A Mediterranean Mayflower?: Introducing Ronit Matalon

Ronit Matalon (b. 1959, Ganei Tikva, Israel) is a major voice in contemporary Israeli fiction. After having written three novels (two appear in English translation, with a third underway), one children's book, a collection of short stories, a novella, and a volume of essays, Matalon has clearly established her reputation and has received an array of prizes and honors. One mark of her position in Israeli literature was exhibited by the scandal stirred after she published her novella Galu et pane'ha (Uncover Her Face; 2006), when the doyen of Hebrew literature Dan Miron and the editor of Haaretz's literary supplement Benny Tzipper attacked the work and its author, while prominent scholars such as Galit Hasan-Rokem and Chana Kronfeld rose to Matalon's defense.¹ Beyond the contents of this wildly fantastic and ferocious urban legend of love and aggression, the very publication of a story by Matalon was clearly considered a cultural event to be reckoned with.

If one is to highlight a striking or remarkable characteristic that readers note about her work, it is that Matalon cannot be pinned down. Two of the articles in this issue of Prooftexts, by Hannan Hever and Shimrit Peled, are devoted to a particular novel, Ze im ha-panim eleinu (The One Facing Us; 1995). Hever and Peled's variant readings of it join previous diverging interpretations by Gil Hochberg,² Deborah Starr,³ Nissim Kalderon,⁴ Avner Holtzman,⁵ Barbara Mann,⁶ and Batya Gur z"l,⁷ and the possible meanings are hardly exhausted. Matalon's prose brings together self-conscious art, piercing political criticism, Israeli politics of ethnicity, nationality, territory, family, and intimacy, as well as emotional depth and psychological insight that are powerful and rare.

Matalon is one of the most well read and intellectual authors Hebrew literature has produced since Lea Goldberg, and thus reading her work is an experience at once demanding and complex, but also rewarding. Her novels and stories continuously challenge the limits of their genres as well as those of language and narrative. She achieves her ends by including photographs and paintings, extracts from other authors (most recently from Dumas's The Lady of the Camellias), and even gardening manuals. Matalon's writing displays a deep awareness of post-structuralist and neo-Marxist thought, and her stories not only integrate selections from essays (as from Jacqueline Kahanoff's writings in Ze im ha-panim eleinu, George Steiner's autobiographical Errata in Galu et pane'ha, or her own essays about the first Intifada embedded in Sarah, Sarah [2000],⁸ but also maintain an intimate exchange with Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, among others, as emerges clearly from the three articles appearing here.

While Matalon's prose hosts a wide variety of texts and voices, her fiction can also contradictorily be described as literary autarky, offering its stories while simultaneously producing a self-reflective gaze of interpretation. Story and meta-story are woven, one into the other, and seemingly render a critical view of them redundant. This is similar to autobiography, which also dwells on the conditions of its making, exposing narrative possibilities that were discarded and the craft of storytelling. Matalon often flaunts a fabricated autobiographical voice, and thus conjures the intricacies of autobiographical narration, without signing a commitment to "the autobiographical pact."⁹ Vivid examples include scenes that appear in her autobiographical essays and repeat themselves in fiction, or a photo in Ze im ha-panim eleinu entitled "Jacqueline Kahanoff, Uncle Moise and Mother, the banks of the Nile, Cairo, 1940" (Hebrew edition, 130; English, 123), which is in actuality a photograph taken at a train station in Warsaw.¹⁰ Matalon's stories, as they are told, bring to the surface the multiple possibilities of narration and the paths not taken. They lead us to question if a storyline is, in fact, possible. These exposures may stifle the options of reflection upon them. They paradoxically stand before us almost hermetically inaccessible in their nudity, in their stark self-awareness. But surprisingly, this analytical fiction meets its readers on an emotive-sensual plane. The sensual...