In Search of the Story: A Friendship between Critic and Writer

I. Blind Date

I first met Shlomith in the Fall of 1976 at café Savion in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Rehavia. It was a blind date arranged by a mutual acquaintance, who had for some reason insisted: "You and Shlomith Rimmon must meet."

It was only a short time after I had returned from my doctoral studies in Paris. My surface agenda was to look for friends, for conversation. Underneath, however, what I brought to the meeting was a "disruption of the self" (to start borrowing from Shlomith's conceptual framework). I had left my emotional and intellectual life, my loaded relationship with Europe and its buried legacy, in Paris. In an act of cultural rebellion, a complex move of betrayal-in-fidelity, and an urge to expose a repressed voice, whether individual, cultural, or communal, I had returned not to Tel Aviv, the city of my youth, but to Jerusalem.

On the way to the café my palpitations came from a still deeper source. At that time I had already chosen literary writing as a way of life. Even if this remained unsaid, in meeting Shlomith I was hoping to find a partner for a kind of a secret esoteric sect.

True to her notorious Yekke (German-Jewish) precision, the analytic star of the Hebrew University was already waiting for me at the café. To my surprise and delight, she was frank, direct, and humorous; she immediately legitimized the radical rebel in me. And the laughter that kept erupting from some intense energy would become a major part of the narrative that connects us.

We decided to continue meeting and to start a study group. A later meeting, this time including Dr. Moshe Ron, a colleague of Shlomith's, took place at a coffee-shop near Jaffa Gate in the Old City. (Today, after two Intifadas, this would be an impossible venue. And our first meeting-place, Café Savion, eventually renamed Café Moment, would go down in history as the site of one of the most murderous terrorist attacks of 2002.) With Moshe Ron we "founded" a forum for reading and discussing critical texts: Poulet, de Man, and Derrida (before he entered our lives in person)...

The conversation with Shlomith has since turned into an intimate friendship of nearly thirty years. It has not been a dependent relationship, of any manipulative variety, between a critic and a writer but rather something of an alliance between two stone miners converging from two opposite directions in the darkness of their mountain-tunnels, on two sides of a blind spot. Or a "fruitful dialogue," to use another of Shlomith's expressions: "I endeavor to theorize through literature, to use the novels as, in some sense, the source of theory," she writes in A Glance beyond Doubt, adding that this process "can be seen as a fruitful dialogue or interaction between literature and theory" (1996: 1).

Our dialogue always exposed a blind spot, a point of friendship from which we took each other by the hand and guided each other over extensive ground, the blind and the sighted as one. Today, too, I sense the quiver of the glance beyond the shroud, towards a blind spot. Is it mine? Is it Shlomith's? Is it that of reading others in order to write the self? My words here will no doubt also contain such a spot, on which Shlomith's gaze will shed light.

I shall not go into the details of the autobiographical "plot" beyond suggesting that it was a more or less linear "full life." "Toute une vie," as Beckett's Mercier and Camier would say in the eponymous novel (1974: 66). Before casting off their shared coat they enumerate the contents of its pocket: "punched tickets of all sorts . . . the classic last tenth of a pointless pencil, . . . a few porous condoms, dust. Life in short" (66). For each of us there has been love and marriage, the birth of children, and the loss of parents, a continuous battle against the shortness of time, and against the body—with its...