22
PARTISAN REVIEW
used to be identified with the Great Generation. It is the basic
Hebrew context which reappears in the last two decades: the persis–
tent fear of approaching disaster; time and place which suddenly feel
unreal; longings for faraway places; scepticism, irony, and even self–
hatred; political siege transfigured into emotional siege; and ulti–
mately the effort, which used to be so typical of the Great Genera–
tion, to seize within a fluid language a fluid, transitive reality .
If
there is any common denominator for writers as different
from each other as, say, Amihai and Amalia Cahana-Carmon, it is
the following: the language strains itself to deal with a gushing river
of an unsettled reality.
It
is the widespread feeling in today's Israeli
literature that whatever looks real and permanent today was not
there yesterday and might be gone tomorrow; or else, that tonight's
dreams, nightmares, or horrid memories might become real life the
next morning.
The Israeli readers do not really enjoy their literature. They
read it as if obsessed; they often say that present-day writers aQd
poets are dangerous to the national morale and damaging Israel's
self-image and its reputation in the outside world. So, it may be that
one day we, too, are going to irritate our readers to the point of their
throwing away our books and cursing us and doing something far–
reaching and angry about the troubles, old and new.
If
and when this happens, it will turn contemporary Israeli litera–
ture, even though post eventum, into a political literature in the
broadest sense of the word. Our readers may then become our
refuters.
If
and when this happens we may deserve to share the same
bookshelf with Brenner and other members of the Great Generation.
And finally: you must have seen for yourselves that the story of
modern Hebrew contains despair and longing, incredible obstinacy
along with tremendous will for life. Indeed, it is a story full of sound
and fury. Maybe it takes an idiot to try and squeeze some of it into a
short account like this.
