Six Israeli Novellas (review)

150 SHOFAR Fa1l2000 Vol. 19, No. I their gemes, and the cultural dynamics of England in the first half of the twentieth century. LeRoy L. Panek Department of English Western Maryland College Six Israeli Novellas, edited and with an introduction by Gershon Shaked. Boston: David R. Godine, 1999. 352 pp. $27.95 (c). While participating recently on a panel devoted to contemporary Jewish-American fiction writers, I was taken by surprise when a gentleman in the audience asked about the relationship between Jewish-American and Israeli writing. My co-panelists and I found ourselves groping for a suitably intelligent response. It was an illuminating moment. The question itself revealed what most readers of Jewish writing feelnamely , that there should be a significant connection, or at least some sort ofdialogue, between Israeli and Jewish-American literature-while our hemming and hawing response to the question revealed both that this cross-pollination between JewishAmerican and Israeli literatures may scarcely exist and that, if it does, many scholars of Jewish writing, locked into our nationalist paradigms of literature, are not focusing nearly enough attention upon the phenomenon. Modem Israeli literature, period, tends to receive short shrift by many of us who assiduously study American and European Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, and Isaac Babel. All the more reason why the recent English translation, Six Israeli Novellas, edited and with an introduction by the Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked, represents an important contribution to the American literary scene. Having previously co-edited a collection ofHebrew novels that featured the work of the most widely known Israeli novelists in America, A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, Shaked intentionally, and appropriately, did not include their work in the present volume. Indeed, David Grossman, Aharon Appelfeld, and Yaakov Shabtai may be the only three of the six Israeli writers included in Six Israeli Novellas whom American readers know. Taken as a whole, the most striking feature of these novellas-which originally appeared between the mid 1960s and late 1980s-is their stylistic diversity, a diversity that clearly must have been high on Shaked's list of editorial goals. In the opening novella, "Shrinking," Ruth Almog delivers a spare, impressionistic portrait of her female protagonist's mean, solitary existence, which consists largely of caring for both feral cats and an aging, irascible father. Almog poignantlyevokes herprotagonist's sour existence as she unloads her father's groceries: She took the groceries out ofthe basket and opened the refrigerator. A foul smell filled the kitchen, and she hastened to put in the food and close the door. Then she washed the Book Reviews 151 dishes and scoured the marble counter with cleanser. The acrid smell made her sneeze. She opened the window and gasped. The concentratedpower ofAlmog's impressionistic prose contrasts strikingly with the near Victorian realism and leisurely narrative pacing ofBenjamin Tammuz's "My Brother." "About forty years ago," Tammuz writes toward the beginning ofthe novella (thus evoking the biblical exodus), after our parents died, my brother went to Italy to study agriculture. I was already working as a teacher in the colony school. When my brother came home three years later we agreed that he would live in our parents' house, while I would build myself a house at the back of the yard, slightly removed from the street. ... In the hundred or so pages that follow, Tammuz's disaffected narrator scrupulously recounts these forty years during which he has passively observed the often immoral mannerby which his more charismatic and effectual brother, upon returning from Italy, carried out his tumultuous domestic life. What places "My Brother" squarely in the modern literary tradition is the subtle narrative perspective that, as Shaked suggests in his introduction, finally undermines the narrator's sensitive, but detached, mode of living in favor of the brother's active engagement with life, despite his moral imperfections . "Only I sit here alone in the land ofthe living," the protagonist ruefully reflects late in the narrative, "a solitary witness to the revels in which the skeletons ofthose who are not yet dead dance." David Grossman's "Yani on the Mountain" is a stylistic cousin to Tammuz's realism, but its prose...