Mothers of Soldiers in Israeli Literature: The Return of the Politically Repressed

y 333

PROOFTEXTS 33 (2013): 333–364. Copyright © 2013 by Prooftexts Ltd..

Mothers of Soldiers in Israeli Literature: The Return of the Politically Repressed

D A N A O L M E R T

This article discusses the role of mothers of soldiers in Israeli literature of the past decennia. The canonical Israeli literature between the 1940s and the 1990s teems with figures of fighters and soldiers, alive and dead, combatants and noncomba-tants, but in only very rare cases does it actively feature mothers. In the great majority of these sporadic cases, these are, moreover, bereaved mothers. Though ostensibly bereavement would appear to underscore the conflict between loyalty to the national ethos and to the family, most of the mothers who appear in this literature do not bear this out and tend, unquestioningly, to fall in with the dominant national ideology. The canonical Israeli literature, that is, fails to exploit its potential fictional freedom to propose alternative narratives to those provided by the ideologically engaged national culture. From the early 1990s, however, the role of the soldier’s mother in Israeli literature starts to change. Inspired by the active part taken by Israeli women in the public struggle against the first Lebanon war and against Israel ’s military occupation of Palestinian territories, a new character enters the literary stage: the mother who refuses to accept the conventional gender roles and questions the validity, good faith, and moral superiority of the national ideological discourse. In these works—by Orly Castel Bloom, Yehudit Hendel, David Grossman, Sammy Bardugo and others—motherhood takes a more central role and is treated with more complexity and ambivalence. The first part of this article is dedicated to a description of the national norm of motherhood and the way it evolved, from a psychoanalytical and historical perspective and in relation to other cultural models of soldiers’ mothers. The second part offers a critical description of the sphere of action set aside for mothers of soldiers in post-independence Israeli literature. Here the question arises what mothers of soldiers in Israeli literature between the 1940s and 1990s “were allowed” to think, feel, and do, and what they were “ forbidden” to think, feel, and do. The final part offers a reading of Orly Castel Bloom’s novel Dolly City. Here the argument is that Dolly constitutes the most critical mother of the national ethos this literature hitherto evolved. The focus of this discussion is on the interrelations between Dolly and the sphere in which she acts, Dolly City—relations that on the face of it are marked by continuity and containment. The argument of this article is that Dolly’s inclusion in the Dolly City—an inclusion reflected in the name of the city—is a parodic and challenging gesture aimed toward a continuity typical of the

334 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

relations in Israel ’s national domain between the mothers of soldiers—or of soldiers-to-be—and the state. The interpretive move that concludes the article suggests reading Dolly City’s drama of motherhood in light of the elusive and deceptive mechanism of continuity between mothers and the nation.

There is a place inside me which is totally anarchic; that’s the place of motherhood. There are moments when I don’t care about the country, because these are my children and that’s all I care about. That sound, which I think is known to all mothers, is always anarchic and always clashes with notions of loyalty to one’s country. And that’s the voice the state wants to subdue.—Ronit Matalon1

Then we didn’t know yetThe occupation would be forever—Dalia Fallah2

Even though the canonical Israeli literature written between the 1940s and the 1990s is populated by a great number of fighters and soldiers, alive and dead, only a few of them have mothers who take an active role in the narratives.

Almost all the mothers mentioned in these works are bereaved—including the mother in Moshe Shamir’s novel Hu halakh basadot (He Walked through the Fields; 1947; quoted from the 1957 edition), the mother in Mordechai Tabib’s play Kinoro shel Yossi (Yossi’s Fiddle; 1949), or the mothers in Yehoshua Bar-Yosef ’s story “Ha-em” (The Mother; 1950) and Yigal Mossinson’s “Corporal Sonnenberg” (1954). These mothers do not question the ideology that sends their sons to war and into their deaths. The literature written after the 1990s, however, challenges the decency, sincerity, and superiority of the national ideological discourse; moth-erhood, here, seen from a more complex and ambivalent perspective, acquires a more central role.3 Among literary works that put mothers of soldiers at their center, Orly Castel Bloom’s Dolly City (1992) stands out due to its stringent criti-cism of the national ethos. Dolly, the protagonist of the novel, tries to expose the mechanisms that generate the ethos and to undermine their smooth working.

In what sense does Castel Bloom’s protagonist depart from the conventional representation of the soldier’s mother in Israeli literature? Which roles—maternal

Mothers of Soldiers in Israeli Literature y 335

Winter 2013

and anti-maternal—does Castel Bloom impart on her protagonist, Dolly? How, through her searching eye, is the Israeli national ideology featured? To approach these questions, I would like first to discuss the “conventional representation,” the social and cultural expectations, implicit and explicit, in relation to which the ideal model of the soldier’s mother, in national terms, was molded, starting with the years of struggle around the establishment of the state, until the 1990s. This anal-ysis will form the first part of this essay. I will examine the national norm of moth-erhood in its historical and theoretical context as well as in relation to models of soldiers’ mothers in other cultures. In the second part, I describe and engage criti-cally with the question of what soldiers’ mothers in Israeli prose between the 1940s and the 1990s were “allowed” and “not allowed” to think, to feel, and to do. The final part will propose a reading of Dolly City that sheds light on its linking of poetic radicalism with political—gender and national—radicalism, in the context of the drama of motherhood.

T H E F L U I D I T Y O F M A T E R N A L I D E N T I T Y : A H I S T O R I C A L P E R S P E C T I V E

A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S

Though there is no complete overlap between women and mothers (not all women are mothers) and between men and soldiers (not all men are soldiers), “mothers” and “soldiers” constitute two generalized identities that, in the context of modern national culture, form the very crux of gender—female and male—supporting the social distribution of roles. Nancy Huston put it succinctly when she wrote that girls learn that they become truly women only when they enter motherhood; boys, by contrast, learn that they will turn into men only through war.4 In the prevailing stereotype, that is, mothers represent a kind of femininity taken to its condensed extreme: the role of the mother in the national order is to give birth to sons and to raise them, and she personifies women’s imputed tendency to exist through the other and by caring for him, to take positions identified with weakness and impo-tence, and to require male guardianship. Soldiers, by contrast, represent the far end of the male stereotype: they exhibit a tendency to use force, and have a strong appreciation for hierarchy and loathe any behavior that reeks of softness—seen, hence, as feminine—together with a willingness for self-sacrifice.5

