Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq

5. The Experience of Transition: First Novels in Hebrew

5 The Experience of Transition: First Novels in Hebrew Our expectations of the country were great. a mixture of messianic dreams and unrealistic aspirations. but the reality was different: crisis followed crisis-economic. social. religious and moral. The hardest of all was the search for identity. a search for the personal I and the collective; and on top of all of these came an additional blow-[the crisis ] of culture. -EliAmir THE CRISES ELI AMIR DESCRIBES WERE SHARED BY MANY UPON THEIR arrival to Israel during the period of mass immigration (1948-51). Their experience has found expression in the Hebrew literary subgenre, sifrut hama'abarah (literature of the transit camp). This literature, written predominantly by Israelis of Iraqi origin, is frequently characterized by the sharp contrast between the newcomers' expectations and the lack of welcome they received, the bleak physical conditions of the transit camps in contrast to life in the country of origin, and the clash between the cultures of the newcomers and the veteran settlers. The plot describes the difficulties encountered by the characters, including fragmentation of the family unit and the crisis of identity. These novels, written in the realistic mode, create adolescent protagonists and large casts of secondary characters that often remain underdeveloped. The authors make use of institutions central to Israeli society as back67 68 ExiLE FROM EXILE: ISRAELI WRITERS FROM IRAQ ground, examining them as mechanisms for promoting integration of these characters. Foremost among these institutions is the ma'abarah. The root of the word ma'abarah implies transition or passage. One of the writers puts the following explanation in the mouth of one of his characters (Eliahu Eini): I asked why they called these camps ma'abarot; they told me that they are a passage (ma'avar) to full absorption into the way of life. I looked for the word in the Bible and found it in the Book of Samuel ... a verse about Jonathan who passed between the ma'abarot, where [there was] "a crag from this passage and a crag from that one." Here you have: the ma'abarah! A rock on both sidesP SOCIOHISTORICAL BACKGROUND With the influx of the mass immigration to Israel in the early days of the state, the factors affecting the integration of the newcomers changed because of the rapidly increasing rate of immigration, the shaky postwar economy, and the creation of a complex bureacracy.2 Shlomo Hillel, an Iraqi-born Jew already living in Palestine at the time of the mass immigration, was recruited to help organize the illegal immigration of those Jews wishing to leave Iraq; he describes this last development as an overnight change. Returning from a successful mission , he finds his own entry to Israel challenged. He had never been issued an official passport. The Israel I had left nine months earlier was like one big family; it was enough for you to speak fluent Hebrew to prove that you "belonged." But the intervening months had turned us from a family into a state, with the standard bureacratic rules and formalities that could not be winked at.3 The conditions e:ncountered by the newcomers were caused in large part by the very success of the programs organizing the immigration movements. The: scale and suddenness of the mass immigration severely strained an already overburdened postwar economy. The bureaucratic structures developed to ease the "absorption'" of the newcomers compounded the difficulties. Immigrants first met the more veteran Israeli citizens within an impersonal bureaucratic setting. This initial encounter not only emphasized the difference in status between the immigrants and the veterans (a status based on date of entry) but THE EXPERIENCE OF TRANSITION: FIRST NOVELS IN HEBREW 69 also established a hierarchical-relationship pattern of supplicant and provider.4 The veteran Israeli citizen was in the position of knowledge and power; the oleh (immigrant) was reduced to an ignorant and therefore passive client. Economic and employment opportunities were very limited. The ma'abarot (plural of ma'abarah, i.e., transit camps) were set up as a temporary measure. The intention was to furnish the immigrants with their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, sanitary facilities) until they could learn the skills (including Hebrew and often job retraining) necessary to function independently.s Upon their arrival in Israel, the Iraqi immigrants faced a set of conditions for which they were ill prepared and for which the Israelis were ill equipped. They were settled...