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

Based on a doctoral dissertation, this book offers both more and less than the title promises. On the one hand, it brings together three timely topics—history, nationalism, and realism—in contemporary critical theory; on the other it does not sufficiently explore the complexity of each of these important concepts, suggesting a rather simplistic definition for each and constructing an apparent paradox based on their conjunction.

The book basically defends the Hebrew canon against recent feminist and postcolonial critiques regarding the exclusion of minority discourses. Hasak-Lowy argues that male Ashkenazi hegemonic writers like S. Y. Abramovitz, Y. H. Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, and S.Yizhar wrote fiction from the margins as it were, fiction that was experimental, iconoclastic and critical of mainstream national ideas. Thus, for example, Abramovitz's The Travels of Benjamin the Third is a satire of Zionist travel utopias and of Zionism tout court, while Brenner's From Here and There represents the pioneering enterprise in Eretz Israel in modernist terms as a fragmentary and subjectivist experience. While the complexity of the works under discussion in this book has already been analyzed by previous critics, Hasak-Lowy recasts these readings, emphasizing the approach to Zionism as a coherent theme.

This is both the strength and the weakness of the book. While the book argues correctly that the production of literature is part of the process that produces the nation, it does not acknowledge that national counter-narratives, critiques, and challenges also represent aspects of the narration of the nation. National narrations are here too easily identified as ideological coherencies or socialist realistic descriptions of the national collective as a coherent story. The book at times overstates its point, as when it argues for example that Agnon's "epic realism was embraced, while the critical nature of the same realism was ignored and its perplexing and troubling modernism denigrated" (p. 145). While I agree that most critics were indeed lured by Agnon's realism, I for one analyzed in detail his use of modernist techniques and critical perspective on the Zionist Yishuv (e.g. Cunning Innocence: On S. Y. Agnon's Ironic Art, Tel Aviv University Machon Katz, 1985; 1987 in Hebrew). Hasak-Lowy presents S.Yizhar's work as an overtly political "thoroughly oppositional modernism" due to its critique of the marginalization of the Arab character (p. 142). But what Ella Shohat defined as "shoot and cry" literature is hardly oppositional, which is itself a relative term in need of clearer definition than the one offered here.

Most importantly, Hasak-Lowy ought to have offered a more accurate and careful reading of current feminist and postcolonial theory and criticism (again, my own Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction, 1987, is not mentioned). This critical body has emerged in the late 1980s in an attempt to highlight the diversity and complexity of national voices, many of which have indeed been silenced. Hasak-Lowy does not adequately deal with this important insight, nor does he attempt to assess it in conjunction with his own re-reading of the canonic center. Nor does he offer a context or comparative grid for his presentation of the Hebrew canon as somehow unique for its inclusion of self critical perspective on the nation. As I noted, and this remains my gravest reservation, national narrations consist of a continual dialogue between hegemonic and marginal, mainstream and oppositional discourses—this is what defines them as national narrations in the first place.