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J Smadar Shiffman Forging the Image of Pioneering Women T he Zionist movement was, from its outset, a masculine one; from Herzl, Nordau, and onwards, the Zionist utopia was formulated as a project intended to return to the Jewish man his lost masculinity. Biale, Boyarin, Gluzman, and others have shown how the Jewish national movement is closely connected to the image of the masculine, fighting pioneer , with Aryan physique and appearance, freed from “Diaspora,” that is, “feminine,” characteristics. The lost “Jewish muscles,” for which Max Nordau yearned, characterize that type of Judaism that Zionism would stir to new life “for the first time after the war of desperation of the great BarKochba ”; this is, of course, “masculine Judaism,” in which women have no part.1 In the world of Herzl and Nordau, the only role a woman can play is that of a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. The literature and press of the early twentieth century (the First Aliyah) tend to identify the man with the public sphere and the woman with the private . “In the Hebrew literature of the beginning of the century,” says Dan Miron, “the life-experience of the young female Jew is usually interpreted as a personal or private experience while that of the young male Jew is presented as a metonymy for the national experience . . . the severance [of the young Jewish women from their parents’ traditional home] is shaped—from the aspect of their subjective experience—as a private event, while the quarrel of the young man with his father or grandfather and his cutting himself off from his home are a symbolic national drama.”2 The literature of the 1940s and 1950s, the literature of the “Palmach generation ,” identifies the “new” man with the national revolution and tends to hide his partner in the revolution in the shade; the figure of the halutza or the Palmachnikit (female Palmach member) in this literature is a support- ive, “motherly” one, far from being “new” in its images and its roles. Miron stresses the uniqueness of the artists of this generation as men and creators who “were born into a world of war and its signature is imprinted on their personality.”3 Shaked identifies in their work the stamp of the Zionist metanarrative . Shaked notes that the redemption of the nation through redemption of the land is the Zionist myth that most of the works of the members that generation contended with, and this myth is basically a masculine one.4 Thus, we can say that the place of the woman in the pioneering-socialist world of the Palmach generation authors is not essentially different from her place in Herzl’s liberal-bourgeois world. In a world where one’s contribution toward the national goal is measured mainly by fighting ability, or hard, physical work in agriculture, woman turns almost per force into the “other”: the one whose characteristics are those rejected by the new Hebrew man. Against this background, the novella Kirot Etz Dakim [The Other Side of the Wall] by Nathan Shaham is a refreshing surprise.5 Of course, the novella, which takes place in the early 1940s, was written in the 1970s, but the centrality of the woman in this work stands out both when compared with the works of the Shaham’s contemporaries, Shamir and Yizhar, and when contrasted with later works or studies. One may say that Kirot Etz Dakim is a harbinger of a certain change that took place in the public and literary atmosphere in Israel about a decade later. Even if in Europe and the United States the late 1970s were a period already bearing the marks of the first wave of the feminist revolution, in Israel these were years in which the masculine experience was still the central experience in literature. One could mention, for example, one of the important novels of the late 1970s, Zikhron Devarim [Past Continuous] by Yaakov Shabtai. It may or may not be a coincidence that both Kirot Etz Dakim and Zikhron Devarim appeared in 1977. Shabtai’s novel is decidedly masculine. The protagonists in his novel, the focus of both plot and point of view, are three men, while the women in it are secondary and seen through the eyes of the men. In contrast, the main consciousness in Shaham’s novel is the woman’s consciousness. One might argue that if the novella was written today, or even at the end of the 1980s, the central consciousness...

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