Reflections of/on Zionism in Recent Hebrew Fiction: Aharon Megged's Foiglman and Ruth Almog's Dangling Roots

68 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 REFLECTIONS OF/ON ZIONISM IN RECENT HEBREW FICTION: AHARON MEGGED'S FOIGLMAN AND RUTH ALMOG'S DANGLING ROOTS by Rachel Feldhay Brenner Rachel Feldhay Brenner is an Assistant Professor in the Hebrew and Semitic Studies Department at the University ofWisconsin-Madison, where she teaches Modern Hebrew Literature. She has published Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing (Peter Lang, 1989) and A. M. Klein, The Father of Canadian jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion (Mellen, 1990), as well as numerous articles on the representations of the Holocaust in Jewish Canadian and in Israeli literatures. She has completed a manuscript on intellectual responses to the Holocaust and is now at work on a study of the artist's self-representations in Modern Hebrew Literature. . . . a political ideal which is not grounded in our national culture is apt to seduce us from loyalty to our own inner spirit and to beget in us a tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political domination, thus breaking the thread that unites us with the past and undermining our historical foundation. Ahad Ha·Am' The tradition of justice ... makes it clear that ... [i)ndependence of one's own must not be gained at the expense of 'Ahad Ha-Am, "TheJewish State and the Jewish Problem," The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 268. Zionism in Recent Hebrew Fiction 69 another's independence.... A regenerated Jewish people in Palestine has not only to aim at living peacefully together with the Arab people, but also at a comprehensive cooperation with it in opening and developing the country. Manin Buber Contemplating his relationship with Foiglman, his late friend, Arbel, the protagonist-narrator in Megged's novel, admits: Foiglman's spirit haunts me and harrows me. It gives me no peace.... He follows me like a shadow.... He walks around my house, sits on the couch, stands in the kitchen. He refuses to come out of me. When I lie down, and when I rise and when I am on my way. In the nights I dream about him. Sometimes r see him appear at my door ... his face white as a sheet, his arms stretched out as if asking why. (I' 255).3 Mira, the protagonist-narrator in Dangling Roots, admits her incomprehensihle sense of affinity with Levadovi, her long dead greatgrandfather : For years, the man has been in my thoughts, until he became very close to me, practically pan of my soul ... like my shadow ... attached to me with the root of his spirit (DR 13).' r still do not understand this man, whose great-granddaughter r am, though sometimes I feel as if he were my soul's twin (200). r felt as if he had planted himself inside me, as if he were reincarnated in me ... (216) Let us recall that Foiglman is a Yiddish poet and a European intellectual, a Holocaust survivor of Majdanek and Auschwitz. The memories of the Holocaust and the consciousness of the destroyed people and culture haunt FOiglman and alienate him in the now "Jew-free" Europe and estrange him even from his fellow survivors. Encouraged and sponsored by Arhel, Foiglman makes an attempt to establish himself in Israel by presenting his poetry to Israel's cultural environment. Unfortunately , his poems, even in the Hehrew translation, do not entice Israeli 2Manin Buber, "The Meaning of Zionism," in A Land of Two Peoptes: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 183. 3Aharon Megged, Foigllllan (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), p. 255. My English translation of the quotations is based on Marganit Weinber-Rotman's unpublished translation ofthe novel. Page numbers preceded by Fare 10 the Hebrew text. 'Ruth Almog, Dangling Roots (Jerusalem: Keter, 1987). All the quotations from the novel are in my translation. Page numbers preceded by DR are to the Hebrew text of the novel. 70 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 readership. Thus, Foiglman's plan to integrate into the Israeli society and...