Literature at work: Zionist literary realism between utopia and “Khirbet Khizeh”

ABSTRACT

Zionist Hebrew literary realism from the 1920s and 1930s is usually considered to be nothing but propagandistic literature, working in the service of national ideological imperatives. Challenging this literary-historical narrative, this essay argues that Zionist realist writers attempted to imagine radical collective transformation, which cannot be reduced to (and was at times at odds with) the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. Emphasizing the formal similarities between Zionist realism and the structure of utopian novels, the essay suggests that the realists did not simply celebrate a Zionist metanarrative. Rather, realist works by Ever Hadani and Yisrael Zarchi thematize in a variety of ways the contradiction between emancipatory goals and the everyday realities of workers. The essay argues that S. Yizhar’s “Khirbet Khizeh” should be read as expressing the crisis of the collective transformative project that animated the realists’ literary imaginary. In this sense, Yizhar’s novella signals the foreclosure of transformative possibilities in the late 1940s.

KEYWORDS:

• Realism
• Zionism
• utopia
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Oded Nir recently received his PhD from the department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. In his dissertation, he interrogates the figurations of collectivity in Zionist and Israeli literature, focusing on utopian literature, war novels, and detective stories. He currently teaches courses on Israeli literature and film, speculative fiction, and critical theory.

Notes

1. For Lukács, the important aesthetic feature of realism was not verisimilitude but the narrative mediation of surface aesthetic antagonisms onto a deeper, hidden, social totality (Lukács 1977, 28–33). In this definition, speculative elements are mapped onto particular class positions within the totality, and are given the role of expressing these positions within the social whole. Since, as we will see, the speculative vision in Zionist realism from the 1920s and 1930s is shared by the narrator and multiple characters, this definition becomes insufficient in analysing this corpus of writing.

2. See for example Dror Mishani’s reproduction of Shaked’s distinction between the “generists” and the “anti-generists” in Mishani’s own discussion of the national-allegorical dimension of Yehoshua Kenaz’s Infiltration (Mishani 2006, 58–59).

3. In addition to Zait’s analysis, see, for example, Bernstein (2000) and Gozansky (1986) on the practices of the General Federation of Labour in preventing Jewish-Arab cooperation. Shafir (1987) argues that the success of Zionist enterprise as a whole depended on the exclusion of Arab Palestinian labour.

4. For a detailed description of Yizhar’s relation to the halutzic Imaginary, see Shapira (2000, 6–7).

5. The military actions against Palestinians were not themselves at all repressed, but rather a hot political topic during the war. A famous example of their appearance in literary production is Nathan Alterman’s poem, “On That.” For a more detailed survey, see Laor’s detailed analysis (1995, 115–131).