336 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

There are, nevertheless, marked differences among patterns or ideals of mother-hood, depending on historical period and cultural context, indicating the fluidity of “motherhood” as an identity category and the implication of any given normative mode of motherhood in social and political arrangements. In ancient Sparta, for instance, women were trained from birth to be mothers and to raise physically and psychologically strong sons who would then serve as soldiers for the best part of their adult lives. It was the Spartan mother’s role to instill patriotism and to encourage her sons to show their willingness to sacrifice themselves.6 For French mothers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, it was extremely rare to actively raise infants and children below age seven. Elizabeth Badinter, who studied the social expectations of mothers in France during this period, argues that motherly love was not considered a self-evident or natural phenomenon, nor did it imply any particular social or moral standing.7 The assumption that mothers are driven by a natural, primal, or—as Matalon writes--an “anarchic” impulse to look after the health and well-being of their children and to protect them at any cost, because their motherly love takes precedence over, and is distinct from, any other social imperative, does not stand up to the test of history.

Freud, always successful at conferring the appearance of universal law on the cultural dictates directed at women, used scientific terminology to formulate author-itatively the rationale by which modern Western culture deposited the moral respon-sibility for their offsprings’ physical, and mainly their psychic, well-being with mothers. Yet even he claimed that motherhood, rather than a primary instinct, is one possible response—the healthy response, he believed—that women may have to their anatomical inferiority. Women’s wish to become mothers is entailed, for Freud, by their need to compensate for being castrated. Freud further stated that the love of a mother for her son is the most perfect form of love, because only in this way can the mother fully make up for her inborn anatomical inferiority.8 In Freud’s way of thinking, the mother’s love for her son is the result of an intense yearning for her own pre-oedipal phase, when she was unconscious of her castration, did not experi-ence herself as castrated, and therefore did not yet suffer from penis envy.9 The mother’s love of her male child, therefore, is inseparably bound up with the fact that the son is a symbolic representation of her own lost masculinity. Freud’s explanation further implies mothers’ unwillingness to acknowledge their separateness from their


Winter 2013

sons. This is also why the separation between mothers and sons is eventually achieved by the latter when they realize that the mother is castrated and then use this dramatic discovery to detach themselves from her, by evolving “triumphant contempt.”10

Freud’s and his followers’ wish for scientific recognition had the effect of blinding the traditional psychoanalytic discourse to the active role played by social constructions in the evolution of the normative model of motherhood. This blind-ness was confronted by feminist psychoanalysts like Jeanine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Nancy Chodorow, and, later, Jessica Benjamin. In an attempt to conceptualize maternal experience and the role of the mother as a subject in a language combining psychoanalysis and feminism, Benjamin, following Chasseguet-Smirgel, argued that while the little boy may express “triumphant contempt” toward his mother and label her a castrate, he unconsciously invests her with enormous power. Benjamin further argues that the assumption that mothers gain absolute satisfaction from their relationship with their masculine infants, rather than being a fact, is the outcome of an infantile wish originating in Freud’s unconscious identification with the infantile yearning for the totally dedicated, perfect mother in a symbiotic relationship.11 The unconscious origins of the gendered role division as Freudian theory suggests it are not an easily fixed error, for this role division reflects and represents what Benjamin calls a “true lie.” Its paradoxical character simultaneously negates and affirms human experience of gender. Even though recent years have witnessed increasing visibility of men and women whose mode of conduct and identification clash with a binary gender model that attributes definite and distinct features to men and women—to soldiers and to mothers—this visibility is in constant tension with the binary forms of thinking that are vital to the organization of human thinking. The encoding of gender into binary and dichotomous structures is a primary, crucial, and formative psychic and cognitive process, so that even when there is a conscious intention to weaken its hold, it cannot be entirely discarded or ignored.12

Israel’s national discourse poured concrete content into the Freudian idealiza-tion— false and true at once—of the mothering of sons. It also included a concrete threat: an Israeli mother who truly, in total perfection, loves her son will not undermine the development of his masculinity that culminates with his military service and starts with a militarist education back in earliest childhood.13 The love of the Israeli mother for her son, especially if he happens to be a combat soldier,

338 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

must, therefore, be rendered by means of her total dedication to his needs and through her avoiding any intervention into the public aspects of the military.14 The national discourse thus defuses the potential contradiction between the mother’s concern for her son’s well-being and her support for his recruitment into a combat unit—a contradiction apparent in Matalon’s quotation—by equating support for his recruitment with concern for the boy’s needs as a man.

By the norms that prevailed in the Israeli public domain for decades, it was only “bereavement”—the death of the soldier-son—that gave mothers an “entry ticket”—however paradoxical—to the public domain of security, in the sense that they became part of the “family of bereavement” and were turned into “living icons” of the national struggle. But though bereavement gave them public visibility, it simultane-ously co-opted them into the national myth and its derivative collective identity.15

Rivka Guber, who lost her two sons in the War of Independence, is a key example of a mother who wholly followed the nation’s dictates, both before and after the deaths of her sons. She gave this ample expression in the books she wrote, edited, and published. In a letter David Ben-Gurion sent to Guber after reading the memorial book she dedicated to her sons, Sefer ha’aÿim (The Brothers’ Book), he admiringly addressed her as “the mother of the sons,” praising her strong morale and her observance of national values.16 Part of Ben-Gurion’s letter appears in the introduction to the fourth edition of the latter book: “As soon as I read what you wrote in The Brothers’ Book I knew a great mother had emerged among us, in Israel, a mother of a kind we did not have for hundreds of years, and whose words are stamped with the eternal imprint of human splendor. . . . With mothers like you in Israel, we can meet our future with a quiet heart. Respectfully and with love, David Ben-Gurion.” Ben-Gurion wanted—and succeeded—to turn Guber into a national symbol and cultural ideal of motherhood and sacrifice, a shining example of motherhood devoid of any conflict between parental and national feelings. He also implied an affinity between Guber and the biblical figure of Hannah and her seven sons, thus adding a historical-legendary dimension to Guber’s life story.17

In reading Guber’s work, and especially Im habanim (With the Sons), one discovers Guber’s huge willingness to adjust herself to Zionist ideology’s expecta-tions of women: to designate their sons to take an active part in the defense of the homeland and to educate them for self-sacrifice. At the start of the book, Guber


