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PARTISAN REVIEW
his praise for Grossman's
The Yellow Wind
to his own
Arabesques:
"It
appears to me," Shammas has written, "that Israeli Jewish consciousness
will
no longer be what it was [before the publication of
The Yellow Wind
]."
Rabbi Nachman, whom Shammas quotes, once said that a life can be an
answer to a question asked long ago. In that sense, Shammas is the answer
to the Cananites, but his answer raises new questions. Israeli society wiU ul–
timately have to confront and in some way answer the questions raised by
Shammas in this impressive, even delicate novel. Israeli identity is still being
forged in the furnaces
The Yellow Wind
and
Arabesques
describe. Out of
those flames something beautiful will emerge. Not a mythic bird rising from
the ash, but to use Grossman's terms (with apologies to Camus), something
"human." In Grossman's sensibility of responsibility (despite the absence of
proposed solutions) and in Shammas's use of history
(if
not in his less elegant
attempts to promote a political agenda), we can catch a glimpse of the Israeli
human still to come.
