AMOSOZ
21
Brenner-after all, they had been through Dostoyevsky before-no,
they grew angry with themselves and with the entire air of decline
and decomposition of DiasporaJewish life, traditional and "modern–
ized" alike. So Bialik and Berdichevsky and Brenner and the others,
without really meaning to, had started the fire and the zeal of those
few hundreds, and eventually thousands, of "desperados" who
created the foundations for Israel. Our grandparents. In a strange,
paradoxical way they burned with desire to show Brenner just how
wrong he was. So they stepped right out of his stories and indeed
right out of their own skin just to show him that they were not at all
what they really were . I realize that this may sound like some third–
rate detective story with characters suddenly leaping out of the pages
to demolish their author-but that's how it worked: a literature
which was finally meant to commemorate a dying world ignited a
revolution beyond its authors' widest hopes. So eventually Brenner's
own characters made his stories sound wrong and cruel and hateful
and short-sighted; his heroes became his refuters, which is exactly
what he might have wished in his heart of hearts.
Now what has this to do with present-day Israeli literature?
When, if ever, am I going to get to the point and talk about Zach,
Amihai, Pagis, Dahlia Rabikovitch? And what about Appelfeld and
Yehoshua and Amalia Cahana-Carmon and their more recent
successors?
Apparently, what is happening in the free state ofIsrael belongs
to a brand-new story, in literature and otherwise. Apparently, gone
are the days of a ghost language used by desperate writers to mourn
a dying world. Can't we just let the dead bury the dead and go about
our own business? Indeed, such a mood prevailed over the so-called
Sabra Literature for about one decade, just before and just after
independence was achieved. Books seemed to convey a lot of hero–
ism and to celebrate the Gentile-Jew type. There was a combination
of glee and macho, perhaps a touch of Hemingway at his worst, and
a touch of enthusiastic, Soviet-inspired, Social Realism. But let me
stress that even for those euphoric years my description is unfair to
some major writers and poets like Yizhar, Amir Gilboa, and Haim
Gury (Gouri) in his better poems. In fact my description refers just
to the general, widespread literary mood in those years. The pulses
of dread and of guilt, of unreality and of neurosis, had never dis–
appeared completely from the literary scene.
Since the sixties, roughly, one can decipher a significant come–
back of themes and tunes and melodies and even techniques which