Winter 2013

writes: “This book was not written—it was made: made as part of all the other acts of making and the many labors women throughout the world know how to perform all at once. I wrote it with an untrained hand; never before did I attempt to express myself in writing or try to acquire the tools to do so.”18 The apologetic rhetoric under-lines the feeling that Guber does not consider her writing of any literary value: its sole function is to document.19 She also mentions that she started writing only once she had lost hope that her second son, Zvi, who from early childhood was meant to become a writer and the documenter of the family and its times, would do so. She presents writing, therefore, as an act devoid of artistic ambition. However, the book’s sequence of short pieces and letters is clearly an archetypal narrative about the birth of heroes and their consecration to the nation-making project.20 The book starts with the birth of Ephraim, the eldest son, after Guber had experienced three stillbirths. Next, she describes her difficulties with breastfeeding, and how, during the first months, other breastfeeding mothers were recruited to feed the infant by a daily rotation—come rain or shine, early in the mornings and in the middle of the night. Guber’s observance of the narrative scheme of the birth of the hero bears out her awareness of the symbolic-mythical potential, ostensibly meant to bear out the necessity and the inevitability of the Guber family’s tragic experiences.

The book includes many letters: ones Guber wrote to her sons and received from them, as well as letters to and from other people; it is through these that the family narrative emerges. The book also includes pieces she wrote on various occasions, all part of her ardent activity in the service of Zionist ideology and the nation-building project. The description of the son’s enlistment to the military is a dramatic and emotional climax. The first-born son, Ephraim, initially joined the British army and later the Haganah, in whose ranks he fell. After his death, Zvi, the younger one, fully supported by his mother, felt obliged to take his older brother’s place. He joined the army when he was seventeen years old and died three months after his brother. It is not with the brothers’ deaths that the book concludes, but with a description of Guber’s work, after the foundation of Israel, with new immigrants in the ma’abarot (transit camps)—an account marked by the same profound national fervor.

On the eve of her eldest son’s enlistment, Guber writes: “My heart fears greatly: he is setting out on a long journey, he will go wherever a man is needed. My son will not return unless he brings victory. Here I am, a mother both joyous and sad, but this

340 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

is not a time for sentimental unburdenings.”21 How is one to understand Guber’s absolute certainty that her son will “bring victory,” and her ambivalent attitude, with its joy and sadness, to his enlistment? Like the mothers of ancient Sparta, it seems, Guber measures her mothering in terms of her sons’ ability to prove the extent to which they imbibed the patriotic national model based on heroism and sacrifice.22 This is why the death of her sons, the fear of which causes her sadness, also serves as important proof of her success at being a proper mother in nation-building terms. It is also the reason why only after the deaths of her sons did Guber allow herself to express her hidden concern that they might not be able to meet the expectations—from both family and the nation: “The supreme ambition was for them to be good and useful sons, not only to their parents. Always, doubt was gnawing away at me: what I saw mostly was their shortcomings. Ephraim seemed overly practical, too clever and opinionated. Zvi, it appeared to me, was immersed in fantasies, not in touch with reality. Now I am at peace, I have no concerns. My sons were good—who will dispute that? Different in their ways, they were alike in the main: members of one race—born volunteers, and as for me—blessed with a restless spirit, a period of calm has set in: a heavy certainty now will no longer allow it to rage. At the same time, though, there is a loss of motivation and a sense of powerlessness: this is the end of the era of volunteering. It would seem there is nothing left to give, and this, perhaps, is the hardest thing we have to endure now” (emphasis added).23 Her sons’ death in battle settles all of the mother’s fears and doubts about her sons’ ability to fulfil their destiny. Their death is conclusive evidence that they are not cowards, and hence not victims. They are among the volunteers and those who make the sacrifices. But their deaths put an end to the possibility of Guber’s role as a sacrificing mother: there is no one left to sacrifice (her young daughter, on account of her gender, was not deemed worthy for the purpose).24 In this sense, Guber’s description of her work with new immigrants in the transit camps, which appears at the end of the book, stakes out the new grounds in which she might fulfill her national mission. Guber’s writing, thus, rather than attempting to fissure the national ethos and its attendant gendered division of roles, is devoted to confirm, consolidate, and underpin it.

The founding of Israel in May 1948 was supposed to have been the ultimate realization of the national ethos in whose name so many young lives were sacri-ficed—among them Rivka Guber’s sons. The ethos underlay Zionism’s aspiration to


Winter 2013

“build a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.”25 But the transi-tion from this vision of creating a state for the Jewish people to the everyday routines following its realization involves a paradox, as Hamutal Tsamir observes: “Once the state is established, the aim is achieved: symbol, subject, and nation become one totality, and this marks the end of the transcendental horizon, the advance-toward, cancelling the objective that hitherto guided the nation’s actions. . . . From this point onward, the nation’s existence is no longer driven by the aspiration to create or give birth to something sublime like a state, and to be reborn as a result, but it is now of necessity grounded in the defense, safeguarding, and improvement of what has already been achieved” (emphasis added).26 Part of the safeguarding and defense of what was achieved was characterized by the entrenchment of the gender-based division of roles of the Zionist society as they had crystallized during the years of struggle. This is illustrated by the birth notices of sons routinely appearing in the daily press. Though their direct context was ostensibly personal and family-oriented, it was common in the first two decades of statehood to conclude these advertise-ments with the phrase “Another soldier for the Israel Defense Forces.” In time, these adages stopped appearing, but this earmarking of male progeny was designed to preserve the national-gender order and left its mark on the Israeli mindset as a cultural imperative for many years to come.27 The struggle for the state’s foundation ended, but the energies that had gone into it went on, in subsequent years, feeding and maintaining the upkeep and the justification of the reigning order.

