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ABSTRACT
This article offers a comparative reading of stories by Amos Oz and Sherwood Anderson to propose “smallness” – evoked by genre, setting, and literary devices – as a vital literary strategy structuring Oz’s works. Manifestations of smallness, fundamental to the twentieth-century American literary imagination, are indispensable in Oz’s stories. Paradoxically, both Oz’s literary modernism and his status as a “world author” can only be understood in the context of the small, the provincial, and the local that Anderson elevated to the status of great literature, suggesting that not only European literature but also (non-Jewish) American writing has influenced Hebrew literature
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. “Amos Oz,” Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.
2. This is a key idea undergirding Damrosch’s seminal study. Noting that world literature encompasses “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language,” he specifies that “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (What is World Literature, 4).
3. See Holtzman, for example, on Oz’s position as Berdyczewski’s “most prominent heir” (“Strange Fire,” 145). Other examples of scholarship comparing Oz to European authors (Hebrew and non-Hebrew) include: Aschkenasy, “Women and the Double”; Ginzburg, “Madame Bovary”; Shaham, “El ha-yeled ha-zeh hitpalalti?”; Govrin, “Ha-mishpaha ha-sifrutit.” Asked about his influences in an interview printed in Voices of Israel, Oz lists the Hebrew writers Berdyczewski, Brenner, and S. Y. Agnon and the Russian writers Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He relegates American literature to a third tier that includes Herman Melville and Sherwood Anderson.
4. Despite Oz’s status in Israel as a highly regarded bestselling author, critics have pointed out for decades the disjuncture between the idea of Oz as the cultural representative of Israel, on one hand, and the limited scope of Israeliness typical of his works, on the other. Oz is more concerned with men and masculinity than with women; with European Jews than with Mizrahim or Palestinian Israelis; with the kibbutz and Israel’s “salt of the earth” than with the far more numerous populations in cities or development towns. As such, some consider Oz to have perpetuated a romanticized portrait of Israel that, by excluding or stereotyping certain people, parallels their marginalization by Israel more broadly. Relatedly, critics reading Oz in a postcolonial vein have taken him to task for his consistent commitment to a Zionism they equate with colonialism. On women in Oz’s works, see: Abramovich, “Woman-Centered Examination” and “Sexual Objectification”; Aschkenasy, “Women and the Double”; Ben-Dov, “Amos Oz’s Artistic Credo”; Gertz, “Amos Oz and Izhak Ben Ner”; Fuchs, “Amos Oz’s Treacherous Helpmate” and “Beast Within”; Wheatley, “It is the Hunter”; Zilberman, “Zehut nashit be-tokh zehut gavrit.” On “others” in Oz’s works, see: Loshitzky, “From Orientalist Discourse”; Khoury, “Rethinking the Nakba”; Amende, “Man with Such an Appearance”; Shimony, “Mizrahi Body.” For a postcolonial critique, see: Laor, “Sipur al ahava ve-hoshekh” and “Hayey ha-min shel kohot ha-bitahon”; and Piterberg, “Literature of Settler Societies.”
5. Wai Chee Dimock argues for a reclassification of world literature on the basis of genre, proposing epic poetry and the novel as “the durable threads that bind together the entire species [of world literature]” (“Genre as World-System,” 90). For a compelling theorization of a “modern epic” as a “supercanonical” world text, see Franco Moretti, Modern Epic, 4.
6. It’s worth noting that Eran Kaplan and others have commented on Love and Darkness as a text that casts Oz and his family in a minor light; though he integrates his family’s narrative into the larger story of Israel, he represents his parents as marginalized because of their diasporic proclivities and his father’s right-leaning politics. Long before the publication of Love and Darkness, Hanan Hever identifies a similar tendency already in the early story “Nomad and Viper,” which he proposes as an exemplar of “minority discourse of a national majority” (Hever, “Minority Discourse”).
7. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, 23.
