Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature by Karen Grumberg (review)

Amos Oz does a lot of heavy lifting in Karen Grumberg’s Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature, where he acts as a foil—a “counterpoint,” in Grumberg’s words—for an analysis of more contemporary incursions by Orly Castel-Bloom, Sayed Kashua, Yoel Hoffman, and Ronit Matalon into novelistic representations of space, place, and national identity. Against Oz’s approach to the construction of literary—and by extension, political—place, Grumberg’s innovators move beyond the static structural oppositions that buoy Oz’s writing about Israel, especially those central places in the construction of both Hebrew literature and the Israeli imaginary that Oz, even in critique, cannot get away from: the kibbutz, the desert, development towns, and the garden.

Oz might have had it coming, especially in a reading of his essays on labor Zionism, which wax nostalgic on the pioneering ethos of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the transformations in the land wrought in the name of improvement. But Grumberg does not relate to these essays, nor does she give much attention to Oz’s early works that sought to undermine a prior generation’s sense of place—novels like Elsewhere, Perhaps and My Michael, and stories like “The Way of the Wind” and “Nomads and Viper” (I kept wondering what Grumberg would do with Oz’s representation of the old Tel Aviv Central Bus Station in Elsewhere, Perhaps; or the critique of Geula’s sylvan Orientalist fantasies in “Nomads and Viper”). Grumberg does recognize the critical nature of Oz’s projection of Zionist space, but sees the binary partitions of space in A Perfect Peace, To Know a Woman, and Don’t Call It Night as reifying (my term) a Zionist discursive understanding of place; that is, they are unable to transcend the structures and terms of in(side) and out(side), of boundaries and borders, of inclusion and exclusion—structures and terms these writings would ostensibly criticize and reject.

Against the static terms of Oz’s dependence on Zionism’s definitions of nature and place, Grumberg then reads Castel-Bloom, Kashua, Hoffman, and Matalon as reaching beyond these structural limitations, even as they work in reaction to them. Thus, while for Oz the figure of place in his novels “confirms, forces, and even establishes the identity of characters according to the needs of the ideology” (p. 249), Castel-Bloom represents space within an ideology critique and shows the sinister side of vernacular and (supposedly) individual spaces, such as the balcony, the hospital, the cemetery, and the city (in Dolly City, Human Parts, and Where Am I). Kashua, according to Grumberg, likewise demonstrates the problematics of place by seeking out the in-betweenness of the roadblock, the village, and the house, all vernacular quotidian spaces that nevertheless are fraught by the ideological demands of the region and the conflict (in Dancing Arabs and Let It Be Morning). In Hoffman, Grumberg analyzes less the semiotics of spatial figures than the way that identity (here bourgeois and Ashkenazi) would inflect the ideologies of those places differently, and in doing so open up possibilities for the expression of different subjectivities in Hebrew (in Katschen, Christ of Fish, and The Book of Joseph). Similarly, Matalon’s focus on the dynamics of permanent immigration (of a ceaseless process of becoming) destabilizes the function of place in the lives of her characters—a process that would then undermine the very foundation of national ideology altogether, making Matalon perhaps the most subversive writer in the group (in The One Facing Us and Bliss). Indeed, the chapter on Matalon is by far the best of the study and the only one that never mentions Oz, freeing itself from the structural oppositions that mar the critical logic and strength of Grumberg’s study as a whole.

In the need to see in Oz an oppositional figure and representative of everything Zionist, Grumberg’s critical method becomes itself strangely oppositional, structural, and partitioned—precisely the terms that she...