interviews

G.S.: In a discussion I had with George Steiner in Jerusalem, he claimed that a country caught up in constant military and political conflict cannot produce good literature – that good leterature requires a certain amount of cultural serenity and not conflict. As evidence he pointed to the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Israeli authors.

Yehoshua: I find it strange that George Steiner, an outstandingly erudite scholar, would make such a broad sweeping statement, which is immediately refuted by reality. I am generally very cautious in defining the external conditions for good literature or art. Reality proves that great and important works have been created in times of war and amid brutal social hardship, just as great works have been created in times of peace and social calm. In our case, in the case of the Jews, since peaceful times are so few and far between, it can be said that most good works were created in times of crisis, war and danger. If we consider the author we both like so much – Agnon – most of his great works were written in periods of suffering and disaster, compared to which the period we live in today appears idyllically calm. His own home burned down twice, he lived through the Great Arab Revolt of 1936, World War II and the War of Independence. Did any of this prevent him from writing works that deal with both the distant and recent past? And there are many more examples that refute Steiner´s claim. Thomas Mann, too, wrote The Magic Mountain during and after World War I, which brought about deep crises in Germany that dwarf all of Israel´s wars. [Steiner´s] criterion of the Nobel Prize is altogether very strange. Half the Nobel prizewinners in the twentieth century have been forgotten, whereas many who did not receive the prize still shine in the literary firmament (Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Virginia Woolf and many others). When the cannons roar, the muses roar even louder, and some of the success and interest Hebrew literature nowaday enjoys abroad stems from the combination of sophisticated modern writing and real existential conflicts. We need not invent a traffic accident or cancer to kill off our heroes. We can credibly send them to war or a suicide bombing, where they die glorious deaths... True, external conflicts can sometimes provide superficial dramatic solutions and divert the focus too much from the internal to the external. My contemporaries and I have undoubtedly paid a literary price for staying close to events.

G.S.: Since [Steiner] is a classicist, I asked him whether he had ever heard of Aeschylus and Sophocles, who wrote about the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, and how he could explain it. The statement that conflict can – and now you´re saying it – both strengthen and constrain cultural work, is one I totally agree with.

Yehoshua: If we expand your question a little more, our national and social conflicts – and of course the Holocaust – matured us and introduced real tragedy into our literary state of affairs. On the other hand – and this is perhaps the downside – it possibly stopped us lingering over those details through which one expresses longing; That [lingering] got somewhat lost in the conflicts. There was a certain degree of both gain and loss in it, and between the gain and the loss I see the immense strength of S. Yizhar, for example, who was attentive to the smallest nuances and who, through his language, could express the subtlest things in the landscape with all that this entails. David Grossman does fine work in this area as well.

G.S.: Everyone acknowledges that cultural experience and identity are formed through conflict with the other, and we have had conflict with the other since Jews first came into being, from the Bible through the Palmach all the way to Yona Wallach. And the question is: what is the distinction between the conflict of the Jew with the other and the conflict of the Israeli with the other, who is both a similar and a different other?

Yehoshua: The conflict of the Israeli is more tangible because it is a conflict over territory, over national dominance, the kind of national conflict that happens elsewhere. But this is combined with the classic conflict of the Jew with the non-Jew, which is attended by an ambiguous identity [of the Israeli] that enables such demonic projections. For within this imbroglio of the boundaries of Jewish identity with and without the non-Jew, the Jew, too, does not understand himself. And you yourself, Gershon, have recently written a whole book entitled Identity on this issue that deals with all the subtleties of the problem. But the conflict with the Palestinians is clearly a national conflict, in other words, we aren´t being killed over some fantasy that was fantasized about us, but because we took territory that they considered theirs. And in spite of this, the wars here are unlike those between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine. France never said: Germany – no such thing; it doesn´t have the right to exist. And Germany never said that France was irrelevant. And here, the Jewish dimensions of the Holocaust are added to our national conflicts. We in Israel are paying for the sins of Jews throughout the generations. The sins of the Jews who abandoned their country and did not return to it even when they could. Because of the Jews who did not come here, sy in the 1920s after the Balfour Declaration, when they could have founded a state before the Holocaust and resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it began, we are also trapped in the Jewish condition.

