Written lives: On Israeli literary autobiographies by Nitza Ben-Dov (review)

Literature, it would seem, belongs to the realms of imagination. But recently, as everything around us is colored by the demand for “reality,” so too are literary works. The contours of fiction and non-fiction have become blurred as more and more novels are based on the lives of historical figures, with various degrees of authorial license. Similarly, the lives of the authors themselves gradually take center stage, so much so that literary critics, who for decades strived to disregard the author as irrelevant to the analyzed text, are now forced to take a second look. In the introduction to her new book, Nitza Ben-Dov offers several observations concerning the mounting wave of autobiographical writing in current Hebrew literature. Among other points, she indicates the tendency to self-exposure, common in Israel in recent decades as a reaction to the ideal of restraint and modesty of former generations and the recent supremacy of individuality over the communal in society and literature. Still, Ben-Dove does not claim to expose the “real story,” nor the lives of the authors as they were lived, but rather to analyze the artistic aspect of these lives in the literary works she is reading.

Following the introduction, the book contains eleven chapters, the first three of which are dedicated to the study of literary works predating the current autobiographical wave. Ben-Dov is one of the leading exponents of the work of the great master of Hebrew prose, S. Y. Agnon, having published a number of books dedicated mainly to his work, and the first chapter in her current book offers an analysis of Agnon’s short story Hasiman (The sign). The story includes one of Agnon’s very few explicit literary responses to the Holocaust and is autobiographical since it deals with the destruction of Buczacz, Agnon’s birthplace, and with the reaction of the narrator, who represents the writer, to the terrible news. Unlike former exponents of this story with whom she argues here, Ben-Dov is out to demonstrate that, like in many of his other stories, Agnon makes use of irony and that the story’s explicit language hides an intention different to that which is apparent at face value.

Ben-Dov then turns to another master novelist and analyzes Mikdamaot (Preliminaries), the first of the three volumes which constitute S. Yizhar’s late trilogy. This novel predated the autobiographical-literary wave which began swelling in the years following its 1992 publication and perhaps even brought it about. Ben-Dov analyzes the structure and many of the details of the book in which Yizhar relates his childhood memories from infancy to thirteen, showing how details of personal memory were raised to epical and mythical levels, telling of a world being created, of a people being reborn on its land, and of an elected son whose life is in constant danger. Ben-Dov also exposes the ramified contacts between Yizhar’s book and the Bible, which are sometimes hidden in the deepest levels of this work.

The third chapter is dedicated to the poet Dalia Rabikovitch, although focus here is on her less-celebrated prose output. Here Ben-Dov studies a cross-section of the whole oeuvre, pointing out the motif found in Rabikovitch’s earliest work through to the last: the rupture in the life of six-year-old Dalia due to the death of her father. Ben-Dov shows how various, seemingly trivial, details in Rabikovitch’s language—especially the recurring motif of obsessively counting years—all relate to that basic trauma, from which no relief was ever achieved.

The next six chapters deal mainly with literary works from the beginning of the current autobiographical wave to its peak. Chapter four is dedicated to Amos Oz, a writer often studied by Ben-Dov, and includes two separate studies. On the one hand, she examines his most overtly autobiographical work, Sipur shel ahava vechoshech (A tale of love and darkness), and on the other she...