Apples from the Desert. Savyon Liebrecht
traumatic separation from family and friends and the inability of the victims to protect the lives of their loved ones left deep scars on their psyches. Following the liberation from the camps, when they found out that their relatives had perished, their congregations had been annihilated, and the world they had known no longer existed, survivors were overcome by unbearable feelings of guilt, extreme loneliness, and total emptiness.
Consequently, the need to start a new family became the most compelling drive in their lives. However, the expectations the survivors had of the new family were partially thwarted, since the conditions of its creation were greatly inadequate; for the most part, couples got married in a hurry, while still in a state of shock and suffering from confusion and disintegration. Due to these circumstances, in addition to the scars left from having lived in the shadow of death, many of these new unions failed to provide the yearned-for solace and intimacy, and the wish for warmth and loving kindness went unanswered. The story “A Married Woman” presents the relationship between a husband and wife, who met by chance while looking for their lost relatives, as based on pity and desperation more than on love: “Tremendous compassion and loving kindness impelled her to touch his back gently, to quell in him the overpowering sense of despair. Then he suddenly turned back and his laughing mouth asked, ‘Shall we get married?’” (75). The couple’s daughter suffers from this compromised relationship, since neither of her parents can nourish her emotionally. “She was only eighteen, but her face was the face of a weary, miserable person” (74).
Children of survivors, born into these conditions, were particularly vulnerable. In her essay on the impact of the Holocaust on her work (128), Savyon Liebrecht claims that, in some respects, children of survivors had an even harder time than their parents. She herself was born to devastated parents who had lost everything, including their language and their culture. The inability to rebel against such parents, so as not to hurt those who had already known so much suffering, created an additional burden with which the children of survivors had to contend. Dina Wardi describes the role of children in these families: they were perceived as replacements and compensation for the relatives who had perished, and they became the central preoccupation of the parents’ lives—a state of affairs that made it difficult for the children to develop discrete, individual personalities.9
Despite the parents’ attempts to provide their children with everything and to shield them from pain, all children of the second generation knew pain and suffering. Most of the victims’ families lived in an atmosphere of dejection, anxiety, and worry, viewing their immediate environment with fear and suspicion (easily understood, in view of their past). Concern for the continued existence of the family was of the highest priority for survivors, many of whom were almost obsessively preoccupied with physical survival.10 Self-preservation and personal security were the only meaningful causes in those families. Personal happiness and creative expressions of individuality were, by and large, discounted and ignored.
This kind of troubled psychological existence pervades most of Savyon Liebrecht’s stories, not only those that directly or indirectly deal with the Holocaust.11 Her focus on the family cannot be explained simply by the central position the family occupies in Jewish tradition and Israeli society, as Atmon and Izraeli demonstrated (2); its centrality in her work must be accounted for by the experience of the second generation of the Holocaust. Liebrecht has written very little about childhood, youth, and love, and her characters are hardly ever presented as solitary figures or as couples. The family, on the other hand, is the typical arena where events take place in her stories, and it is always minutely detailed and highly charged. In “The Homesick Scientist,” for instance, the story of the relationship between the elderly uncle who has lost his son and the nephew who fills the void in the uncle’s life overshadows the intricate love story and relegates it to a secondary position. The love of the uncle and his nephew for the same girl, whom neither of them gets in the end, becomes ancillary to the unique father-son relationship that develops between the older man and the boy.
When characters in Liebrecht’s stories find themselves in a conflict, torn between family and another concern, they always prefer the family connection. This is particularly evident in the story “A Married Woman,” which explores the concealed reasons behind the powerful familial connection; not even the legal procedure of divorce can destroy the family ties.12 The woman in the story continues to care for the man she divorced under pressure from their daughter, even though he has cheated on her with other women countless times and has spent her money on drinking and gambling. The fatal connection between them, which nothing can undo or annul, is the result of their common loss of everything they had before the Holocaust. The wife is aware of this terrible truth; there is an affinity between them that cannot be repudiated, and so the relationship is maintained even though it inflicts pain on her, because her husband is all she has left that connects her to her previous life.13
In the story “Mother’s Photo Album,” the father does leave his wife and son, but it is in order to be reunited with his first wife who, unbeknownst to him, had survived the war. This is an exception that proves the rule: only previous familial ties—not love or passion, as in an affair—can supplant later familial ties. The mental illness that consequently afflicts the abandoned woman in “Mother’s Photo Album” testifies to the fact that the family served the survivors as an essential existential anchor, even when it did not satisfy many of their emotional needs.
Liebrecht’s stories underline the inability of a mother to bestow love on her children because she herself has been emotionally deprived by her equally damaged husband. Yearnings for a mother’s love, which the characters never received as children, are quite common in Liebrecht stories. In “What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him,” the protagonist bears her mother a grudge for “the gratuitous bitterness she has injected into her life, for the poison she had accumulated in her heart over all those years, letting it fester and bubble like molten lava, locking her heart even against rare moments of sweetness” (163). Although the daughter is aware of the atrocities her mother lived through during the war, she does not understand how that trauma affected her mother’s sexuality.14
The protagonist, who never dared rebel against her mother when the latter was alive for fear that she would add to her pain and suffering, now, after the mother’s death, tries to divest herself of the depressing heritage that was bequeathed to her. She has sex with a total stranger—the real estate agent who, at her request, takes her to her parents’ old apartment, which is now for sale—in order to take revenge on her mother. In an act symbolizing her separate individuality, she makes love to the man in the exact spot where she used to hear her mother rebuff her father’s advances. This hasty, meaningless sexual encounter marks the differentiation between the daughter, who enjoys her sensuality, and the mother, who denied her physical urges. The daughter wants to prove to herself that she is capable of enjoying sex even without emotional ties, and so she seduces a stranger and makes love to him in the empty apartment, on an expensive fur coat given to her by her husband on their anniversary.15
Only after this act of rebellion can the woman begin to think about her mother with some understanding and ponder the reasons why her mother could not enjoy her own body and what lingering effects this hostility toward physical pleasure had on her. The daughter’s plea to her mother is a combination of sorrow and helpless rage: “I wonder why you never accepted the consolation of the body, why you never taught me this great conciliatory gift, this immeasurable pleasure, and I had to learn all this by myself, as if I were a pioneer” (167). Only in this extreme situation is the daughter capable of separating from her mother and father to become an individual person—although it is doubtful that this symbolic rebellion is sufficient to relieve her of the heavy burden left by her family.16
THROUGH LOVING EYES
Psychological studies examining the impact of the Holocaust on survivors’ children have demonstrated that many of them are marked by unusual sensitivity to other people’s suffering. The explanation, according to Wardi (106), is the high level of empathy these children have for their parents’ anguish. Their sense of justice regarding civil rights and the rights of minorities, disadvantaged, and deviant individuals in society is remarkably strong. Liebrecht’s identification with the victim is demonstrated in various social situations throughout her work.