Apples from the Desert. Savyon Liebrecht
women, children.
Particularly noteworthy is her protagonists’ ability to identify with members of the Arab minority in Israel, who suffer discrimination as a corollary of the continuous conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. The Other in this instance is a former enemy, a compatriot of the present adversary.17
Liebrecht tries to play the role of a healer, presenting possibilities for mending the rifts that threaten the existence of Israeli society. Her work describes the healing of breaches between Jews and Arabs, the building of amicable relationships, and the disappearance, at least on a small scale, of the gaps that separate Ashkenazic Jews, who constitute the elite of Israeli society, and Sephardic Jews, the disadvantaged ethnic group. Her stories offer moments of grace that span the gulfs between secular and observant Jews, between old and young. In such moments of grace, the Other is revealed as a complete human being, and a new social integration is created.
The literary paradigm by which Liebrecht constructs this vision of integration is the observation of the Other through the eyes of a representative of the ruling group. This pattern relies on strongly accentuating the motif of the observing eye, and on using the observer’s point of view as a means of effecting a change of attitude toward the object of scrutiny. The pattern comprises two stages that stand in contrast to each other: in the first stage the protagonist sees the Other in the conventional way, that is, as a different, offensive, threatening figure. In the second stage, however, the protagonist comes to realize and appreciate the Other’s unique qualities and thus regards him or her with more compassion. Readers who identify with the protagonist may thus change their own attitudes toward the Other, by seeing the Other through her loving eyes.
This literary pattern recalls Kaja Silverman’s analysis in her book The Threshold of The Visible World, in which she claims that the art form of the cinema can play an important political role in changing spectators’ attitudes toward people whom they have learned to fear or despise. Her argument is that this change may take place when the undesirable people are presented through the loving eyes of the main character in the movie. Silverman’s argument pertains mainly to changes in attitude toward people whose skin color or sexual orientation are different from the spectators’. She maintains that the success of this process depends on repeated presentations in different movies.
A similar pattern emerges in Savyon Liebrecht’s stories, since they emphasize visual elements and are based on intensive mutual observation of characters. Liebrecht’s technique favors a telling of the plot through nonverbal means, a fact that also explains her predilection for screenwriting. Liebrecht herself commented on her nonverbal sensitivity in her interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea, connecting it to the fact that she is a daughter of Holocaust survivors: “Our home was a silent home. In a home of this type, a child learns very early on to observe and absorb clues from nonverbal sources.”
The events in Liebrecht’s story “A Room on the Roof” are conveyed largely through silences and exchanges of looks, since the characters do not really have a common language. The heroine is a young Jewish woman who is asserting her independence by having a room built on the roof of her house, using three Arab construction workers. She does not speak Arabic, and the workers’ Hebrew is broken and limited in vocabulary. The room is built against the wishes of her husband and during his absence, which results in uncommon closeness between the woman and the strange workers who find themselves inside her house.
This unexpected closeness enables the woman to get to know the most threatening Other figure in Israeli Jewish reality, under unusual circumstances. Unlike most Israeli women, who have no contact with Arabs from the occupied territories, the protagonist in this story maintains personal contact, on a daily basis, with the Arab workers in her employ. It is a very complex relationship, conducted against the background of the protracted conflict between the two peoples. Hence the woman’s fear that the Arabs may harm her, and her momentary anxiety about a possible connection between them and some acts of terrorism carried out against the civilian population in her area: “Could these hands, serving coffee, be the ones that planted the booby-trapped doll at the gate of the religious school at the end of the street? Her heart, which had been on guard all the time, began to see something, but it still didn’t know; this was just the beginning, appearing like a figure leaping out of the fog” (49).
Under these conditions, the woman’s decision to hire the Arabs to work inside her house without any male supervision evinces considerable courage. This decision can also be interpreted as a political-feminist protest against the state of affairs between the two nations, for which men are by and large responsible. Thus, the feminist project of building “a room of one’s own” is contingent on cooperation between a woman and Arabs—members of two groups of Others in Israeli society.
An element that contributes to this protest is the love that evolves between this Jewish woman and one of the Arabs, Hassan. It is a hesitant, fragile, and hopeless love, but even in its incipient, germinal existence, it points to another kind of relationship that could exist between the two peoples. The turning point in the relationship between the two main characters in the story is marked by this emergent love and by a change in the balance of power between them. While in the beginning of the story the relationship is that of conqueror and conquered, the turning point enables the characters, now finding themselves on the same level, to experience a measure of reciprocity and a true egalitarian rapport. This turning point comes with the baby’s fall from his cradle and the woman’s subsequent panic; Hassan, who has studied medicine for a couple of years, succeeds in calming down both mother and child, and thereby changes the nature of the relationship.
For the first time, Hassan speaks to the woman “without the forced humility she was familiar with” (54); for the first time he speaks to her in English, not in broken Hebrew. Even his Arabic—the language he uses when he pacifies the baby—sounds different to the woman, lyrical and fascinating. “She heard Hassan talking softly to the baby in Arabic, like a loving father talking to his child in a caressing voice, the words running together in a pleasant flow, containing a supreme beauty, like the words of a poem in an ancient language, which you don’t understand, but which well up inside you” (53–54).
At this point, it becomes apparent that Hassan is an educated, sensitive, and charming man, and he awakens in the woman warm feelings. When she compares Hassan’s gentle treatment of the baby to the cold, distant attitude of the baby’s father, she clearly prefers the stranger to her husband. Liebrecht does not invest Hassan with stereotypical qualities; he does not represent some charicature of Arab virility, but rather full, rounded humanity. The Jewish male, on the other hand, is presented as someone who has paid a heavy price for occupation and domination; he has lost the ability to maintain a viable, flowing relationship with his wife and baby.
Criticism of Israeli male aggressiveness, which supplanted the sensibility and tenderness that marked Jewish men in the past, features also in “The Road to Cedar City,” another story depicting relations between Jews and Arabs. Due to unforeseen circumstances, two families—one Jewish, one Palestinian—find themselves sharing a ride in a van while vacationing in the United States. The Jewish family consists of an older couple and their son, who is about to be drafted into the army. The Arab family consists of a young couple with their baby boy. At the end of the story, the Jewish woman, Hassida, who identifies with the Arab couple and is fascinated by their baby, decides to separate from her alienating husband and son and continue the trip in the company of her new friends.
The friendship between the two women, the Jewish and the Arab, forms almost without words; it is an affinity born out of their shared concern for the baby’s needs and well-being. The two women collaborate in caring for the baby, while the men squabble and bicker about political and military issues. During the ride, the Arab-Israeli conflict is the main topic of conversation, but the women take no part in it. They cannot tolerate the animosity between the two families and want to put a stop to it. Both women see themselves as entrusted with the task of preserving life, and they derive pleasure from taking care of the helpless baby.
Hassida’s decision to leave her husband and son results from their cruel and derisive treatment of her. The two men make fun of her sentimentality, mock her poor sense of direction, and scoff at her depressions, induced by menopause and by being cut off from