Apples from the Desert. Savyon Liebrecht
“whose eyes flashed daggers at her”; she imagines that they wait for her “with eyes like hidden traps” (99).
5. In the interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea, Liebrecht said that women cope much better than men in situations that are beyond their control, and that a sense of helplessness may lead directly to insanity. Consequently, one expects women to feel compassion—the most important element in the feminist ethos, according to Lugones and Spelman (1987: 235).
6. This difficulty is presented in the stories “Excision” and “Hayuta’s Engagement Party” through the figures of the daughters-in-law. Savyon Liebrecht, in her essay on the Holocaust’s influence on her writing (128), justified her use of these figures as the vehicles for venting aggression toward the survivors; according to her, the children of the victims would never dare utter the words said by the daughters-in-law in the stories. Only those family members who did not grow in the shadow of the Holocaust could do so.
7. An example of the problematic function of Holocaust and Heroism Day in Israeli reality can be found in “Hayuta’s Engagement Party,” in the words of the survivor’s daughter-in-law when she tries to shut him up. “Don’t we have Memorial Day and Holocaust Day and commemorative assemblies and what have you? They never let you forget for a minute. So why do I need to be reminded of it at every meal?” (88)
8. In the article “The Holocaust in Hebrew literature: Trends in Israeli Fiction in the Eighties,” Avner Holtzman writes that he considers Savyon Liebrecht one of the most important writers in this respect (24).
9. Wardi calls children of Holocaust survivors “memorial candles,” underlying their role in preserving the memory of relatives who perished in the war. It is this role that makes the natural separation during adolescence so painful for the parents, resulting in difficulty in individuation for the children. Savyon Liebrecht overcame this difficulty by requesting to work on a kibbutz during her miliary service and, particularly, by going to London to study immediately after her discharge. Her father was angry at her and would not talk to her for a year after she left, even though she was almost twenty at the time.
10. The main characters in “Dreams Lie” and “General Montgomery’s Victory” (published in the collection On Love Stories and Other Endings) are both grandmothers who channel all their efforts and energy to preparing food and nourishing their grandchildren in order to ensure their health and well-being.
11. The most direct descriptions of the Holocaust are found in Liebrecht’s third collection of short Stories, What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him (1992), particularly in the stories “Morning in the Park with the Nannies” and “The Strawberry Girl.” The majority of her stories, however, present echoes that the trauma of the Holocaust left in the survivors’ souls, either through memories or as an ideological position. For example, in the story “Pigeons,” which appeared in Apples from the Desert, the protagonist loses her faith in God as a result of the atrocities she has lived through, and becomes active in a movement fighting religious coercion, claiming that “God went up in smoke in the chimneys of Auschwitz.”
12. In “A Married Woman,” there is a sharp juxtaposition between the story’s title and the opening sentence, which presents the main character as a divorced woman. “Only when the divorce bill lay in her hand did Hannah Rabinsky remove her wedding picture from the wall next to her bed” (73). That photograph is the symbolic expression of a survivor’s yearning to have a family and to live a normal life, and it is more powerful than the legal document, the letter of divorce. It is clear from the events in the story that the title conveys a profound truth; Hannah remains a married woman even though she has divorced her husband. One can see “A Married Woman” as a negative image of S. Y. Agnon’s story “Metamorphosis.” Both stories open with a description of a divorce proceeding, and both allude to a reversal at the end. However, in Liebrecht’s story, “the marriage wasn’t really a marriage and the divorce won’t really be a divorce” (78).
13. A somewhat similar pattern of relationships is portrayed in the story “A Love Story Needs an Ending” (from the collection Love Stories and Other Endings), in which the protagonist, a Holocaust survivor, cheats on his devoted wife. The wife is resigned to her lot, but agonizes over what she regards as the betrayal of her daughter. After the father’s death, the daughter decides to take revenge on one of the women he has loved, whose love affair with her father she witnessed as a child. That affair was a source of anxiety for her, since she feared that her father might be enticed by the bewitching power of love to step outside the family circle, and so she tried to prevent him from leaving by using childish ruses. In this story, the Oedipal elements in the father-daughter relation are prominent, discernible when the mother tells her daughter, “Sometimes I thought that it was not normal, the way you loved him. Perhaps this should not be between father and child, such love.” (Similar elements can be found in subtler form stories such as “What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him.”) Dina Wardi points out that such relationships are not uncommon in families of survivors; the father often turns to the daughter for the fulfillment of emotional needs because of the mother’s precarious mental state, steeped in chronic mourning and depression.
14. Wardi cites research showing that women who suffered during the Holocaust had difficulties functioning emotionally and sexually with their husbands.
15. Unlike Leon Yudkin, who interprets the incident as a failed attempt on the daughter’s part to reconcile her parents to each other (178), I see it as the daughter taking a position with her sensuous father against the mother who denied her sexuality. Moreover, it is a failed attempt to wipe out the stains of the past, symbolically represented by the stains on the bedroom ceiling, which the mother implores the father to blot out. The stains of the past, indelibly lodged in the depth of the mother’s psyche, have left scars on the daughter as well. This is not a story about “lack of communication,” as Yudkin has claimed, but a work describing the insurmountable difficulty of understanding the survivors, who forever feel as if they were speaking Chinese to those around them.
16. Many characters in Liebrecht’s stories suffer from an inability to forge for themselves a unique individual identity, because they bear the brunt of their parents’ past on their shoulders. According to Wardi (40), this difficulty is characteristic of the second generation of survivors, due to the parents’ expectations that their children will stand in for family members who have perished, and also that they will fulfill the aspirations that they themselves were unable to realize because of the war. Thus, the second generation is saddled with the dual task of “pulling a hearse” and of carrying out the “youthful wishes” of the survivors. This heavy burden lies on the shoulders of the protagonist of Liebrecht’s ars poetica story “To Bear the Great Beauty” (published in the collection Apples from the Desert). Even though the mother in the story is not presented as a Holocaust survivor, her severe medical condition and the death of all her immediate relatives in a disaster serve as a “camouflage” in this respect. The mother who suffers from depression, untreated chronic mourning, and an inability to relate even to the people closest to her, is in fact characterized by “survivor’s syndrome,” defined by psychologists as the emotional condition of concentration-camp survivors. (See, for example, W. G. Niderland.) Her son, the protagonist, feels that he has to carry, for her sake, the memory of her dead relatives and, at the same time, write the poems that she herself was unable to produce because of the traumas she has suffered.
17. The protagonist of the story “Reserve Duty,” from the collection Apples from the Desert, is not content with merely wishing for peace and with working diligently and clandestinely to bring it about; he is willing to cross the line that separate the two peoples, to come and live in the Arab village as one of its native sons. This urge to “desert his nation,” to immerse himself in the world of the Other, comes over him at the least expected or appropriate moment: when he enters the village as the commander of an army detail searching for indigenous persons suspected of hostile activity.
It is important to note that Liebrecht is not the first nor the only writer in Hebrew literature to express guilt feelings vis-à-vis the Arab minority in Israel. According to Benjamin Tammuz and Leon Yudkin (16), Hebrew literature has been dealing with these feelings for many years now. The best