G.S.: Let us talk a little about writing; after all, I am talking to you not as a philosopher of history, but as a writer. This issue preoccupied you, in my opinion, even in The Death of the Old Man, where it is covert, whereas in Facing the Forests, and later in The Lover and The Liberated Bride and so on, it is more overt. One of the amazing things in Mr. Mani is that you created conflicts between the members of a single family and various others: an English other, an Arab other, a German other – all the possible options of observing how the Jewish family contends with other identities. In Mr. Mani are more Israeli Jews than Jewish Israelis. And as they face various others, each of them provides an added dimension both to the family and to the other facing them.

Yehoshua: Look, in Mr. Mani each member of the Mani family in fact represents a different perception of identity. The Mr. Mani of the third conversation declares that Israel should be partitioned, a border determined, and urges the Palestinians to rapidly dopt a national identity so that we can divide the territory between us and avert an endless blood feud. On the other hand, his father, Moshe Mani of 1899 Jerusalem, is actually in favor of a kind of state for all citizens. While his (official but not real) father, Yosef Mani of 1848, dreams of integrating the Arabs into a Jewish nationality in an odd fantasy in which they are actually „Jews who have forgotten that they are Jews.“ And Mr. Mani of Crete in 1944 speaks about abolishing Jewish identity altogether. Each one presents a different option taken at a historical srossroads in the annals of Zionism over the past two hundred years, an option that Zionism did not ultimately adopt. I am preoccupied with the Holocaust. Since my Mizrahi family (as opposed to my wife´s) had no connection to the Holocaust, I can and do allow myself to experience it intellectually, and not only emotionally. And I consider the Holocaust to be not only a profound failure of parts of European civilization, but also as the greatest failure of the Jewish people. Why failure? The failure stems from the fact that there have been numerous red flags throughout history warning us about the pathological relations between Jews and their host countries in the Diaspora, and we ignored them. We ignored the dangers that our foreign identity reated in the rapestry of other nations´ lives, until we reached the worst possible scenario in which we were exterminated like so many other germs. Not for territory, not for ideology, not for religion, not for money of property.

In the Yom Kippur War, Sadat took us by surprise; only ten kilometers separated us in the Suez Canal, and then we forced back the Egyptian army and the war ended with a great victory for us on both fronts. And yet, to this day, our intelligence and military failure is being discussed. Numerous books repeatedly analyze the question of why we were taken by surprise. We consider the Holocaust to be a decree from heaven that we could not have foreseen, yet some people did understand the abyss the Jewish people were walking into and tried to change its situation.

But Mr. Mani is not just a political book or a book about identity. It is a book about a family and how the subconscious is passed down for generations. In other words, we know the extent to which we are engaged in a constant dialog with our parents, but there is also an ongoing subconscious dialog with our grandparents and our great-great grandparents, which we cannot trace back because some of the generations that preceded it have sunk into oblivion. Numerous doctoral dissertations and papers have been written about Mr. Mani, but I recently saw a dissertation by Dr. Eli Shai, who researched the family archives of the generations that preceded me – of my father, Ya´akov Yehoshua, who was an Orientalist and a researcher of the Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem, and other members of my family. And I can see the extent to which subconscious elements going back several generations influenced me in the writing of this book.

G.S.: In this novel, which I see as a crossroads in your writing as well as in 20th century Hebrew fiction, there is still something that puzzles me. All the main characters conduct a kind of dialog. And there is not only the “give” of the various Manis, or the way they are affected by the pressure of the other. The other is also affected by the Mani presence. There are wars here that have no direct bearing on the Jewish people, wars between non-Jews. What did they get from us?