M O T H E R S O F S O L D I E R S I N H E B R E W L I T E R A T U R E

T H R O U G H T H E 1 9 9 0 S

What role did Israeli literature assume in the shaping of the national consciousness of soldiers’ mothers? At the beginning of this essay I argued that there were very few literary figures of soldiers’ mothers. The mothers featuring in such literary works were in the mold of Rivka Guber. It could be said, in this respect, that Israeli literature written between the 1940s and the 1990s did not exploit the potential space fiction offers the imagination to produce new and different possi-bilities in the context of soldiers’ mothers’ conduct. Mother figures in Israeli litera-ture followed the hegemonic national norm that hallowed the separation between

342 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

the masculine sphere—the military—and the domain of the feminine and maternal: staying within her allotted social territory and caring for the soldier when he returned home on leave, taking responsibility for his food and laundry, and so on—rather than producing an alternative vision.28

Rutke, the mother of Uri in Moshe Shamir’s Hu halakh basadot (He Walked through the Fields; 1947), who becomes a bereaved mother when Uri dies, is a case in point. In a remote but formative past she faced the conflict between fulfilling the ideological values of the kibbutz and the new nation in its struggle for existence, and her concern for her son’s well-being. When a baby of the same age as her Uri dies in a remote kibbutz cut off from necessary medical services, she becomes anxious for the health of her own baby. She chooses to leave the kibbutz and move with Uri to Tel Aviv. Some years later, however, submitting to kibbutz rules, she returns to live there according to its ways. From Rutke’s perspective, her and Uri’s return involves the conscious and intended elimination of any conflict between motherhood and ideological commitment to the kibbutz and society. It transpires, however, that the time she took off to live in Tel Aviv has become engraved in Rutke’s conscience as an act of betrayal toward the kibbutz, and once she returns, her life becomes dedicated to an ever failing effort to atone. She decides not to give birth to another child, so as to avoid rekindling the conflict between family and kibbutz, and spends her life paying her debt by applying herself to work and keeping silent.29

Michal Arbel has pointed out that free, unimpeded motion is tantamount to sin for the women in Hu halakh basadot. Women are only allowed to move within the range of their reference group, in the confines and orbit of the kibbutz. Other-wise, a woman must sit and wait for a man—whether husband or son—to return from his journeys.30 According to Arbel, Rutke, in moving rather than staying put where she was deemed to stay, betrayed her gender identity. For Rutke’s son Uri, by contrast, the return to the kibbutz and the renunciation of movement constitute, in the national-gendered logic of the novel, the loss of masculinity. The danger, that is, in his failure to join the Haganah—he leading Zionist military organization in pre-state Israel—is the danger of his transforming into an effeminate man. That is why it is important for both Uri and Rutke that Uri go to war and realize his masculinity. In this context, Michael Gluzman offers another argument: Uri, too—not just his mother—is haunted by the years of his early childhood spent in


Winter 2013

Tel Aviv. Uri’s eagerness to embody the national collective values, including self-sacrifice, is connected to a nagging apprehension about his profound, oedipal bond with his mother, which precedes the “triumphant contempt” he is expected to display toward her; it is this relationship that threatens his masculinity.31

In Yehoshua Bar-Yosef ’s story “Ha-em” (The Mother),32 too, the character of the mother, Sarah the telephone receptionist, conforms to the hegemonic national model: like Rutke, her eponymous Uri is her only son, but unlike Rutke, Sarah never married and her son was born as the result of a brief affair. He is all she has and she devotes her whole life to raising him. The mother’s total dedication to her son and to her motherly duties only intensifies the horror when he dies in the course of a secret Palmach operation. It would seem, at least on the face of it, that such maternal dedication might boost the potential for friction between the mother and the national imperative to sacrifice one’s son on the altar of the nation’s birth. No friction of this kind, however, occurs in the story. The rendering of the conflictual potential between motherhood and nation-building, together with its absolute erasure, even though all conditions are present for it to break out, marks the figure of Sarah as a martyr, like her biblical predecessor, the mother of Isaac, and indeed like Rivka Guber. The beatification of the mother reaches a climax in the matter of dealing with Uri’s corpse. Sarah is prevented from a public expres-sion of her mourning because Uri’s identity is unknown to the British authorities: his military superiors warn his devastated mother not to expose his identity because that may put the British on the trail of the dead man’s surviving friends. Sarah’s restraint is heroic: by dressing up like a nurse she manages to take leave of her son’s dead body without revealing either his or her own identity and without losing control and weeping openly for her loss. Though the story was published in 1950, it addresses the historical reality prior to the foundation of Israel and creates continuity between the common expectations of mothers then and those following the establishment of the state—in the way Tsamir describes it.

Since the 1960s, Israeli literature has taken a more critical view of the militarist ethos of heroism.33 However, here the dominant figures in the works that address the army have been fathers whose soldier-sons entertain a complex oedipal relation-ship with them, one which cannot be resolved other than by the son’s sacrifice on the altar of the father’s values. This is the case in A. B. Yehoshua’s “Betehilat kayits 1970”

344 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

(Early in the Summer of 1970; 1972) as well as in “Derekh haruaÿ” (The Way of the Wind; 1965) by Amos Oz. Oz’s hero, Gidon Shenhav, a weak, insecure boy, is crushed under the weight of the ideal masculinity personified by his father. Gidon’s mother, Raya, is briefly mentioned for opposing her son’s wish to serve in a combat unit and for refusing to sign the army’s form of consent for parents who have only one, male, child. Gidon’s father, however, dismisses his ex-wife’s reservations and asks his friend, a senior army officer, to intervene for the sake of their male comrade-ship—a request which is met.34 The voice of the dissenting mother is silenced and ignored. Though the story is full of irony and rage against the father, this criticism, attended as it is by his son’s yearning for the father’s recognition of his masculinity, puts the father at the center of events and reaffirms his status as a role model and as a metonymy for the values of nationhood—no matter how thwarted and destructive.

In 1986, Yehoshua Kenaz’s epic novel, Hitganvut yehidim (Infiltration), set in the mid-1950s, was published. The novel introduces a mixed company of soldiers, all physically unfit, doing their basic training at Training Base Four. The “damaged” soldiers at boot camp live with the fear of somehow becoming like women due to their physical weakness: the same situation that Uri in Hu halakh basadot faces serves as the engine of that novel’s plot and drives Uri into his death. The most frequent insult in Hitganvut yehidim’s training camp is the taunt of nekevot—“girls/bitches”: officers and soldiers alike use it—to keep the threat in view and to warn against it.35 Gluzman argues that “in Hitganvut yehidim masculinity features as national ideology. As a result, masculinity, in the army camp, becomes the single meaning of Israeli-ness, gaining as it were consensual status. . . . The promise that the military will make the new recruits into men—incessantly repeated throughout the novel—is accompanied by a relentless assault on their femininity.”36

