A Poetics of Haunting: From Yizhar’s Hirbeh to Yehoshua’s Ruins to Koren’s Crypts

This essay explores the “poetics of haunting” that runs through the pages of modern Israeli Hebrew literature. Specifically, the essay looks at the manner in which the historical violence associated with the forced Palestinian exile of 1948, though seemingly finding little direct expression in the Israeli literary canon, nevertheless finds its way into these texts under the sign of a growing visible invisibility. The essay traces this haunting legacy from its moment of birth in S. Yizhar’s renowned novella “Hirbet Hiz‘ah” to its later manifestations in two other prominent Hebrew Israeli works: A. B. Yehoshua’s “Mul ha-ye‘arot” and Yeshayahu Koren’s Levayah ba-tsohorayim. At the centers of these three texts, the “ruins” of destroyed Arab villages mark the unresolved and haunting history of violence.