DAVID TWERSKY
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book begun rather than concluded with such an assertion, it would merely
have added another chapter to the lengthy anti-occupation literature of the
left. Novelist Anton Shammas praised
The Yellow Wind
"precisely because it
does not meet the expectations of the left." Grossman, he went on, "comes to
this story like one who can still persuade the undecided, and those innocents
who don't know how to ask the right questions about the occupation ... "
(Shammas plays here on the Hebrew from the Passover Hagada story
about the four sons.)
The Yellow Wind
takes us through the by now familiar territory of
refugee camps and Jewish settlements, Palestinian universities and work–
places. Grossman is a filter, a prism, not only a camera or a tape recorder.
He catches details and nuances and makes the Palestinian "other" real to the
Jewish Israeli. Americans appear to love "the good" Israeli, one who suffers
his infliction of pain on others, which may account for the book's celebrity in
this country, despite its failure to clearly mark the passage to moral action
and advocate or contemplate a solution. In fact,
The Yellow Wind
essentially
tells us that among the solutions we must discard
is
the idea that Israel can
"enjoy" the occupation on the cheap. Grossman concludes that "nothing
matches the occupation as a great personal challenge.
As
a personal cross–
roads demanding action and thought."
Grossman's questions might fade in the light of a settlement, but for
Anton Shammas, a settlement will only exacerbate the concerns raised in his
first novel,
Arabesques.
Shammas, a Christian Palestinian/Israeli from the
Galilee village of Fasuta, demands an Israel in which Arab citizens can play
an equal role. His argument was foreshadowed by a small Jewish liter–
ary/political group in the fifties called the "Cananites" who argued that He–
brew-speaking Israelis are not merely Jews in another place - but a different
human breed altogether.
As
defined by one of its remaining practitioners,
columnist Boaz Evron, Cananism "is the understanding that true indepen–
dence in the area and peace depend on creating a political framework much
broader than the existing ones...." Specifically, Evron calls for a state
"neutral from an ethnic and cultural point of view capable of incorporating
different national groups." If Evron is the question, Shammas is the answer.
In a delicately crafted novel, Shammas peels away the many layers of his
identity: as Arab, Christian, Palestinian, Israeli, writer, man.
Arabesques
is it–
self replete with irony: a major novel in Hebrew, the national and religious
language of the Jews and the dominant language of the state of Israel, writ–
ten by a non-Jew, an Arab at that.
The identity of "Israeli" and "Jew" is very strong, so strong that most
people (including most Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews) tend to ignore the re–
ality that almost one of every six Israelis is an Arab. By writing in a subtle
Hebrew, Shammas has stormed the Jewish fortress from within and aimed a
sharp epistle at the Hebrew-reading public, that is, the Jews.
Arabesques