Yehoshua: Recently, I read Dror Mishani´s book, The Ethnic Unconscious: The Emergence of ‘Mizrahiyur’ in Hebrew Literature, and he accurately analyzes Molcho´s [the protagonist of Yehoshua´s Five Seasons] Mizrahi identity through his interactions with his dead wife and his surroundings. He concludes in an odd way, stating that: “After Five Seasons, Yehoshua stopped dealing with the Mizrahi issue,” and moves on to analyze the protagonist´s lack of identity in The Mission of the Human Resource Man. I asked myself how Dror Mishani – an intelligent scholar – can totally ignore Mr. Mani and Voyage to the End of the Millennium. After all, Mishani knows my work well. Then I understood that his – and others´ - preoccupation with the Mizrahi issue, as well as with the Palestinian issue, stems from a desire to transform them into rods with which to beat Zionism by describing them as victims, weak and oppressed. Hence, Molcho´s degree of passivity (I say “a degree” because deep down he is also strong) is at times tactical rather than substantive. And a non-intellectual passivity of this sort points to a certain oppression of his inner identity, which attracts postmodern and post-Zionist criticism. However, the active, strong, creative Mizrahis, who are sometimes even hyperactive – as in Mr. Mani and Voyage to the End of the Millennium – do not fit the theory of Mizrahi oppression, of an identity that has been erased through “Zionist trampling.” Incidentally, we sometimes forget that before the Holocaust ninety-five percent of the Jewish people were Ashkenazi and only five percent Mizrahi. I wanted to give my Mizrahi characters inner strength and an original way of thinking, not necessarily in the Mizrahi context, but rather in a general Jewish one (like myself) [I also wanted to give them] a different perspective on the Yionist option, as a substantive correction to the classic Jewish problem. Bz this I meant that there is strength in the Miyrahi perspective, in its waz of seeing new and different solutions to the Jewish problem, especiallz for a Miyrahi like me / a native of Israel for generations – who has more genuine feeling for local Arabs, as well as harsh criticism for the Jews´ conduct in the Diaspora. [I am] a Miyrahi who is not post-Zionist but pre-Zionist, and who doesn´t constantlz bewail the Europe that was lost to us. We have within us, I feel, a kind of primal validation [system] that can refresh the discourse of Zionism. And that, perhaps, is the ideological and pszchological foundation of Mr. Mani.

G.S.: The conflict in Mr. Mani is verz interesting because it reminds me how, when I first came to Israel in 1944, I was told that the real people of wealth in Jerusalem were the [Sephardi] Valero and Hadaya families ... who were the economic aristocracz of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel. And the poor Mizrahis who came as immigrants did not rub shoulders with this aristocracy, which did not take much notice of them and turned their economic struggle into an ethnic issue. Your Manis are aristocrats ...

Yehoshua: We weren´t wealthy at all and our feelings of aristocracy were very limited. Forty-six years ago when a mutual friend introduced me to Ika, my wife, and told her that I was from the Sephardi aristocracy, it seemed very strange to me. Because the only feeling of aristocracy I related to was the fact that I belonged to a family that had lived in Israel for many generation. And every résumé I write always begins with: “Born in 1936, fifth generation in Israel.” Perhaps that is also the reason why Mr. Mani contains five conversations and not six or four. Even my wife Ika, who comes from one of the classic Zionist families that came to Israel from Lithuania in the 1920s – what we call the “Mayflower of Zionism” - felt a sense of aristocracy when she came to my family home. She was impressed by its solidity, its colorfulness, its Moroccan ornateness. And she interpreted it as aristocracy compared to the austerity and grayness of her own ideological Zionist home.

G.S.: We began with the Jewish-Arab conflict and then went on to talk about the Jewish people´s inner conflicts, which preoccupy us just as much. Today, in fact, our literature deals with this internal ethnic conflict as much as with the external, political one, and the problem is that using the internal conflict to serve the external one is, in my view, one of the most terrible things in this country. It constitutes internal destruction and it´s not right either ...

Yehoshua: True, on the one hand it´s not right, but on the other there was a situation here in which Zionism emerged from the hardships endured by East European Jewry, although [it is also true that] the hardships of Mizrahi Jewry would have increased with the totalitarian and Islamic developments in the Arab countries. In Israel today, we are half Mizrahi and half Ashkenazi and this is not only because the Holocaust destroyed such a huge proportion of European Jewry, but also because many European Jews chose not to come to Israel, whereas most Mizrahi Jewry did. With regard to the Mizrahi issue, it always offends me when people ask, “Why are you running away from your Mizrahi identity?” as if there were only one kind of Mizrahi identity. I have written many books with Mizrahi protagonists, and I also refuse to have an outsider define my identity according to his needs and ideological criteria. Imagine someone asking Kafka, “Why don´t you write about Jews? Why don´t your characters have unmistakable Jewish features? Write about your family home.”

