An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature

Chapter 3. Unfortunate Suicides: Rewriting Narrative

95 The present shapes the past: the interests and needs of the present—or, more bluntly, politics and ambition—mold and make use of the past in order to influence the present. —Alex Weingrod The teaching of history [is] a legitimate tool of the state for implanting national values, even at the price of the selective use of historical evidence. —Elie Podeh The “drive to construct the new national Hebrew culture” was a deliberate attempt to create a unique Jewish identity in Palestine.1 Narratives of heroism accompanied by “commemorative strategies” used rituals that connected a traditional Jewish past with a national present as a means of shaping the Hebrew nation and its identity.2 Culture was of primary importance in enhancing this mission. “The Hebrew literary establishment was a major agent in the formation of ‘the Zionist narrative,’ that is, the system of narratives, symbols, and attitudes which the Zionist movement generated, wittingly or unwittingly, in its attempt to mobilize the Jewish population in both the Yishuv and the Diaspora, for actions leading to the creation of a Jewish sovereign state in the ancestral homeland.”3 Through all forms of cultural production, the shaping of collective identity and collective memory remained a focal point. Unfortunate Suicides: Rewriting Narrative chapter 3 96 chapter 3 The creation of national narratives in the move toward a Jewish national homeland in Palestine and its realization in a political form as the State of Israel have been well defined in Israeli society and in recent years have received much scholarly attention. In line with other national movements , Zionism engaged in the process of creating “complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ and make them the immanent subjects of a range of social and literary narratives.”4 Nurit Gertz has shown that the numerous narratives that “appear and reappear in variations according to the specific event taking place at a given time and the system in which they occur” can be called master narratives in Israel, “all-encompassing models by which people are asked to live and die.”5 These narratives have the power to transmit ideological messages, in subtext, if not in text, and these become a “particular Zionist reconstruction of Jewish history ” in which collective memory is sculpted in the name of national history.6 This chapter builds on Yael Zerubavel’s study of the ways in which “the Zionist periodization of Jewish history and its portrayal of symbolic continuities and discontinuities . . . designed to enhance its vision of a new national age, and conversely, the Zionist vision of the future was, to a great measure, shaped by its reconstruction of the past.”7 Her work, along with that of Michael Feige, Nurit Gertz, Maoz Azaryahu, Yoram Bilu, and others, has established that the use of commemorative rituals, geographic sites, and calendric days which had been an inherent part of the Jewish tradition were reemployed in the service of the modern nation , thereby anchoring the new in the old. Nevertheless, as Zerubvael reminds us, counter-memory becomes a way to disrupt an acceptance of the culturally constructed historical narratives. The Zionist national narrative was itself a disruption to the Jewish Diasporic past. Thus counter-memory functions dialectically, articulating the hegemonic and politically motivating meanings of the narrative, only to discredit them, and highlighting that which has remained hidden, edited, and absent. While early Zionist history has ascribed a powerful role to literature in the creation of the Zionist master narrative, the invention of tradition in the modern age has also faced its strongest critique within the novel. Timothy Brenan claims that “the epic was that genre the novel parodied unfortunate suicides 97 in its nation-forming role. . . . where ‘beginning,’ ‘first,’ ‘founder,’ ‘ancestor ,’ ‘that which occurred earlier,’ and so on are . . . valorized temporal categories corresponding to the ‘reverent point of view of a descendent.’”8 The three novels considered in this chapter preserve this idea of epic with its expectations (and details) of heroic deeds and events of national (or cultural) significance, yet they do so in order to undermine the culturally constructed narratives of heroism and the markers conceived to be significant in the history of the nation. Thus the master narrative’s attempts to represent the past in a “story-like” fashion, in order to provide a general notion of a shared past as a unified group moving together...