While the soldiers’ mothers only have a marginal presence in Hitganvut yehidim, the Spartan model of motherhood haunts the boot camp for “damaged” soldiers, symbolizing the nation state’s link to its subjects: “’In Sparta,’ said Micky, ‘they used to throw the sick, weak, crippled babies out onto some mountain, so that they would die of hunger or so that the wild animals would eat them. Because they wouldn’t grow up to be good soldiers and only be a burden to society and weaken it.’ . . . ‘In Israel,’ said Micky, ‘they’ve invented Training Base Four for the same purpose. That’s where they chuck all the invalids and it’s all much more humane.’”37 In Kenaz’s novel,


Winter 2013

Israel is likened to a big and cruel Spartan mother. The analogy between the ancient polis and Israel brings into focus the relationship between the damaged soldiers’ failure to adjust to the ethos of heroism, and their parents’ loss of symbolic assets that have failed to deliver “quality goods.” What stands revealed is the cruelty imposed on the relations between parents and children in the context of the national culture. In the novel, the most glaring victim of this culture is Allon, the Ashkenazi kibbutznik, whose father died in the War of Independence. Allon cannot reconcile himself to being excluded from the opportunity to physically embody the ethos. His suicide at the end of the training course reveals the fragility of a male identity that requires the confirmation of the military and the nation but fails to fulfill their criteria.

Hitganvut yehidim also develops a fascinating and important distinction between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identity and between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi motherhood. The analogy with Sparta and its model of motherhood shows, however, that in spite of the major differences among the new recruits, their joint physical inferiority turns them all—Mizrahi and Ashkenazi alike—into the aban-doned children of the nation, which is represented as a cruel mother.38

L I T E R A T U R E F R O M T H E 1 9 9 0 S : “ T H E O S L O C L I M A T E ” A N D

O R L Y C A S T E L B L O O M ’ S D O L L Y C I T Y

The most radical representation of the Zionist state as a cruel mother occurs in Orly Castel Bloom’s novel Dolly City, published in 1992. Dolly is the first mother in Hebrew literature who responds incisively and provocatively to the normative division of roles between mothers and sons in the national domain and to the demand this division passes as natural. One could read Castel Bloom’s novel as a late engagement with the seventeen-year-old boy’s monologue in Brenner’s short story “Hu amar la” (He Told Her; 1905), in which the boy explains to his mother why he has decided to join the vigilantes in the context of the early twentieth-century pogroms in Russia. Brenner’s protagonist passes responsibility for his decisions to his mother. Reminding her that it was she herself who brought him up in a nationalist mindset amid the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people, he expects her to accept the consequences.39 It is as though Dolly chooses to allow the mother in Brenner’s short story to speak for herself. Dolly appears on the scene like

346 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

a volcanic eruption after years of silence—a silence that has been interpreted, with some justice, as consent. Brenner’s story does not let the mother speak, yet it is entirely directed to her as a rhetorical addressee, thus marking her liminal position as a listener who is important but has no voice, whose cooperation the (national and gender) system needs in order to exist. Dolly makes herself heard as a mother, but over and beyond this she also presents a new understanding of the historical narrative, an understanding that encompasses the ninety years that have elapsed since Brenner’s story. Dolly City, therefore, ruptures the national and gender models that inform soldiers’ mothers’ status in Israeli culture because its heroine wishes not merely to sound her singular voice but also to expose the very workings of the system. She dares to point out the tacit agreements on which the system relies, among them the mechanism of symbolic compensations the system awards to the bereaved mother in exchange for her assent to the gendered division of roles.

The novel is written in a new, wild language, “post-modern” in critics’ terms, which is singularly Castel Bloom’s yet shares something with the work of other young authors of her generation who started to write and publish in the early 1990s.40 As Aim Luski put it, Castel Bloom “shreds Hebrew to pieces”: her writing contrasts sharply with “the modernists’ sense of textual reduction and purifica-tion” and aims to represent “a total disintegration of values.”41 Such acts of frag-mentation, in Dolly City, are smuggled in via a plot line concerning the relations between a mother and her son who is joining the army.

The novel’s publication and its enthusiastic reception are associated with a short-lived political and cultural phase that one might call “the Oslo climate”:42 the 1993 Oslo accords and the political and cultural events leading up to them and occurring in parallel and around them constitute a “soft” temporal marker with fluid bound-aries. Even so, “Oslo” provides us with a code name for a distinct period, one marked by a climate, in economic, political, gender, and cultural terms that featured a new sensitivity to collective mechanisms of denial and repression and their manifesta-tions in both the national mindset and the spoken and written language. Castel Bloom’s writing is among the earliest and most radical expressions of this climate and should be read in the context of the critical moment, in Adi Ophir’s43 sense, which began to emerge in Israeli culture in the late 1980s and came into its own during “the Oslo period.”


Winter 2013

From the start, and by design, the Oslo accords were formulated as an incom-plete agreement, an agreement that came as a declaration of intentions regarding a willingness to engage in a dialogue based on trust that would lead to a future change of relations between Israel and the Palestinians. The leaders of both sides agreed to talk about various matters related to the conflict, by design delaying the discussion of core matters: the status of Jerusalem, refugees’ right of return, the status of the Israeli settlements, and the distribution of resources. The rationale behind the agreement was that it would only be possible to discuss core issues after the sides had come closer and trust was created.44 Lev Grinberg comments that the agreement’s open-ended character was meant to forge a new mood that would then allow the imagination of different possibilities: “Leaving [certain] questions open made it possible for each to imagine peace as he liked. That was the great strength of Oslo, but also its main weakness. The ability to imagine is crucial to achieve political change but it is not enough.”45

Literature served as one of the sites through which this work of the imagina-tion was happening, but with regard to the position of soldiers’ mothers in Israel’s public domain, the possibility of imagining a new and different state of affairs was underwritten by a change that had already started in the political-activist sphere, around the First Lebanon War. In the country’s history, this was the first war that was publicly perceived as a “war of choice,”46 and it triggered a wave of protest. In marked contrast to previous situations, parents of soldiers, including mothers, began openly to question military officers’ judgment and show critical involvement in their sons’ military service. It was the public activity of Raya Harnik, the mother of Guni (Giora) Harnik, commander of the Golani unit, that marked the start of mothers’ participation in the public discourse about the ways decisions were being made about matters of security. Guni Harnik was killed on the second day of the First Lebanon War, in the battle of the Beaufort. After his fall, his mother tried to push for an official investigation into the decision-making processes that had led to the war.47 She also published an acerbic critique on the Ministry of Defense’s Rehabilitation Section for its treatment of bereaved families, acted for Israeli army to withdraw from Lebanon, and fought a nine-year legal battle against the defense establishment until her demand to remove the words “Operation Peace for Galilee” from her son’s tombstone was accepted.48 Harnik was also active in the literary

348 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

sphere. She published poetry—Shirim le-Guni (Poems for Guni; 1983) and Mishirey Har Herzl, Yerushalayim (From the Poems of Mount Herzl, Jerusalem; 1987)—that centered on bereavement and her fallen son, expressing anger at his death and profound doubt about the steps that had led to it: “Finally you rest / My tired restless son. / Your broad shoulders narrow / To fit coffin and soil. / . . . The land you loved averts its face / But the soil may hug you / And a tear may sprout a flower.”

