Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction (review)

In a reaction to Sidra Ezrahi's reading of S.Y. Abramovitz's The Travels of Benjamin the Third as a lampooning characterization of utopian Zionist visions, Todd Hasak-Lowy poses the following question: "How can this pre-maskilic Jew be read as a post-maskilic Zionist?" (28) Hasak-Lowy's binary witticism of pre-Jew and post-Zionist with the Haskalah in between captures the playful and inquisitive manner of his methodological and critical approach in Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction. Hasak Lowy bases his study on a close reading of five texts widely considered foundational in the context of the Hebrew literary canon: S.Y. Abramovitz's The Travels of Benjamin the Third, Yosef Chaim Brenner's From Here and There, S.Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday, and S.Yizhar's "The Prisoner" and "Chirbet Chiz'ah." He interrogates the concept of a Jewish "return to history" as the focal point of realist Hebrew poetics that evolved diachronically with the rise of a Jewish national consciousness. The "return to history" that Hasak-Lowy describes emerged from the dialogue between the cultural and political realms of nineteenth century European Jewish thought, and entailed a communal act of imagining a Jewish collective. This act proved critical in shaping a Jewish historical narrative that functioned as both representation and event. Hasak Lowy applies Raymond Williams' theoretical writings on the novel as a means of literary intervention to the broader category of narrative fiction. Using this methodology, Hasak-Lowy explores how the four modern Hebrew authors "intervened" to narrate both a past and a forward-looking present in stylistic modalities that stretched the contours of realist fiction.

The first chapter of Here and Now focuses on S.Y. Abramovitz's The Travels of Benjamin the Third and how its author engaged with and departed from a realist paradigm. According to Hasak-Lowy, Abramovitz's nusakh—an innovative Hebrew prose idiom that gained Abramovitz the reputation of having forged a linguistic medium ideal for a mimetic approach—at times frustrated his writing's mimetic capacity. But it did so in the service of social criticism. Abramovitz's satirical bent—he included genres such as the mock epic and the picaresque—allowed him to create what Hasak-Lowy characterizes as a multivalent and non-transparent text that acquired new layers of meaning with the author's auto-translations from Yiddish to Hebrew. Casting European Jewry of the late nineteenth century and Zionist ideologues as the respective objects of his satirical gaze, Abramovitz used the realist idiom to point out the trappings of a society that he regarded as steeped in mystification. In doing so, he crafted an ongoing work that defies categorization as a purely realist text.

Hasak-Lowy devotes his second chapter to Yosef Chaim Brenner's From Here and There and the author's so-called "Mimetic Poetics of Fragmentation." Brenner's writing, he maintains, embodies a tension between the commitment to represent accurately an unstable reality (that of the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine) and the duty, as an author taking on the prophetic role of the Watchman figure, to critique that reality from within. Brenner's From Here and There thus exhibits the modernist qualities of fragmentation and multiple subjectivities. This trait makes it a text that self-consciously oscillates between realist and modernist modes. According to Hasak-Lowy, Brenner does not depart from the mimetic impulse. Rather, he shifts the grounds of mimesis in order to represent a fragmented modern reality.

The third chapter of Here and Now deals with S.Y. Agnon's thematization of secularized Hebrew through the controversial Balak plot in Only Yesterday. According to Hasak-Lowy, the figure of Balak, a dog who internalizes and ultimately enacts the words "mad dog" painted on his body, not only disrupts the realism of the novel —the dog also serves...