In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction
  • Judith R. Baskin
No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction, by Yael Feldman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 337 pp. $16.50.

In its first century modern Hebrew prose fiction was primarily the domain of male writers. Women, when they wrote, expressed themselves in poetry, a literary form which was culturally approved as suitable for the female sensibility. As Yael Feldman notes in her ambitious literary study, No Room of Their Own, this peculiar correlation of gender and genre reflected both Hebrew’s heritage in Jewish tradition as the male [End Page 139] language of prayer and study, and modern Israel’s specific contemporary circumstances as a society under siege. While early Zionism had purported to foster the model of a “New Hebrew Woman,” the actual marginalization of women’s literary aspirations, even in modernist and secular circles, represented a blatant contradiction between feminist aspirations and nationalist goals which continues to be played out in Israeli society and in Israeli literature.

Feldman’s study delineates the new literary landscape shaped by a cohort of Israeli writers approximately of the 1980s who created strong and autonomous women “acting intentionally and purposefully as their own agents in a society still inhospitable to such a project” (p. 6). These authors, whose work Feldman examines for its belatedness, its specific literary shape, and its sociopolitical implications, include Shulamit Lapid, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Shulamith Hareven, Netiva Ben Yehuda, and Ruth Almog. The book ends with an overview of younger female writers of the post-Zionist, post- modernist 1990s. Feldman believes these authors are no longer constrained by Israel’s problematic conflict between feminist and nationalist ideologies which so profoundly shaped their predecessors’ lives and writing.

What gives Feldman’s fascinating study a special shape is its attempt to place the writers in whom she is interested into a theoretical framework informed by feminist literary criticism. Central to Feldman’s endeavor, as is apparent in the title of her book, are the writings of Virginia Woolf, an author she believes has had a profound impact on Israeli women writers. Feldman argues that such Woolfian themes as the solidarity of outsiders, the female critique of male aggression, the deconstruction of gender roles through androgyny, and the use of insanity as social critique, are found throughout the corpus of the authors under study. She suggests that Woolf’s attack on the essentialist constructions of women implicit in the Victorian worldview, particularly in her championing of androgyny in such works as Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, offered a central inspiration to Israeli writers like Shulamith Hareven, Netiva Ben Yehuda, and Ruth Almog, providing them with representational strategies in which women could enact both “male” and “female” roles. A number of other feminist theorists, including Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, are invoked as well, as Feldman interweaves chapters on literary theory in its contemporary western context with textual analyses of her chosen Israeli writers. While it is Feldman’s hope that the two narrative strands will shed light on and critique each other, it must be said that the theoretical chapters can be heavy going for the non-specialist while the discussions of the various Israeli writers stand quite well on their own.

Judith R. Baskin
Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies
University of Oregon
...

Share