8. This claim differs substantively from those advanced by other studies addressing the interaction between Hebrew and American literature and culture, which are concerned primarily with encounters and representations that are historically or biographically motivated. Thus, for example, Alan Mintz and Michael Weingrad have published on Hebrew writing in America; Mintz has also explored the translation and reception of Hebrew literature in the U.S.; Andrew Furman has examined American-Jewish literary representations of Israel; Emily Miller Budick has made a case for comparative readings of Israeli and American-Jewish literatures. In 1997, a special issue of Shofar titled “Israel and America: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Literary Imagination” focused on literature as a “point of contact or exchange for Israeli and American Jews” (Sokoloff, “Israel and America,” 3). The articles included consider literary depictions of the American-Jewish understanding of Israel, Anglophone Israeli literature, Orthodox Jewish literature in Israel and America, the presence of American popular culture in Israel, and American-Jewish struggles with identity in Israel. While these studies and others offer important insights regarding Hebrew/American literary relations, I posit that considering the role of American literature beyond Jewish texts and contexts can enrich our understanding of the development of Hebrew literature.
9. Oz, Love and Darkness, 487. All citations from Oz’s works are from the English translations.
10. Ibid., 489.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 491.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 493.
15. Ibid.
16. In 1911, the Hebrew author Yosef Haim Brenner wrote what would become a highly influential essay, “Ha-zhaner ha-eretzisraeli ve-avizarehu” [The Land of Israel Genre and Its Devices]. Brenner acknowledges a link between the setting and subject of Hebrew literature produced in Ottoman Palestine at that time, and observes different modes of engagement and representation with it. Critiquing what he terms the “Land of Israel Genre” as a narrow reflection of nationalist ideology, he distinguishes between such works and an “anti-Genre” poetics that brings the local and the universal into fruitful, complex dialogue.
17. Oz, Love and Darkness, 493.
18. Crowley, “Introduction,” 8.
19. Ibid., 9.
20. Lauck, From Warm Center, 12.
21. Ibid.
22. Since Van Doren deemed a positive regard for the local as incompatible with modernism, he interpreted the localism of Anderson and other authors as a repudiation of provincialism. Others, however, who understood the nexus of the local and modernism differently, developed a vibrant discourse on the subject in the U.S. at around the same time that Van Doren published his essay. Associated with figures such as the philosopher John Dewey and the poet William Carlos Williams, this discourse emphasized the significance of the local in American modernist art and literature as far more than a counterpoint for modernist cosmopolitanism; indeed, the local was conceptualized as the ground of modernism itself. “Williams,” notes Eric B. White, “consistently viewed the local as a dynamic crucible of modern experience. In this sense, Williams’s investment in local culture was essential to his literary modernism, not a paradoxical quirk of it” (William Carlos Williams, 8). White makes clear, though, that Williams’s localism, defined partly by interaction with artistic forces abroad, partook in a broader transcontinental circulation and exchange of ideas.
23. Lauck, From Warm Center, 13.
24. Ibid., 14.
25. Ibid., 15.
26. Lauck argues that Anderson understood “how his work had been misused… and explained that his goal was to explore the inner life of the Midwest, not to attack the region” (From Warm Center, 28). Like many of his Midwestern contemporaries, Anderson was concerned “about the detachment from place, the growing rootlessness in the nation, the rise of technology,” and other developments; the small town, despite its flaws, signified a crumbling bulwark against this transition (Ibid., 27).
27. Lauck’s highly visible and much discussed book, From Warm Center to Ragged Edge, has been called a “manifesto” for its efforts to recuperate Anderson and other authors specifically from the revolt thesis (Kern, Review, 80). Numerous other scholars reject the revolt thesis implicitly or bypass it altogether, offering innovative theoretical approaches to Anderson that revise prevalent perspectives. Among recent examples, see: Colton, “Metafiction”; Oler, “Shadowy Figure”; Yerkes, “Strange Fevers.”
28. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, xxi.
29. Ibid., 2.
30. Much of Oz’s fiction, including not only short stories but also novels, is set in small places. Makom aher (Elsewhere, Perhaps, 1966) and Menuha nekhona (A Perfect Peace, 1982) take place on a kibbutz; Al tagidi laila (Don’t Call It Night, 1994) is set in a small development town in the desert; Pit’om be-omek ha-ya’ar (Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, 2005) takes place in a small village.
31. Mann, Short Story Cycle, 15.
32. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles, 13.
33. Lundén, United Stories of America, 123.
34. See Nagel, Contemporary American; see also Dunne and Morris, The Composite Novel. For more on the related-tale format, see: Luscher, “Short Story Sequence”; Mann, Short Story Cycle; Pacht, Subversive Storyteller; Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles; Lundén, United Stories of America; and Kennedy, “From Anderson’s Winesburg.”