In contrast with Rivka Guber, whose writings reflect a staunch willingness to sacrifice, in Harnik’s poetry the beloved land for which the son’s life was sacrificed is shown to avert its face and renounce moral and national responsibility for his death. All the mother can hope for is that the land itself is holding and hugging her son. The line about the flower that might grow from the mourning mother’s tear is a bitter and ironic allusion to the promise at the end of Haim Gouri’s poem, “Behold, Our Bodies”:49 expressing a certainty that the dead sons will return to life in the form of red flowers. Harnik’s poem exposes the compensation national ideology offers bereaved families through symbols of growth and life as false, a compensation that has lost its meaning, leaving the speaker, the mother, alone to carry the burden of bereavement.50

Inspired by Harnik, other mothers of soldiers began to reject their allotted role in the gender-national order and to participate in different domains of the public discourse on military policy. Nashim beshaÿor (Women in Black), an organi-zation identified with the radical left, was established in 1988. The women demon-strated regularly to call for an end to Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories. While it did not refer to its members’ identity as mothers but rather as women, the organization, together with other groups such as Yesh Gvul (There’s a Limit/Border), which was established in 1982 and included men and women, and Bat Shalom, a women’s organization founded in 1988, seems to have paved the way to breaking Israel’s public norms about the hallowed status of the army and the exclusive say of men in how it is run.

Following the so-called “helicopter disaster” of 1997, when two helicopters that were supposed to have crossed the border into Israel’s “security zone” in Lebanon collided, leaving seventy-three soldiers dead, the Arba Imahot (Four Mothers) organization set out to put the government under constant pressure to


Winter 2013

pull the army out of Lebanon. Arba Imahot sprang from an ahusli (i.e., a pro-military, Ashkenazi, secular, veteran, national, socialist) base.51 Its founders were mothers of combat soldiers who lived in the north and put the army’s presence in Lebanon on the public agenda. Their affiliation with the mainstream of Israeli society, and their fundamental support of security-based values and of the mascu-line identity structure at the root of Israel’s national ideology, gave them crucial legitimacy. Still, the emergence of Arba Imahot signposts a real change: it was the first time that mothers of soldiers got together to sound an opposing voice that drew its legitimacy from their identity as mothers—in a security discourse that had until then kept out all but some exceptional women.52

The intervention of soldiers’ mothers in the public sphere and discourse caused the politically and culturally accepted templates of gender and nationality to crack. It is these changes, along with other economic and social processes in the course of the 1990s that cannot be described here, that sowed the seeds for the “Oslo climate.” The change, as said, was notable both in the national-political arena and also in critical texts and other cultural products—which were not solely for enter-tainment but were not directly political either—such as the satirical comedy of the Hamishia Hakamerit (Chamber Quintet) and the books of young artists like Ronit Matalon, Uzi Weil, Gadi Taub, Gafi Amir, Etgar Keret, and Orly Castel Bloom, who became well-known and relatively popular, even though they dared to imagine situations and conditions that went beyond the limits of the conventional political discourse.53

Dolly City came out about a year prior to the public signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993. Writing with a seismograph’s sensitivity to the power relations in the linguistic and social spheres, Castel Bloom made visible the general chaos of life in Israel, a country in perpetual war. The protago-nist of the book, Dolly, is mentally ill by psychiatric standards, but her inner chaos seems reasonable and even appropriate given the turbulent reality of Dolly City.54 Dolly is the first mother in Israeli literature who considers her son’s enlistment to the army as an educational failure. She does not manage to prevent his enlistment, as he announces that he is going to join the army, gets her “committed” to an old people’s home (though she is only forty-five years old), and then vanishes. After his enlistment, she relates the following about her psychiatrist: “The doctor patted my

350 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

shoulder affectionately and went on, ‘You have to remember your child may die in battle. He may die in battle—you’ve got to get that into your head. . . . She paused for a moment and then continued, ‘And then, if he does die in battle, you’ll be a bereaved mother—just as if you die, he’ll be an orphan. There are names for things. There are identities. For God’s sake, Dolly’ [my emphasis].”55

Bereavement, the psychiatrist explains, is a reasonable and legitimate likelihood that Dolly must accept if she is to achieve stability, and this, of necessity, includes a national component. If she is willing to adjust herself to the role the state has set aside for her, namely to raise her son and then send him to the army, she is ensured the stable identity that will enable her to assign clear names to “things”: to experi-ence confusing emotions, conflicted feelings. For the psychiatrist, who represents the hegemonic national ethos, the notion of the bereaved mother constitutes a well-defined identity, which even carries a certain prestige and is presented as a possible source of comfort. Manuela Dviri, whose son Yoni was killed in Lebanon in 1998, has written about the class-related aspects of national bereavement, describing how even within her new and horrifying status as a bereaved mother there existed national hierarchies. Death in battle is considered especially prestigious and thus gives the surviving parents special status: “There are several types of death announcements and several types of engravings on tombstones. Soldiers who fall in battle are top-notch, the elite! In a word, our announcement was ‘the best,’ as I realized later, but I didn’t understand at the time.”56

Dolly, Castel Bloom’s heroine, is suspicious of stable identities, however, no matter how privileged, and meets them with all-out rage. Every stable identity, including parts of her own, presents itself to her as a target for assault, and in everything usually considered “natural” she perceives manipulation and ulterior interests. Dolly’s extreme ways of seeing things and her cruelty toward her son face the reader with an interpretive challenge. Tamar Elor states that many people found the novel hard to read when it first came out.57 In a lecture presented at the Hebrew University, Castel Bloom herself described how, walking down the street with her children, she felt her neighbors eyeing her with suspicion. Though it would not be implausible to classify Dolly as psychotic, doing so, I believe, would undermine our reading and strip it of its political, critical perspective.58 Caution with regard to psychiatric classification is also suggested by the fact that Dolly’s


