In conversation with Gershon Shaked

Haifa, 2006

G.S.: In a discussion I hadwith George Steiner in Jerusalem, he claimed that a country caught upin constant military and political conflict cannot produce goodliterature – that good leterature requires a certain amount of culturalserenity and not conflict. As evidence he pointed to the number ofNobel Prizes awarded to Israeli authors.

Yehoshua: I find it strangethat George Steiner, an outstandingly erudite scholar, would make sucha broad sweeping statement, which is immediately refuted by reality. Iam generally very cautious in defining the external conditions for goodliterature or art. Reality proves that great and important works havebeen created in times of war and amid brutal social hardship, just asgreat works have been created in times of peace and social calm. In ourcase, in the case of the Jews, since peaceful times are so few and farbetween, it can be said that most good works were created in times ofcrisis, war and danger. If we consider the author we both like so much– Agnon – most of his great works were written in periods of sufferingand disaster, compared to which the period we live in today appearsidyllically calm. His own home burned down twice, he lived through theGreat 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 thedistant and recent past? And there are many more examples that refuteSteiner´s claim. Thomas Mann, too, wrote The Magic Mountain during andafter World War I, which brought about deep crises in Germany thatdwarf all of Israel´s wars. [Steiner´s] criterion of the Nobel Prize isaltogether very strange. Half the Nobel prizewinners in the twentiethcentury have been forgotten, whereas many who did not receive the prizestill shine in the literary firmament (Kafka, Joyce, Musil, VirginiaWoolf and many others). When the cannons roar, the muses roar evenlouder, and some of the success and interest Hebrew literature nowadayenjoys abroad stems from the combination of sophisticated modernwriting and real existential conflicts. We need not invent a trafficaccident or cancer to kill off our heroes. We can credibly send them towar or a suicide bombing, where they die glorious deaths... True,external conflicts can sometimes provide superficial dramatic solutionsand divert the focus too much from the internal to the external. Mycontemporaries and I have undoubtedly paid a literary price for stayingclose to events.

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

Yehoshua: If we expand yourquestion a little more, our national and social conflicts – and ofcourse the Holocaust – matured us and introduced real tragedy into ourliterary state of affairs. On the other hand – and this is perhaps thedownside – it possibly stopped us lingering over those details throughwhich one expresses longing; That [lingering] got somewhat lost in theconflicts. There was a certain degree of both gain and loss in it, andbetween the gain and the loss I see the immense strength of S. Yizhar,for example, who was attentive to the smallest nuances and who, throughhis language, could express the subtlest things in the landscape withall that this entails. David Grossman does fine work in this area aswell.

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

Yehoshua: The conflict ofthe Israeli is more tangible because it is a conflict over territory,over national dominance, the kind of national conflict that happenselsewhere. But this is combined with the classic conflict of the Jewwith the non-Jew, which is attended by an ambiguous identity [of theIsraeli] that enables such demonic projections. For within thisimbroglio of the boundaries of Jewish identity with and without thenon-Jew, the Jew, too, does not understand himself. And you yourself,Gershon, have recently written a whole book entitled Identity on thisissue that deals with all the subtleties of the problem. But theconflict with the Palestinians is clearly a national conflict, in otherwords, we aren´t being killed over some fantasy that was fantasizedabout us, but because we took territory that they considered theirs.And in spite of this, the wars here are unlike those between France andGermany over Alsace-Lorraine. France never said: Germany – no suchthing; it doesn´t have the right to exist. And Germany never said thatFrance was irrelevant. And here, the Jewish dimensions of the Holocaustare added to our national conflicts. We in Israel are paying for thesins of Jews throughout the generations. The sins of the Jews whoabandoned 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 theBalfour Declaration, when they could have founded a state before theHolocaust and resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before itbegan, we are also trapped in the Jewish condition.

G.S.: Let us talk a littleabout writing; after all, I am talking to you not as a philosopher ofhistory, 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 Facingthe 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 youcreated conflicts between the members of a single family and variousothers: an English other, an Arab other, a German other – all thepossible options of observing how the Jewish family contends with otheridentities. In Mr. Mani are more Israeli Jews than Jewish Israelis. Andas they face various others, each of them provides an added dimensionboth to the family and to the other facing them.

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

In the Yom Kippur War, Sadat took us by surprise; only tenkilometers separated us in the Suez Canal, and then we forced back theEgyptian army and the war ended with a great victory for us on bothfronts. And yet, to this day, our intelligence and military failure isbeing discussed. Numerous books repeatedly analyze the question of whywe were taken by surprise. We consider the Holocaust to be a decreefrom heaven that we could not have foreseen, yet some people didunderstand the abyss the Jewish people were walking into and tried tochange 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 forgenerations. In other words, we know the extent to which we are engagedin a constant dialog with our parents, but there is also an ongoingsubconscious dialog with our grandparents and our great-greatgrandparents, which we cannot trace back because some of thegenerations that preceded it have sunk into oblivion. Numerous doctoraldissertations and papers have been written about Mr. Mani, but Irecently saw a dissertation by Dr. Eli Shai, who researched the familyarchives of the generations that preceded me – of my father, Ya´akovYehoshua, who was an Orientalist and a researcher of the Jewish Yishuvin Jerusalem, and other members of my family. And I can see the extentto which subconscious elements going back several generationsinfluenced me in the writing of this book.

