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Chapter 4 Otherness, Identity, and Place Shahar is not often thought of as an author who deals with the “Arab question ,” and studies dealing with the treatment of this topic in Israeli literature hardly ever mention his name.1 It is true that the narrative of The Palace of Shattered Vessels does not seem, at least at first sight, a particularly hospitable context for the discussion of political and ideological issues. Yet the narrator’s repeated insistence that the day on which the “Bloody Events” of 1936 began was a crucial one in his life, a day that “divided time and the world in two,” while puzzling in itself, suggests that the Arab-Jewish conflict is not absent from his novel.2 Another narrative detail that invites further study is the close, detailed, and increasingly sympathetic development in the novel sequence of the character of Daoud Ibn Mahmoud, Judge Gutkin’s chauffeur. Even more significant than the events of 1936 or the character of Daoud are recurrent patterns of representation bearing on questions of identity, in relation both to ethnic and national affiliation and to territory or place. In the latter part of this chapter, we offer analyses of several passages where Shahar tackles nationalhistorical issues head on; we also provide a brief discussion of the presence and implications of the Canaanite ideological paradigm in his work. In following this itinerary, we identify a fundamental ambiguity, even a contradiction, in Shahar’s treatment of these issues. While at a “personal,” “phenomenological” level, Shahar adopts a flexible, pluralistic attitude toward questions of identity, the closer he gets to an explicit thematization of the Jewish-Arab conflict, the more he tends to slide into a rigid, nationalist position. 87 FLUID IDENTITIES AND VIOLENT MOBS Shahar’s fictional recreation of the events of 19363 centers around three separate killings: of a Jew, an Arab, and a British policeman. While this seems to suggest an allegorical, almost mechanical, representation of the political conflict , the picture is complicated by the observation that at the scene of their death, all three appear out of character and are in some sense misrecognized. Thus the boy-narrator, hearing from Dr. Zondack that the mob is coming out of the mosques and approaching the nearest Jewish neighborhoods, comes running into the street only to see Gabriel Luria sitting by a dead rioter whom he has apparently just killed. When the British policeman, who arrives within minutes, turns the body over and reveals its face, the boy and Gabriel are shocked to discover that it is none other than Daoud Ibn Mahmoud, until very recently Judge Gutkin’s loyal chauffeur. Neither Gabriel nor the boy-narrator had at first recognized Daoud who, unaccountably, is dressed in traditional Arab clothes. The question uppermost in the boy’s mind at the moment of recognition is “why all of a sudden he [Daoud] decided to disguise himself as a Bedouin or a fellah from el-djabel” (Countess, 138). The policeman tells Gabriel that William Gordon, the chief of the Mahaneh Yehuda police station , also has died in the riots. Having returned to Jerusalem from a leave just as the crowd started gathering, Gordon hurried, still in his civilian clothes and armed with his camera, to the Damascus Gate. There he was seized by the mob as a Jewish spy and killed on the spot (Countess, 139–40). A few days prior to the outbreak of the riots, another character, Louidor the Silent, was caught and killed in Wadi Kelt, outside of Jericho, by “Arab thugs from Abu Issa’s gang” (Countess, 111).4 When two Arab shepherds tried to stop the killing by saying that Louidor was a “Jewish holy man,” the murderers replied that he was a “Zionist spy” (ibid.). Two days earlier, the boy-narrator was astounded to hear from Berl that the “willi”—or “Moslem holy man”—they both saw near the Jaffa Gate was none other than Louidor; he then remembered hearing that Louidor had been seen in Ramlah dressed in Bedouin garb, and that Mrs. Luria refused to believe that this was, indeed, Louidor (Countess, 94). The error or misrecognition in each of the three killings raises some doubts about the “true” identity of the victims, as well as some uncertainty about their own loyalties and affiliation to a group. The most obvious case of divided loyalties is that of Daoud, who up until this point in the story regarded Judge Gutkin as his adoptive father, was passionately...

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