Winter 2013

relatives—her mother, sister, and son—use such categories to defend themselves against her radicalism. In spite of the temptation to put Dolly down as sick, her departure, in her relation to her son, from conventional modes of behavior, is substantiated in the course of our reading. This reading, based on an acquaintance with historical mothers of soldiers, renders her “insanity” as a departure, with political overtones, from the conformist course of Israeli motherhood with its avowed loyalty to well-defined identities. Thus, rather than in madness, one can find the key to Dolly’s maternal conduct in the explicit relation between Dolly and Dolly City and the fact that it is impossible to draw a clear line between them. Dolly’s inclusion in Dolly City, borne out by the repetition of names, gives explicit, parodic, and resistant expression to a continuity typical of the relations obtaining in the Israeli national sphere between the mothers of soldiers or soldiers-to-be and the state. Castel Bloom’s work constantly points out this situation and describes the mechanism that renders it stable.59

According to this paradigm, the nation—or umma—is a “big mother”—ima—toward whom, as an act of respect, the son has to show a love and willing-ness for self-sacrifice similar to the feelings his mother displayed toward him when he was little. In the transition from childhood to adulthood, these relations shift direction and now the son has to “return” to the big mother that which he received from his personal mother; to give the former the love and care that he was given; to protect her just like his own mother protected him in his childhood; to keep her at the center of his attention as his own mother did with him. The mother, from her side, continues her task by helping her son to fulfill his duties toward the state, which constitutes a kind of symbolic extension of herself: an enveloping and caring feminine entity.60 This perplexing and deceptive symbolic extension, from mother to nation, puts everything the nation does—effectively, the state’s actions—beyond judgment and sees them as deserving of protection. In doing so, it produces justi-fications for the violence of a national mode of conduct involving a long-term mili-tary occupation. The Freudian account of mothers’ conformist behavior—induced by their wish to help their sons in becoming masculine—rests, therefore, on a compensatory national-symbolic pattern, according to which the attachment to the son’s personal mother is not annihilated but undergoes a dialectical negation then to be projected onto loyalty to nation and state.

352 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

Like other mothers to future Israeli soldiers, Dolly, too, embodies a continuity between herself and the geographical and symbolic space of the nation—a conti-nuity signaled by the pertinent link between herself and the nightmarish Dolly City in which she dwells.61 In Dolly’s case, however, this link does not attenuate, remove, or camouflage the violence. On the contrary: both in Dolly’s relations with her son and in Dolly City itself, violence and anarchy are rampant. The soft and soothing continuity between mother and nation, which justifies and explains the violence while also putting it at a remove and cloaking it, replaces a violent and abusive continuity between mother and nation for which there are no justifications or masks. Of course, the soothing analogy between Dolly City and the nation works both ways: it urges us to understand that what Dolly does to her son until he goes to the army is what the state routinely does to its subjects. And even as the state is allowed, out of professed concern for its subjects, to take violent steps that may lead to their—and others’—death, Dolly, too, is entitled to conduct herself vis-à-vis her son-subject: she invades his privacy, abuses him, opens and closes his body, scars him. Her maternal instinct is portrayed as a sprawling malignant disease, while the language she uses teems with terms taken from the military and national discourses: “Before going any further, I would like to stress something: I don’t want to give the impression here that I took a child and destroyed him. I only wanted to protect him from harm. I wanted him to live to a hundred and twenty, and what’s wrong with that? I wanted to be in command on all fronts, and what’s wrong with that? What’s the hypocrisy? In some societies a man can be forced to cut out his sister’s clitoris with his teeth—and I’m not entitled to demand sover-eignty over the defence of my son?”62 She does demand sovereignty, and when she thinks her child is ill, she even tries to get him hospitalized at the military Kiriya hospital and blames herself for not having lowered his military profile—even though the child is only five years old. She says to her own mother: “’The child needs a few days’ sick leave; he needs to be in an isolation room.’ ‘What sick leave are you talking about? What isolation room? The child’s five years old!’ ‘In staff HQ ,’ I said coldly.”63 She describes his pulse as “war drums at the other end of the world,” and likens herself to an “IDF tank.” She tells him not to be “a sissy,” and advises one of her patients “to pose as a wounded veteran.”64 The way military codes are inflected in her maternal language underscores Dolly’s hybrid nature;


Winter 2013

they allegorize the manipulative character of the relations between state and family. Dolly’s extreme behavior thus brings into focus the Spartan core of the hegemonic maternal-national model.

The ambiguity of Dolly’s attitude to her son, in which she treats him both as her subject and as a child in need of love and care, is in place from the start, as soon as he appears in her life. Dolly finds her son wrapped in a black plastic bag: he is wearing Department-of-Health issue diapers, he looks blue and famished. The infant has a festering, infected hole in his belly: Dolly figures it is two centimeters wide. By measuring the diameter of the hole, she marks it, that is, as a bullet hole. The hole in babies’ bellies, however, is also connected to the cutting of their umbi-licus, their severance from the mother’s body. Did someone shoot the young baby? Or does the hole in his belly—a preeminent expression of the child’s separation from the mother—seem like a bullet hole to Dolly because she sees it as a cipher of the nationalizing process condoned and enabled by Israeli motherhood, a mother-hood infected, like the baby’s wound, by national interests? The fact that Dolly did not herself give birth to her son further hints at the dual ownership of Israeli babies, right from their birth, and at their belonging to both their parents and the Ministry of Health, the state. As Dolly finds the infant wrapped in a garbage bag, he might possibly be one of the lost children of Sparta: the damaged, unwanted product of the national machinery, whom Dolly then ostensibly tries to prepare for his destiny while at the same time ensuring his defectiveness so he won’t fit the norm too well, as this will lead to his sacrifice.