G.S.: In this novel, which Isee as a crossroads in your writing as well as in 20th century Hebrewfiction, there is still something that puzzles me. All the maincharacters 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 ofthe other. The other is also affected by the Mani presence. There arewars here that have no direct bearing on the Jewish people, warsbetween non-Jews. What did they get from us?

Yehoshua: Recently, I readDror 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 throughhis interactions with his dead wife and his surroundings. He concludesin an odd way, stating that: “After Five Seasons, Yehoshua stoppeddealing with the Mizrahi issue,” and moves on to analyze theprotagonist´s lack of identity in The Mission of the Human ResourceMan. I asked myself how Dror Mishani – an intelligent scholar – cantotally ignore Mr. Mani and Voyage to the End of the Millennium. Afterall, Mishani knows my work well. Then I understood that his – andothers´ - preoccupation with the Mizrahi issue, as well as with thePalestinian issue, stems from a desire to transform them into rods withwhich to beat Zionism by describing them as victims, weak andoppressed. Hence, Molcho´s degree of passivity (I say “a degree”because deep down he is also strong) is at times tactical rather thansubstantive. And a non-intellectual passivity of this sort points to acertain oppression of his inner identity, which attracts postmodern andpost-Zionist criticism. However, the active, strong, creative Mizrahis,who are sometimes even hyperactive – as in Mr. Mani and Voyage to theEnd of the Millennium – do not fit the theory of Mizrahi oppression, ofan identity that has been erased through “Zionist trampling.”Incidentally, we sometimes forget that before the Holocaust ninety-fivepercent of the Jewish people were Ashkenazi and only five percentMizrahi. I wanted to give my Mizrahi characters inner strength and anoriginal way of thinking, not necessarily in the Mizrahi context, butrather in a general Jewish one (like myself) [I also wanted to givethem] a different perspective on the Yionist option, as a substantivecorrection to the classic Jewish problem. Bz this I meant that there isstrength in the Miyrahi perspective, in its waz of seeing new anddifferent solutions to the Jewish problem, especiallz for a Miyrahilike me / a native of Israel for generations – who has more genuinefeeling for local Arabs, as well as harsh criticism for the Jews´conduct in the Diaspora. [I am] a Miyrahi who is not post-Zionist butpre-Zionist, and who doesn´t constantlz bewail the Europe that was lostto us. We have within us, I feel, a kind of primal validation [system]that can refresh the discourse of Zionism. And that, perhaps, is theideological and pszchological foundation of Mr. Mani.

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

Yehoshua: We weren´t wealthyat all and our feelings of aristocracy were very limited. Forty-sixyears ago when a mutual friend introduced me to Ika, my wife, and toldher that I was from the Sephardi aristocracy, it seemed very strange tome. Because the only feeling of aristocracy I related to was the factthat I belonged to a family that had lived in Israel for manygeneration. 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 Israelfrom Lithuania in the 1920s – what we call the “Mayflower of Zionism” -felt a sense of aristocracy when she came to my family home. She wasimpressed by its solidity, its colorfulness, its Moroccan ornateness.And she interpreted it as aristocracy compared to the austerity andgrayness of her own ideological Zionist home.

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

Yehoshua: True, on the onehand it´s not right, but on the other there was a situation here inwhich Zionism emerged from the hardships endured by East EuropeanJewry, although [it is also true that] the hardships of Mizrahi Jewrywould have increased with the totalitarian and Islamic developments inthe Arab countries. In Israel today, we are half Mizrahi and halfAshkenazi and this is not only because the Holocaust destroyed such ahuge proportion of European Jewry, but also because many European Jewschose not to come to Israel, whereas most Mizrahi Jewry did. Withregard to the Mizrahi issue, it always offends me when people ask, “Whyare you running away from your Mizrahi identity?” as if there were onlyone kind of Mizrahi identity. I have written many books with Mizrahiprotagonists, and I also refuse to have an outsider define my identityaccording to his needs and ideological criteria. Imagine someone askingKafka, “Why don´t you write about Jews? Why don´t your characters haveunmistakable Jewish features? Write about your family home.”

My Mizrahi identity is very different from Sami Michael´s or ShimonBallas´s, just as the Ashkenazi identity of S. Yizhar is very differentfrom Aharon Appelfeld´s. Each has his own unique variations. And allthis racist talk about having to maintain your identity is like tellinga black author in Americe, “You must write only about blacks.” A basictenet 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 rightto do so, and racists like the Nazis or others may not imprison him inhis identity as they define it. In fact, you can sometimes find thisrather racist tone in postmodern and post-Zionist perceptions as well.

