In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (TranslationTransnation) by Gil Z. Hochberg

Author:Gil Z. Hochberg [Hochberg, Gil Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-06-23T20:08:00+00:00

Forbidden Love Letters

Writing in Hebrew, a language Bar-On and many other Israeli-Jews (as clearly revealed by the critics' responses to the novel) assume to be "their own," is presented in Arabesques as an act of unresolved ambiguity. For the narrator it is an experience resulting in both liberating and harming effects. Such duality is best revealed in the exchange of love letters carried on in Hebrew between the narrator and his married Jewish lover, Shlomit.

Sitting by the bed of his dying father at his childhood village in Galilee, Anton writes love letters to Shlomit that are for him the "summit of their passionate love." This exciting exchange is, however, what also brings their love affair to its end. Returning from his hometown to Jerusalem, Anton discovers that Shlomit's husband, an Israeli Army officer, has found the letters, that his love affair has ended, and that "everything went back to normal: Hebrew, Arabic and Death" (83). This dreadful "return" to normality poses Hebrew and Arabic as well as the Jewish and Arab lovers on two opposite sides, separated by death.

Standing by the open window, Anton, consumed with pain, tries to cry for help" but falls victim to his own confusion and silence, "not able to remember the right word, nor in what language he should say it" (85). In the scene immediately following, the narrator is overtaken with the memory of another "confusing event" involving a meeting between the "two worlds": the one conducted in Hebrew and the other in Arabic. Walking peacefully along the streets of Haifa, "happily satisfied with his little-villageworld that he carried in his mind and in his pockets" (86), the narrator is stopped by a car loaded with a noisy group of young Jewish Israelis. The window opens and "a young woman sitting by the driver asks him teasingly in Hebrew: `want to join us at a party?' " Before he even has the chance to answer, the youngsters drive off laughing, leaving Anton confused and humiliated, with an unfulfilled invitation "to the exciting world located behind the fence, a world full of miracles awaiting just around the corner" (86). This memory stays with the narrator, who years later, when meeting Shlomit, tells himself that their love affair, carried on in Hebrew, must be the "pricey fulfillment" of that mocking invitation to the "party he was once promised" (87).=`

But if indeed "everything returns to normal," and if this "normality" is expressed in terms of a reseparation of Hebrew and Arabic, Jews and Arabs, one must note that this dreadful "return" escapes the full separation between the two languages and worlds, for ironically, this "return to normality" also marks Shammas's reentering into the cultural space of modern Hebrew literature. The words "Hebrew, Arabic and Death," are themselves a line borrowed from an early poem by one of the leading modern Hebrew poets, Yehuda Amichai: "A boutique window colored with beautiful women's dresses / in bright blue and white. And everything / in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and Death.

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