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89 Chapter Three Boris Zaidman: A “Russian” in Israel I S R A E L R E P R E S E N T S a special case among the countries that became recipients of Soviet and post-Soviet émigrés. Even though in absolute terms more Russian speakers have settled in Germany, in Israel they constitute a much larger share of the general population. The approximately one million Russian-speaking immigrants who have arrived there since the 1970s make up 20 percent of the entire Jewish population of Israel and have profoundly transformed the country’s demographics and culture.1 The “Russians” constitute today a thriving subculture with their own (nonkosher ) food stores, media outlets, and political parties. There are a RussianIsraeli TV channel and about twenty newspapers and magazines in Russian, including more “thick literary almanacs” than there are published in Hebrew .2 The Russian-Israeli literary scene features some prominent authors such as Dina Rubina, who publishes her books in Moscow and is widely read in Russia, as well as many more writers of a more local significance. Annually, about three hundred titles appear in Russian. Almost none of these books are translated into Hebrew. As a result, Russian-Israeli literature leads a largely ghettoized existence ignored by the mainstream public and neglected by the authorities, who show little enthusiasm for the idea of promoting an Israeli literature written in a language other than Hebrew. (By the same token, Russian is hardly taught in Israeli schools, even though it has de facto become the country’s second language together with Arabic.) A comparatively small number of Soviet émigrés in Israel, recruited mainly among those who arrived at an early age, have become writers in Hebrew . Most of them have chosen not to dwell on their Russian origin, perhaps out of a desire to gain acceptance as “regular” Israelis. The only exception to this rule thus far is Boris Zaidman, whose novel Hemingway Ve-Geshem Ha-Tziporim Ha-Metot (Hemingway and the Dead-Bird Rain) explicitly addresses the protagonist’s dual identity as a Russian Israeli.3 Zaidman’s book deserves particular attention as a manifestation of translingual literature and its construction of a hybrid Russian-Israeli identity. While Zaidman is not the first or the only Israeli writer of Russian origin to write in Hebrew, he Chapter Three 90 was the first one who made his own Russianness the focus of a novel. In doing so, he openly challenged the assimilationist, or “absorptionist,” myth of the Israeli melting pot by showing the traumatic consequences involved in a forced change of identity. Zaidman was born in 1963 in Kishinev, then the capital of the Soviet republic of Moldavia, and emigrated to Israel with his parents when he was thirteen years old. Like most of the Third Wave immigrants arriving in the 1970s, the family made an effort to shed its Russian identity as quickly as possible and assimilate to the Israeli mainstream. As Zaidman explained in an interview with the French magazine Le nouvel observateur, “our goal was to integrate rapidly into Israeli society. And in order to do so, we tried to forget everything.”4 Trained in visual communication at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Zaidman worked as an art director and manager of an advertising agency before the success of his 2006 debut novel Hemingway and the Dead-Bird Rain suddenly turned him into a major figure on the Israeli literary scene. The novel was proclaimed one of the five best books of the year published in Israel and has been translated into several languages (although not into English).5 The graphic design of the book’s cover, sporting stylized renditions of a Slavic folktale hero with sword and shield, a multicolored firebird, and Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs, evokes the concept of Russianness both as a folkloric brand and as a childhood memory.6 Tal Shani, the autobiographically inspired hero of Zaidman’s novel, immigrated with his parents to Israel at age thirteen and, now in his thirties, lives the life of a “normal Israeli.” He is suddenly confronted with his past, however, when he receives an invitation from the Jewish Agency to participate in a Festival of Israeli Culture in his Ukrainian city of birth, where he is supposed to give a reading from his debut novel (written in Hebrew) and at the same time to entice the remaining young Jewish population to depart for their “historical homeland.” During...

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