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

Yehoshua: Only two storiesby S. Yizhar, “The Prisoner” and “The Story of Hirbet Hiz´ah.” It isastonishing, for example, that in Days of Ziklag, the greatest epic tobe written about the War of Independence, there is no trace of thePalestinian problem which was at its heart. And the only contact withArabs throughout the entire book is through a rifle sight, anonymouslyand with Egyptian soldiers. But none of this prevents me fromconsidering Days of Ziklag one of the most profound war novels in worldliterature...

G.S.: Do you rememberDiscovering Elijah? I had a conversation with Yizhar about it. “Youwanted to write about the idyllic and [your belief] that eventuallythere would be peace, but you wrote about the heroism [instead],“ Isaid. In fact, it is a very heroic story. Consciously, Yizhar aspiresto peace, yet he is impressed by the soldiers´ heroism. What is youropinion?

Yehoshua: I think you´reright, at times there is something almost erotic about his commanders –Brigadier General Kalman Magen who later dies of a heart attack, forexample. 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 (Aformer minister in the Labor Party and a peace activist) what was goingto happen, and he said, “Don´t worry, the storekeepers will come, themailmen will come, the teachers will come, the clerks will come andthey will stop the Egyptian army.” And in Discovering Elijah Yizhardescribed the heroism of these simple people beautifully.

Apart from Yizhar, I also have a great deal of respect for SamiMichael´s Refuge. It really does touch upon the essential problem ofIsraeli Arabs. Eli Amir has also produced fine work in some of hisnovels. I have never dared to write about the Palestinians. My booksportray Israeli Arabs, from the Arab in “Facing the Forests,” to Naimin The Lover and Rashid Samaher and Fuad in The Liberated Bride. TheArabs in Mr. Mani are not really specific heroes, but there is a lot ofliterary material in The Liberated Bride. Experts in Arab cultures gaveme the opportunity to penetrate the depths of Arab existence. DavidGrossman´s Smile of the Lamb also touches on Arabs, and he didexcellent work on Israeli Arabs in his collection of essays, Sleepingon a Wire. It helped me with some elements when I was writing TheLiberated Bride, and I told him so.

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

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

G.S.: Interestingly, thesubject does not appear in the work of an author like Yehoshua Kenazalthough he deals with the Mizrahi conflict, and the same is true ofAmos Oz.

Yehoshua: From the point ofview of experience, it is not easy to penetrate the Arab soul. SamiMichael´s and Shimon Ballas´ knowledge of Arabic undoubtedly helpedthem a great deal.

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

Yehoshua: One is alwaysexposed to the lower economic groups. And it is true that Michael andBallas – like Eli Amir – speak Arabic well. On the other hand, althoughI do not know Arabic, I regard Arabs as distant relatives, and theywere 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 feelwarmth toward them. And apart from this, they now speak Hebrew and arefamiliar with our internal codes – I am referring here not only toIsraeli Arabs, but to some Palestinians as well. For example, Rashid –in The Liberated Bride – is a really well-liked character and I feltgreat empathy for him...You know, yesterday I went into a greengrocerin Ramat Aviv Gimmel and the Arab working there suddenly startedtalking to me about The Liberated Bride and it was wonderful, I feltreal satisfaction, and he said to me ironically, “You forced me to read400 pages...” The fact that he could understand my empathy is extremelyimportant to me.

G.S.: You have saidsomething important here: that it is impossible to come into conflictwith 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 isa 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. Youdon´t describe them from personal experience because you were a child,but you were able to internalize and represent all the things thatpassed through your parents.

G.S.: In other words, thethesis for speaking about conflict is this: if it´s not part of yourexperience, the conflict described will be ideological, and for thisreason rather superficial. This also happens with Americans towardAfrican-Americans.

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

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

Yehoshua: Not exactly. Idon´t accept your definition of Ashkenazied Israeliness... I refuse toaccept an Ashkenazi monopoly over Israeliness. Israeliness is a mosaic.But if you mean the Western part of me, then yes. The Arabs, and ourrelationship with them, are the key to our future. Whether we exist ornot a hundred years from now will be determined by the Arab issue. Ifwe cannot find a modus vivendi, we will not exist, I mean in thelong-term, both vis-á-vis the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs withwhom 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 donot destroy creativity; they are its very source.

Yehoshua: Yes, conflicts arethe source of creativity and they feed it with many different hormones.You have to be careful not to let the hormones overpower the delicateparts. 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 intovarious identities in minute detail. [In this book], he goes through abuilding, one apartment at a time, and examines what happens in it,from the smallest phzsical detail of the furniture to the roots andmemories of each character. It= s a great a pity he died at such ayoung age. [When I read his book], I suddenly said to myself / could Inow, at the age of 70, leave behind all the conflicts I deal with andconcentrate on the smallest details of the real world? This is whatYizhar does with landscapes – look at his descriptions of thistles, ofsunsets, with all the constraints involved. True, Yizhar has neverdescribed a family conflict. With Yizhar you never go into the kitchen.Sometimes I dream: if only I could leave behind all the conflicts andall the identities; if only I could go into this kind of detail andextract meaning from it. But I think it´s too late now, I don´t havethe language for it, or the patience. Even the writer, despite hisfreedom of imagination, is firmly bound to his literary identity.

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