Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance

4. Romance as a Defiant Escape

Four ROM A NCE A S A DEF I A N T ESCA PE If Etgar Keret expressed some of the main anxieties of his generation and suggested romance as an interim or temporary solution for the confusion of his age, Gadi Taub, Uzi Weil, and Gafi Amir developed this solution further. They also explored Israel’s inexorable draw toward the urban, capitalist, and consumerist influences of the West which attended the age and loomed large over it. In fact, much of the confusion these writers evinced at the time stemmed from a gradual increase of these influences over life in a post-national Israel. But unlike popular culture in general (newspapers, television, popular literature), Taub, Weil, and Amir did not embrace these influences wholeheartedly and uncritically. Although most of their works consider romance as the central idiom of the new culture, they present it in nuanced ways that often seem patently unromantic. Their stories heave a deep and melancholy sigh of unrequited longing that comes from the friction between their romantic premise and the inability to realize it. Each of the three writers explores a different aspect of the new life and times of the country through semantics of love, as it were. In his first [and so far only] collection of short stories, Gadi Taub isolates his heroes in quiet spaces by themselves where the only noise, save that of their own thoughts, is the faint call of possible love. Romance is explored much more dramatically and not always conventionally in Uzi Weil’s first collection of short stories, “The Day They Shot the Prime Minister Down,” whose parenthetical title is in fact “Love Stories.” Finally, Gafi Amir’s stories look at the nature of love as a commodity in a commercial age. Romance as a Defiant Escape 93 Gadi Taub Gadi Taub’s literary debut, like that of Keret, attracted media attention almost immediately after he published his 1992 collection of short stories, Ma haya kore in hayinu shochachim et dov (What Would Have Happened If We Forgot Dov).1 The references to his work were not as prolific as the attention Keret received, but they were just as astute. “Taub,” wrote Iri Rikin in the daily Maariv, contemporizing older critiques of previous literary generations, is another link in a generation of Tel-Aviv journalist-writers who have recently emerged, including Etgar Keret, Irit Linur, Gafna Amir, and Uzi Weil. Simplistically speaking, what is common to all of them is a rejection of the literary Hebrew of the past and its substitution with a contemporary, spoken idiom that they use to create direct and unadorned prose. Another of their characteristics . . . is an almost complete disconnection from the weighty subjects that preoccupied their predecessors and their interest in personal matters and the existential anxieties of a local youth that could have probably been written in any other western metropolis.2 Rikin’s appraisal was shared by other readers, all of whom wondered about the correspondence between what they called Taub’s lean language and the equally spare emotive register of his stories. Avi Katz put it perhaps most perceptively when he identified Taub’s penchant for metonymic fragmentation over a richer and more symbolic use of language as a way to de-mystify and negate hierarchies or centralizing ideologies.3 Taub, he wrote, “democratizes reality, looks life in the eye and offers a very secular, very Tel-Avivite and unfocused way of interpreting the world.” In other words, Taub’s early short stories adumbrated the generational ennui which he elucidated much more clearly later on when he studied the period critically in his Dispirited Rebellion. “Quiet desperation” is how Dan Miron described the silence that envelops the stories, their muted and seemingly oblivious observation of quotidian minutiae.4 For Miron, Taub’s terse texts do not indicate malaise or an unbaked literary talent that flaunts its cultural and linguistic ignorance and substitutes it with a contrived poetic stance.5 Instead, the stories have a new and perhaps even a revolutionary role within the culture as an important voice in a growing choir that opposes the canon. 94 Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas Young writers like Taub, wrote Miron, offer a resolute antithesis to the likes of Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Yehoshua Kenaz, and David Grossman , to their luxuriant style and to the national consciousness in which their works are steeped. Miron noted that...