Summary
Israeli writer whose novels Doli siṭi (1992, Eng. Dolly City, 1997) and Ḥalaḳim ʾenoshiyyim (2002, Eng. Human Parts, 2003) are, with Sahar Khalifeh’s work, the subject of Chapter 5 of Rhetorics of Belonging (PDF p.24).
Details
- Castel-Bloom is a śafah razah (lean language) writer whose work is expressly anti-epic and often anti-realist, yet is just as concerned with the demand for national narratives as the epic realists (PDF p.19).
- Two of her novels became available in English from smaller presses such as Dalkey Archive, part of the younger generation’s shift from epic social or psychological realism to black comedy and wry surrealism (PDF p.12).
- In Bernard’s account her novels embed critiques of the gender-nationalism nexus in defensive national allegories — dystopian satires of Israeli life after the first intifada and at the beginning of the second — while positioning a Jewish Israel as the framework within which women’s liberation will take place (PDF p.24).
- She is placed, with Amos Oz, among the writers addressing the demand for national allegory more ironically (PDF p.33).
- Chapter 5’s opening (PDF p.123-126) gives Castel-Bloom (born 1960) as the most significant Israeli writer of either gender to emerge in thirty years, the first woman in Hebrew literary history treated ‘as an important Hebrew writer – as opposed to an important female Hebrew writer’ (Hasak-Lowy, 2008, 108n13, quoted PDF p.126); only three of her thirteen Hebrew novels and story collections have appeared in English.
- In Dolly City’s famous scene, Dolly carves a map of Israel, ‘as I remembered it from the Biblical period’, into her adopted infant son’s back (1997, 44, quoted PDF p.123-124); Bernard reads it both as parody of the expectation that Israeli writing be ‘about’ the nation and, taken at its word, as showing women’s agency in transmitting the nation and enforcing its boundaries (PDF p.124-125).
- Castel-Bloom has said she wants to ‘refresh’ Zionism, ‘like the process when you press refresh on the computer’ (Pervos, 2008, para. 10, quoted PDF p.125); Bernard reads the scene as a reformist critique of militarist Zionism, not a rejection of Zionism as such (PDF p.125-126).
- Chapter 5 in full (PDF p.127-136) stresses she is introduced to English audiences by reputation rather than gender or Mizrahi origin, her parents being Francophone Egyptians, and that her postmodern stylistics and explicit use of feminist fiction’s tropes anticipate and mock feminist interpretation while objecting to the myth of Israeli women’s equality (PDF p.129-130); her protagonists’ alienation negatively figures a more egalitarian collectivity of Jewish Israeli women (PDF p.130-131).
- Bernard reads Human Parts — three protagonists across ethnic and class divisions, no Palestinian Israeli character, set in second-intifada Tel Aviv — as satire of the social realist ‘state of siege’ novel rather than a ‘post-post-Zionist’ affirmation of Jewish victimization (Hasak-Lowy, 2008, read against, PDF p.131-133): its protagonists are victimized by Israeli patriarchy, race and class, and its ending suggests Zionism as currently constituted is bad for Jewish Israeli women, while its desired imaginary challenges Zionism’s collective representation without contesting its exclusion of non-Jews (PDF p.134-136).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Sahar Khalifeh, Amos Oz, National allegory