My Mizrahi identity is very different from Sami Michael´s or Shimon Ballas´s, just as the Ashkenazi identity of S. Yizhar is very different from Aharon Appelfeld´s. Each has his own unique variations. And all this racist talk about having to maintain your identity is like telling a black author in Americe, “You must write only about blacks.” A basic tenet of human rights is a person´s right to define his own identity, with all its variations. If a Jew wants to assimilate, it is his right to do so, and racists like the Nazis or others may not imprison him in his identity as they define it. In fact, you can sometimes find this rather racist tone in postmodern and post-Zionist perceptions as well.

G.S.: In your opinion, which literary works – apart from your own – deal with the Jewish-Arab conflict in a way that touches upon the core problem?

Yehoshua: Only two stories by S. Yizhar, “The Prisoner” and “The Story of Hirbet Hiz´ah.” It is astonishing, for example, that in Days of Ziklag, the greatest epic to be written about the War of Independence, there is no trace of the Palestinian problem which was at its heart. And the only contact with Arabs throughout the entire book is through a rifle sight, anonymously and with Egyptian soldiers. But none of this prevents me from considering Days of Ziklag one of the most profound war novels in world literature...

G.S.: Do you remember Discovering Elijah? I had a conversation with Yizhar about it. “You wanted to write about the idyllic and [your belief] that eventually there would be peace, but you wrote about the heroism [instead],“ I said. In fact, it is a very heroic story. Consciously, Yizhar aspires to peace, yet he is impressed by the soldiers´ heroism. What is your opinion?

Yehoshua: I think you´re right, at times there is something almost erotic about his commanders – Brigadier General Kalman Magen who later dies of a heart attack, for example. On the other hand, that is the way it is. I remember that, during the first dark days of the Yom Kippur War, I asked Luba Eliav (A former minister in the Labor Party and a peace activist) what was going to happen, and he said, “Don´t worry, the storekeepers will come, the mailmen will come, the teachers will come, the clerks will come and they will stop the Egyptian army.” And in Discovering Elijah Yizhar described the heroism of these simple people beautifully.

Apart from Yizhar, I also have a great deal of respect for Sami Michael´s Refuge. It really does touch upon the essential problem of Israeli Arabs. Eli Amir has also produced fine work in some of his novels. I have never dared to write about the Palestinians. My books portray Israeli Arabs, from the Arab in “Facing the Forests,” to Naim in The Lover and Rashid Samaher and Fuad in The Liberated Bride. The Arabs in Mr. Mani are not really specific heroes, but there is a lot of literary material in The Liberated Bride. Experts in Arab cultures gave me the opportunity to penetrate the depths of Arab existence. David Grossman´s Smile of the Lamb also touches on Arabs, and he did excellent work on Israeli Arabs in his collection of essays, Sleeping on a Wire. It helped me with some elements when I was writing The Liberated Bride, and I told him so.

G.S.: What about Arabesques by Anton Shammas?

Yehoshua: Arabesques is in a category of its own. It´s quite incredible that this is still Anton Shammas´ only novel. It was written over 20 years ago, and because he wrote it in the splendid Hebrew of an Israeli Arab, it is a rarity that is constantly referred to. It is a good and original book. But I think Shammas has ended his romance with Hebrew as a language for writing. Anyway, the conflict appears in other forms on the outer reaches of various novels.

G.S.: Interestingly, the subject does not appear in the work of an author like Yehoshua Kenaz although he deals with the Mizrahi conflict, and the same is true of Amos Oz.

Yehoshua: From the point of view of experience, it is not easy to penetrate the Arab soul. Sami Michael´s and Shimon Ballas´ knowledge of Arabic undoubtedly helped them a great deal.

G.S.: The problem is that you´re familiar with Arab people in an abstract way, but you can´t characterize them directly because you haven´t lived among them as Michael and Ballas have. There´s a problem here, too, and I ask myself – they [Michael and Ballas] did not actually live among Jews or Arabs of the lower economic groups. They belonged to the communist intellectual elite of Iraq, who are not representative of any nation.

