Visions of Jewish Modernism

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Note on Transliteration and Translation xv Introduction: The No-Man's-Land of Language 1 PART I. HISTORICAL VISIONS AND ELISIONS Chapter 1. From the "Hebrew Bedouin" to "Israeli Arabic": Arabic, Hebrew, and the Creation of Israeli Culture 21 Chapter 2. Bialik and the Sephardim: The Ethnic Encoding of Modern Hebrew Literature 60 PART II. BILINGUAL ENTANGLEMENTS Chapter 3. Exchanging Words: Arabic Writing in Israel and the Poetics of Misunderstanding 105 Chapter 4. Palestinian Midrash: Toward a Postnational Poetics of Hebrew Verse 141 PART III. AFTERLIVES OF LANGUAGE Chapter 5. "Along Came the Knife of Hebrew and Cut Us in Two": Language in Mizrahi Fiction, 1964-2010 189 Chapter 6. "So You Won't Understand a Word": Secret Languages, Pseudo-languages, and the Presence of Absence 238 Conclusion. Bloody Hope: The Intertextual Afterword of Salman Masalha and Saul Tchernichowsky 285 Bibliography 299 Index 329

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

............................................................................................................... ii Dedication .................................................................................iv Acknowledgments................................................................................................v Vita......................................................................................................................vi Chapters:

Tradition and politics: new year festivals in Turkey

Since its establishment in 1998, NATAL, “The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War,” has been propagating the notion of national trauma as a comprehensive category of suffering related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Against the shifting perceptions of PTSD in Israel, we explore recent undertakings of NATAL's experts to naturalize trauma among “pre-clinical” populations of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) veterans. The experts’ attempts to de-politicize the suffering of the veterans are constrained by the fact that in their clinical ideology, the apolitical language of the therapeutic is aligned with a somber national pathos that strikes a collective cord of common Jewish fate and identity. This alignment may account for the Israeli public's acceptance of NATAL's agenda, despite its subversive connotations.

From PTSD to “national trauma”: The case of the Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War

! Masud Khan was one of the most controversial psychoanalysts of the post-war period. This thesis argues that modernist literature and culture are central to Khan’s conception and realisation of his psychoanalytic work in Britain from the late nineteen forties onwards. His lifelong engagement with modernist art and writing also shapes Khan’s vision of himself as a ‘self-exile’, and provides the framework for his own imagining of contemporary political life in Europe, Pakistan, and Britain. His psychoanalytic work, thoroughly shaped by the writing of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and the painting of the cubists, is a complex response to his own sense of his postcolonial modernity, and the rapid social and political changes of the period. By taking Khan as a case study this project explores the intersection of modernist writing and the end of Empire, especially concerning questions of cosmopolitanism, exile, race, and the politics of modernism. It aims to enrich our sense of the history modernism by exploration of this highly idiosyncratic figure. The explicitly modernist bent of Khan’s writing also opens up new readings of his psychoanalytic contemporaries Donald Winnicott, Michael Balint, and Marion Milner that highlight the continuity of their writings with many aspects of modernist culture.! ! More specifically, the study examines the shaping effect of specific ideas and themes in modernist writing on Khan’s conception of subjectivity, whilst also reflecting on the meaning of these translations of cultural life into psychoanalytic theory. Explored are: Joyce’s articulations of ‘epiphany’ and exile, as well as his writing on race and Jewishness; T.S. Eliot’s concept of ‘tradition’ and his writing on culture and community, especially as it allows Khan to imagine his own ‘feudal’ past and ethnic distinctiveness in postwar London; and the painting of Georges Braque and Joan Miró in Khan’s figuration of new and radical forms of self-experience in psychic life. ! !

Modernism and the Making of Masud Khan.

The Politics of Canonicity sheds new light on the dynamics of canon formation in modern Hebrew literature. It explores the ways in which literary culture-as site and as tool-participates in the production of national identity. The aesthetic paradigms, political ideologies, and social interests that privilege certain texts and literary modes are reexamined within the framework of the conscious and deliberate practices of Zionism to formulate a national discourse. As the author shows, the suppressed, the marginal, the undesired "others" of the nation demonstrate the limits of both the literary canon and society's own self-understanding. The book combines the specific questions of Hebrew literature with a critical inquiry of the theoretical debates surrounding the notion of canon. It begins by examining the formative debate in both Hebrew letters and European discourses of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century which address the tension between writing the nation and writing the self. It moves on to the equally constitutive question within Jewish nationalism of the relation between diaspora and homeland in literary writing. While international modernism tends to glorify exile, Hebrew modernism demonstrated a fierce antagonism toward a "diaspora mentality." In his analysis of the suppressed margins of the Hebrew literary canon, the author outlines the specific aesthetic fault lines of the new national community. In chapters devoted to the poets David Fogel and Avot Yeshurun, and the poetics of a feminine voice in Rachel Bluvstein, Esther Raab, and Anda Pinkerfeld, he analyzes the historical tensions between margin and canon, highlighting the ways in which these marginalized poets were able to speak within a discursive system that suppressed their voices. We are grateful for support from the Koret Jewish Studies Publication Program.

Michael Gluzman

Papers

The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry