Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert (review)

Beginning with Maurice Blanchot’s commentary on Franz Kafka’s “strange attraction and repulsion towards Zionism: ‘his wandering does not consist in nearing Canaan, but in nearing the desert, the truth of the desert—in going always further in that direction,’” Ranen Omer-Sherman sets out to test “that notion in relation to other prophetic Jewish writers” (p. ix) in contemporary Israeli literature as well as in writings from the Diaspora. Choosing to stay in the uncertainty of the desert, exposed to the elements, is more than a symbolic gesture: it represents an ideological stance. By creating a counter-discourse to the dominant Zionist narrative, these writers offer a different perspective “in which the Zionist dream of Israel is marked by confinement and stagnation, whereas the desert beckons as an eternally youthful and creative realm” (p. 9) Desert truth is a liberation from ideological constraints and relevant for contemporary Jewish readers who are on a spiritual quest for an “alternative natural space” (p. xiv).

Israel in Exile gives an overview of literary representations of the desert, beginning with the Hebrew Bible. Omer-Sherman shows not only the “pervasiveness” of the desert metaphor throughout the centuries but also how it functions as a reminder of the “unwelcome specter of ‘Diaspora’ that Zionist teleology had repudiated” (p. 7). Theoretically this study is indebted to Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts about hebraic wanderings, the Other, and especially to his “affirmation that . . . the Bible credits the desert as the site of a supreme skepticism unsettling all nationalist or individualist complacency” (p. 13).

Most of the writers discussed here “set their narratives in Sinai, perhaps because even today it is a stubbornly intangible and uninhabitable space that somehow always seems to transcend a conventional national identity, no matter what nation controls it” (p. 7). In Shulamith Hareven’s novel, Thirst: A Desert Trilogy (1996), the “ancient Hebrews/Israelis/Palestinians live in a constant state of both literal and existential thirst” (p. 39). Here the desert “serves as a subterranean conduit for smuggling in the values of Diaspora and heterogeneous coexistence” (p. 53). Hareven questions the nationalist Zionist master narrative with her “feminist politics/poetics of wandering,” critiquing “both the origins of her tradition’s gender biases and the symbolic male order of the violent present” (p. 184 n. 12). Similarly, Moses in Sinai (2002) by the American novelist Simone Zelitch likewise employs “feminist reconsiderations of the master/slave dialectic of [her] ancient sources” (p. 26). Her Moses is not a leader but a “divided man, uncertain of his path” (p. 131), confronting “a remote and inexplicable deity” (p. 133). In Zelitch’s universe “the people learn in the desert that there is no need of sovereignty for God’s will to be done in the present” (p. 134) and rebellious biblical figures such as Korah and Dathan become important subversive prophets.

The novels of Amos Oz and David Grossman, with their depressed protagonists’ “lonely masculine egoistic quests,” are juxtaposed with the “feminist imagination” (p. 24). Oz’s Sabra are strangers in their own land. A Perfect Peace (1982) is read as a “deconstruction of the colonialist dimension of the Zionist enterprise” (p. 85). “Educated in the certitude of Zionist progress and achievement,” the Sabra protagonist is shocked when he realizes the “destruction of the previous occupants of the land,” and discovers the “dispossessed Arab Other” (p. 85). For Oz, the desert represents “a liminal site in which characters struggle to come to terms with the pressing social realities of Zionist sovereignty” (p. 63) with its “martial identity” and “masculinist ideology” (p. 69). David Grossman’s 1983 Yani on the Mountain deals with the after-effects of the Yom Kippur war on young soldiers. The protagonist is a “deeply embittered, lonely Sabra . . . in the most desolate reaches of the Sinai Peninsula” and the novel an “allegory of the plight of a traumatized society . . . struggling to gain a fresh perspective” (p. 102). H. N. Bialik’s Diaspora poem...