HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
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is to put a female voice into the literature of Jerusalem. I would actually
like to complicate the Jewish story Michal presented by suggesting that
it is always the detours and the digressions and the deferrals, even in the
master plot, that engage our attention. That is certainly true of the Bib–
lical story and all its elaborations. And I think that even if you take
those instances you mentioned as stepping out of the story, whether it's
Ishmael or Esau or the Holocaust, the erased episode was the way I
think you talked about your mother's story, the way in which, to the
extent that they are erased, they come back to haunt us is at least as
interesting as the way in which they've been erased from the story.
There is another version of the Jewish story, which doesn't only
involve erasures (and here I would bring in Andre's presentation) the
story of exile, or the story of the Diaspora; the story of the culture that
is performed at a distance from the epic story, and from the sacred cen–
ter. Maybe we could say that the story of exile is the story of the tem–
porizer. I don't want
to
paraphrase all his wonderful metaphors, but
Andre said something about his writing not being touched by time. I
would add that it might not be touched by time because of the Promise
Michal has talked about as being part of the epic Jewish story. But it's
not just the Promise, it's the deferral of the Promise that the Jews have
always lived in, in a state of exile, in a diasporic state. I think that's
where the other story happens. They are obviously connected stories,
but they are not the same.
One final comment. I thought it was very illuminating that Michal
referred to what we used to call the Temple Mount, or Ha-Habait, by
its Arab name, Haram AI-Sharif. I think that's already a sign, if I may
add a political statement, of the extent to which Jews who understand
the need
to
share the story have already relinquished a certain amount
of sovereignty over that part of the holy city.
Michal Govrin:
Thank you. I agree that sidetracking and footnotes are
much more important than the main story, but they have this extraor–
dinary dialectical tension between them, so that the most outrageous
departure from the story might find an unexpected prophetic echo in
one of the forgotten folds of the story or of the tradition. This is a huge
quilt, or patchwork, or archaeological site, or if you want, a Talmud
page. The differences are gathered into the changing tableau, where
everything finally sticks back, from the center of the page to the mar–
gins, and back. The Talmud is an extraordinary form of what an
exploded plot might be like. It stands in contrast with the tradition of
