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Between Identity and Anonymity: Art and History in Aharon Megged's Foiglman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wis
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Extract

In a recent article, “Israeli Literature Over Time,”Aharon Megged describes his work as “unremittingly concerned with burning national issues,” mainly with the issue of Israel′s relationship to the Diaspora.1 Megged′s intense preoccupation with the Zionist ideology of the negation of the Diaspora emerged in his 1955 story “Yad va-shem” (“The Name”). The story presents a scathing criticism of Israel′s dissociation from the history of the Diaspora and especially from the catastrophe of the Holocaust. “Yad va-shem” was followed by an article entitled “Tarbutenu ha-yeshana ve-ha-hadasha” (“Our Old and New Culture”) in which Megged deplored Israel′s severance of its Diaspora roots and urged a reexamination of the negative attitude toward the destroyed European Jewish culture.In 1984, Megged published Massa ha-yeladim el ha-aretz ha-muvtachat (“The Children's Journey”), a novel based on a true story about a group of young survivors of the Holocaust on their way to Palestine.3 This work, as Dan Laor notes in his review, “offers a perspective of the Diaspora in the Holocaust which differs from [the typical Israeli attitude of] contempt infused with pity” toward the Diaspora Jew.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1995

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References

1. Aharon, Megged, “Israeli Literature Over Time,” Jewish Studies 32 (1992): 36.Google Scholar

2. Aharon, Megged, “Tarbutenu ha-yeshana ve-ha-hadasha,” Massa,Sept. 16,1955.Google Scholar

3. Aharon, Megged, Massa ha-yeladim el ha-aretz ha-muvtachat: Parashat yaldei slavino(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984).Google Scholar

4. Dan Laor, “Megged be-ikvot Brecht” [Megged in Brecht′s footsteps], Ha-Aretz,Nov. 2, 1984.

5. The novel has been reprinted three times, and translated into German and English. A record 30,000 thousand copies have been sold.

6. Hillel, Weiss, “A Continuous Holocaust,” Nekuda 17 (Jan. 5, 1988).Google Scholar

7. Yoffe, A. B., “The Birdman,” Al Ha-Mishmar,April 24, 1988.Google Scholar

8. Ziva, Shamir, “A Yiddish Songbird,” Ha-Aretz,Oct. 23, 987Google Scholar

9. Abraham, Blatt, “Lashon ve-goral” [Language and fate], Ha-Tzofe,Jan. 29, 1988.Google Scholar

10. Abraham, Hagomi, “Le-Yiddish be-ahava” [To Yiddish with love], DavanDec. 4, 1987.Google Scholar

11. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics,trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 224 (emphasis in original).

12. Aharon, Megged, Massa be-av(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1980).Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Aexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose and Fiction(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 65–66.

14. All the quotations from Aharon Megged, Foiglman(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987; reprinted 1987, 1988) are taken from the unpublished translation of the novel into English by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman. Page numbers are from the Hebrew edition of 1988.

15. Aharon Megged, Mahberot Evyatar(Jerusalem: Hakibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1973), p. 66 (my translation).

16. Aharon Megged, Ha-gamal ha-meofef ve-dabbeshet ha-zahav(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984), p. 152 (my translation).

17. Aharon, Megged, Al eytzim ve-avanim(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978), p. 30 (my translation).Google Scholar

18. Gelley, Narrative Crossings,p. 66.Google Scholar

19. Nabokov′s Lolitapresents a similar case. An interpretation of the character of Lolita as a refraction of Humbert Humbert′s psyche outlines a parallel to Foiglman as an embodiment of the repressed, or latent, component of Arbel′s personality.

20. Foiglman serves as a reminder of Jonathan Schell′s observation that genocide can be seen as “the end of civilization [because it signifies] the total disorganization and disruption of human life, breaking the links between mankind′s past and its future” (p. 146). In the post-Holocaust era, as Schell maintains, we face the knowledge which undermines our trust that “our species is biologically immortal” (p. 118). Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth(New York: Avon, 1982).

21. In his discussion of repetition in the classical novel, Edward Said argues that To be novel is to be...a figure not repeating what most men perforce repeat, namely, the course of human life, father to son....The novelistic character is...conceived as a challenge to repetition.“ Edward Said, ”On Repetition,“ in The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute,ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 145.

22. Aharon Megged in interview with Anat Feinberg, Modern Hebrew Literature,Winter 1988, p. 48.

23. Georges Gusdorf,” Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,“ in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical,ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 31

24. Wolfgang, Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose: Fiction from Banyan to Beckett(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 126.Google Scholar