An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature

Chapter 5. Nothing Left to Live For: Women’s Suicide

173 Women’s bodies (or more precisely, women’s wombs) are understood to be a national resource. —Susan Sered, What Makes Women Sick In Judaism, the choice for a woman appears to be between marriage with children, and death. Though Christianity offered women the alternative option of a cloistered life, marriage to God rather than marriage to a man, historical Judaism did not offer women this alternative.1 “In Judaism, even more than in Christianity, women were defined by their social role of motherhood . . . in the eyes of the Law, and society, their major obligation was to procreate rather than create.”2 Modern Zionist ideology transferred this religious obligation for God to an obligation toward the state, and its attendant expectation of procreation as a weapon in the battle for demographic superiority in Israel. Ben Gurion’s call for women to fulfill their national duty was manifested within the state through “several powerful institutions, each with its own distinct ideological and organizational structure, [which] encourage[s] women in the national mission of motherhood.”3 A woman who fails to execute her maternal duty has failed the national enterprise. These national expectations about motherhood are so pervasive that they represent the social norm. This archetypal maternal image becomes a focal point in depictions of women’s suicide in modern Israeli literature. In Nothing Left to Live For: Women’s Suicide chapter 5 174 chapter 5 fiction in which women commit suicide there is an underlying assumption within the text that women who fail to procreate successfully fall outside the expectations and values of mainstream society. This chapter explores the profound influence that social ideology has had on women in Israel, and the ways in which this expectation of fertility has transmogrified to create the trope of women’s suicide in literature. In contrast to the previous chapters, where suicide has functioned as a challenge to the nation’s narratives , within the frame of women’s lives suicide becomes an image that reinforces the ideology of national expectations. Examining a small selection of examples, many of which appear in the novels dealt with elsewhere in this book (or by the same authors) and focusing in detail on Yehudit Katzir’s novella Closing the Sea, I point to a phenomenon which, though marginal (as is the depiction of women in general), appears pervasive.4 Until recently female characters were rarely found at the center of novels as the major protagonist. Their marginal roles as wives, mothers , or girlfriends, according to Esther Fuchs, derive from the “myopic political vision which focuses exclusively on male-produced workers and on male subjects as national symbols.”5 The Israeli film industry has been dominated by men and male-oriented concerns “addressing women’s issues only insofar as they seem relevant to nationalist rhetoric.”6 Similarly, in fiction women play a subsidiary role in the Zionist narrative, which is conceived in the main around procreation and child rearing. While expectations about motherhood can be traced to biblical and traditional Jewish sources, many of today’s myths and ideals about reproduction and women’s obligation emerged in the early formative Zionist period. Yael S. Feldman explains that the liberatory impulse of Zionism has never “overcome” the traditional Jewish valorization of motherhood. Diaries, letters, and other documents from the early decades of this century bear witness to this conflict, “the curious combination of female liberation and the return of women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers.”7 Examining birth and childhood manuals between the 1920s and 1950s, Sachlav Stoler-Liss has shown that “a coherent ideological picture emerges that placed motherhood and proper child rearing at the very heart of the nothing left to live for 175 Zionist effort to shape a ‘new society’ and a ‘new Jew.’”8 Furthermore, the massive loss of Jewish life after the Holocaust and the military struggles for independence made fertility a national priority in Israel.9 Women’s duty has been partly framed in terms of replacing “the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust and [the need] to produce the next generation of soldiers and citizens of the Jewish State.”10 As mothers, women are recruited to “produce the next generation of fighters and instill in them loyalty to the nation and a willingness to sacrifice their own lives.”11 Women experience pressure to “serve as reproductive vehicles for the nation’s need for ‘cannon fodder.’”12...