Yehoshua: One is always exposed to the lower economic groups. And it is true that Michael and Ballas – like Eli Amir – speak Arabic well. On the other hand, although I do not know Arabic, I regard Arabs as distant relatives, and they were present in our home through my father, his friends and his Arabic. I could sense the empathy even in the way he spoke Arabic... So I feel warmth toward them. And apart from this, they now speak Hebrew and are familiar with our internal codes – I am referring here not only to Israeli Arabs, but to some Palestinians as well. For example, Rashid – in The Liberated Bride – is a really well-liked character and I felt great empathy for him...You know, yesterday I went into a greengrocer in Ramat Aviv Gimmel and the Arab working there suddenly started talking to me about The Liberated Bride and it was wonderful, I felt real satisfaction, and he said to me ironically, “You forced me to read 400 pages...” The fact that he could understand my empathy is extremely important to me.

G.S.: You have said something important here: that it is impossible to come into conflict with the other without being close to him. Many of the Arab characters, and the conflicts too, written by Ashkenazi authors, are imaginary. They are more ideological than real. In your case, Naim in The Lover is a man who grew from within you, a projection of the self.

Yehoshua: And in your case – for example in your novel, Sons – you describe non-Jews in Vienna. You don´t describe them from personal experience because you were a child, but you were able to internalize and represent all the things that passed through your parents.

G.S.: In other words, the thesis for speaking about conflict is this: if it´s not part of your experience, the conflict described will be ideological, and for this reason rather superficial. This also happens with Americans toward African-Americans.

Yehoshua: You can belong to one community or another and still maintain a degree of empathy toward a different one, but [it needs to be] through your own background. I have realized that, on a certain level, Arabs are important to me and continue to be more so than the Mizrahi issue, even though the Mizrahi issue preoccupied me at certain points in my life. But since it wasn´t the center of a clear-cut conflict, it was still secondary. I think Arabs accompany me to this day, and even if the novel doesn´t deal with them, there has to be a moment of contact. Like in Five Seasons when the Arab driver takes Molcho to the immigrant town. That scene was important to me. I need that point of contact and warmth.

G.S.: Do you mean that this conflict actually enables you define your own identity and where you stand between your Ashkenazified Israeliness, your deep-rooted Mizrahiness, and the Arabness that is part of that Mizrahiness?

Yehoshua: Not exactly. I don´t accept your definition of Ashkenazied Israeliness... I refuse to accept an Ashkenazi monopoly over Israeliness. Israeliness is a mosaic. But if you mean the Western part of me, then yes. The Arabs, and our relationship with them, are the key to our future. Whether we exist or not a hundred years from now will be determined by the Arab issue. If we cannot find a modus vivendi, we will not exist, I mean in the long-term, both vis-á-vis the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs with whom there are no borders of fences. This is what preoccupies me now.

G.S.: Your answer to [George] Steiner´s question, which is where we began, is: Conflicts do not destroy creativity; they are its very source.

Yehoshua: Yes, conflicts are the source of creativity and they feed it with many different hormones. You have to be careful not to let the hormones overpower the delicate parts. Here is what I mean: I am now reading Georges Perec´s book, Life: A User´s Manual, and I am impressed with what he has done there. He was a superb writer and he had the amazing ability to go into various identities in minute detail. [In this book], he goes through a building, one apartment at a time, and examines what happens in it, from the smallest phzsical detail of the furniture to the roots and memories of each character. It= s a great a pity he died at such a young age. [When I read his book], I suddenly said to myself / could I now, at the age of 70, leave behind all the conflicts I deal with and concentrate on the smallest details of the real world? This is what Yizhar does with landscapes – look at his descriptions of thistles, of sunsets, with all the constraints involved. True, Yizhar has never described a family conflict. With Yizhar you never go into the kitchen. Sometimes I dream: if only I could leave behind all the conflicts and all the identities; if only I could go into this kind of detail and extract meaning from it. But I think it´s too late now, I don´t have the language for it, or the patience. Even the writer, despite his freedom of imagination, is firmly bound to his literary identity.

G.S.: In short: each one of us lives his own conflict.