35. Crowley, “Introduction,” 14–15.
36. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, xxiv.
37. Ibid.
38. Oz, Love and Darkness, 491.
39. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, xx.
40. Pacht, Subversive Storyteller, 1.
41. Kennedy, “From Anderson’s Winesburg,” 195.
42. Pacht, Subversive Storyteller, 3.
43. Citing an event held at Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek in honor of Where the Jackals Howl, Holtzman notes “the surprise and indignation that members of the kibbutzim felt in response to the book.” He elaborates on the sentiment expressed by Ya’akov Hazan, the leader of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir and Mapam, that the book failed to offer “a positive or at least a balanced portrayal of kibbutz life” and indeed had “distorted” its reality (“Strange Fire,” 149).
44. Oz concludes a 1968 essay on the kibbutz by proclaiming: “it is the least bad place I have ever seen. And the most daring effort” (“Thoughts on the Kibbutz,” 124).
45. Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz, 70. Studies on the kibbutz in Hebrew culture abound. See, for example: Gertz, “With the Face to the Future”; Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz; Milner, “Agitated Orders”; Keshet, “Kibbutz Fiction and Yishuv Society”; Halamish and Zameret, Ha-kibutz.
46. In Place and Ideology, I show that spatiality in Oz’s novels illuminates the concept of “Zionist places,” defined as “spaces that have been constructed or designed in the service of Zionist ideology” (Grumberg, Place and Ideology, 26).
47. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, 17. This observation confirms what Oz has said about the literary benefits of small places. “People sometimes ask me… if Hulda isn’t too small for me,” he has recounted. “Here I know a very large number of people, about three hundred. I know them at close range…. If I lived in London, Tel Aviv, Paris, I could never get to know three hundred people so intimately” (Oz, “Kibbutz at the Present,” 127–28).
48. Lindsay, Such a Rare Thing, xxiii.
49. Kennedy, “From Anderson’s Winesburg,” 196.
50. Anderson, Winesburg, 21.
51. Ibid., 22.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 24.
55. Dunne, New Book, 1.
56. Ibid., 2.
57. Schevill, “Notes on the Grotesque,” 231.
58. Ibid.
59. Trevitte, “Fate of Storytelling,” 70.
60. Oz, Scenes from Village Life, 166.
61. Anderson, Winesburg, 24.
62. Oz, Scenes from Village Life, 86.
63. Ibid., 177.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 177–78.
67. Ibid., 179.
68. Ibid., 180–81.
69. Kennedy, “From Anderson’s Winesburg,” 195.
70. Ibid., 182.
71. Anderson, Winesburg, 23–24.
72. Dunne, New Book, 43.
73. Trevitte, “Fate of Storytelling,” 58–59.
74. Ibid., 68–69.
75. Schevill, “Notes on the Grotesque,” 232.
76. Howe, “Book of the Grotesque,” 200.
77. Ibid., 201.
78. Yingling, “Winesburg, Ohio,” 111.
79. Anderson, Winesburg, 28.
80. Ibid., 29.
81. Ibid., 31, 32.
82. Ibid., 32.
83. Ibid., 67.
84. Ibid., 69.
85. Ibid., 81, 98.
86. Ibid., 34.
87. Oz, Scenes from Village Life, 42.
88. Ibid., 49.
89. Ibid., 70.
90. Oz, Between Friends, 3.
91. Ibid., 9.
92. Ibid., 13.
93. Ibid., 159.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., 157.
96. Ibid., 166.
97. Ibid., 178.
98. Ibid.
99. Nurith Gertz writes that in Between Friends “Oz aims to link traces of the past with the possibility of new, ethical, and humane relationships” (“With the Face to the Future,” 95). She compares Oz’s depiction of the kibbutz in that collection to Benjamin’s Angelus Novus: it moves “towards the future” even as his gaze remains fixed on “the debris of the past” (Ibid., 94).
100. Oz, “Kibbutz at the Present,” 128.
101. See note 8 above.
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Notes on contributors
Karen Grumberg
Karen Grumberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2011) and of Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution (Indiana University Press, 2019). Her articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Prooftexts, and other journals.