When Dolly’s son, having scored at the top of his class at the military course, sends her a picture of himself in uniform, flying the Israeli flag, she does not know what to feel. It suddenly seems that “my whole conception was wrong,” and she finds herself, in spite of everything, assuming the classic role of the mother: getting letters and Polaroid snapshots from her son, the soldier.65 One day, however, she reads a newspaper item about a strange young man who, outwitting the most sophisticated security in the world, tried to hijack a flight to Luxemburg. The item also reports that though shot and injured, the young man was not caught. Dolly feels happy and reas-sured because to her the information conveys the news that her son has revolted against the establishment which he joined. His revolt makes him, perhaps for the first time, definitely her son. In describing the very complex political structure of

354 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

Dolly City, with its different parties, Dolly remarks: “Luckily for me, I managed to avoid falling into the traps of any of these groups and I learned to keep a low profile. I learned that the trick is to pretend to be asleep—and undermine.”66 Now she real-izes that her son, too, has pretended to be asleep while subverting the existing order, skirting the security system in order to become a “weirdo.” Dolly City, hence, is a book with a happy ending: the mother and her son become allies, both escape and, while exploiting and subverting it, turn their back to the national order.

The book’s most famous and most frequently quoted scene is the one in which Dolly engraves the map of the biblical Land of Israel on her son’s back.67 In conclu-sion, I read this as not merely a parody of the link between the national space and the model of Israeli manhood, but as a constructive, positive gesture. Uri S. Cohen states that the etching of the map may constitute an embodiment of the common Hebrew metaphor lahtokh babasar haÿay (literally: cutting into the living flesh; i.e., making painful cuts).68 To me, it seems that the resurrected cliché, here, rather suggests that the country’s well-being and security rest on the backs of the young. The act of engraving the back transforms the cliché into a bloody reality. It is, in this sense, the apogee of Dolly’s abuse of her young son—an abuse meant to prepare him for his mission but also to expose the violence such preparation entails. After Dolly’s imposed separation from her son, and following their renewed encounter, she discovers to her astonishment that someone has moved the map’s borders back to the borders of 1967. This movement back, which resonates with the fluidity of the relations between signifiers and signifieds in Dolly City, draws attention to the possibility that the new map may create a new reality.69 The borders drawn on both of these maps are those of the biblical Land of Israel, the imagined space to which Zionism tried to reconnect in an attempt to resurrect the ancient Hebrew nation, while the borders of 1967 represent the moment when Israel changed from being a country with an Arab minority into an occupying country ruling over a disenfranchised population. The altered map thus announces a possible direction for change in the outlines of national identity and mindset. This boundary-game is played out on the back of the child Ben, whose name, in Hebrew, is also the generic masculine. The second act of engraving, it would seem, which takes place with his consent, indicates that Ben is willing to carry the country on his back, on condition, however, that its borders reflect a critical


Winter 2013

approach to the nation in terms of the violent history in whose formation it participates.

Fourteen years after Dolly City was published, another novel by Castel Bloom put a soldier’s mother at its center. Tekstil (Textile) was first published in 2006, following Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination, the failure of the Oslo accords, the Second Intifada, and the suicide attacks. Mandy, the protagonist whose son serves as a sniper in the Occupied Territories, is Dolly’s inverse: instead of fighting the mad reality that endangers her son, she would like to deny it. Dolly is a surgeon who obsessively dissects the reality in which she lives, while Mandy, acting from a conformist, escapist feminine position, yields her body to the surgeon’s scalpel. She drugs herself with the anesthetic of the plastic surgeon under whose knife she puts herself at every opportunity. She does this to desensitize herself to her fear that her son might be killed. In the course of one of these operations, a shoulder-blade implant, she dies. The mother in Castel Bloom’s early novel faces a disinte-grated reality dominated by rigid national and gender norms and dares to challenge them, in the spirit of the short-lived critical moment that emerged during the Oslo period. Tekstil is admirably emblematic of the end of this phase: it constitutes a hyperbolic, parodic expression of the wish, embodied by the mother, to dedicate herself once more, and with a vengeance, to the denial of the violent reality and to pretend that there is no alternative.

Department of Literature Tel Aviv University

N O T E S

1 From an interview entitled “Haben sheli lo yitgayes lekravi . . .” (My son won’t be going to a combat unit. I just won’t let him) by Billie Moskona-Lerman with Sara Chinsky, Sofshavua supplement, Maariv, April 25, 1997, p. 29.

2 From Dalia Fallah, “Az lo yada’anu,” 2003 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003), 49–50.

3 I am referring to the crushed mothers in Yehudit Hendel’s Har hato’im; to Dolly in Dolly City (1992) and Mandy in Tekstil (2006), both by Orly Castel Bloom; to Esther Ballalo in Gafi Amir’s short story “Lahayal hakhi hatikh betsahal” (1997); to Savta Yakuta and the mother in Sammy Bardugo’s novella Aÿi hatsair Yehuda

356 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

(2006); to Yehudit in the novel Dofek by Yaniv Itzkovitch (2007); to Ora in the novel Isha borahat mi-besora (To the End of the Land) by David Grossman (2008/2010); to the mother in the novel Tinnitus (2009) by Emmanuel Pinto, and to Mira-Norma in Haggai Linik’s novel Darush laÿshan (2011). In literary works that do not deal extensively with military service, yet feature mothers as their protagonists—like Eleonora Lev’s Boker rishon began eden (1991), and Ronit Matalon’s Kol tsa’adeynu (2008), the mothers are preoccupied with their sons’ military service (though in Lev’s novel the boy is yet to be born). It must be stressed that some of these works question the validity and moral superiority of the national ideology and its typical gender divisions, while others affirm or even reinforce it by adjusting it to the present.

4 Nancy Huston, “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 119–36.

5 George Mosse, in his study of the evolution of ideals of masculinity in relation to myths of heroism in modernity, has described how joining the army was perceived as a “remedy for effeminacy”; see George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 61–63.

6 Sarah B. Pomeroy, Spartan Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

7 Elizabeth Badinter, Mother Love: Myth and Reality, Motherhood in Modern History (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 65.

8 This argument appears in many of Freud’s articles; see, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1933), in Freud on Women—A Reader, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (New York: Vintage 2002), 361; and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanal-ysis, 1955), 65–144.

9 Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” Standard Edition, vol. XIX, 171–80.

10 Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” ibid., 241–58.

11 See also Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 87–88.

12 Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), 35–38.


Winter 2013

13 On militarist education in Israel, see Orna Sasson-Levy and Gal Levy, “Militarized Socialization, Military Service, and Class Reproduction: The Experiences of Israeli Soldiers,” Sociological Perspectives 51, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 349–74. On the militarized character of Israeli society in general, see Baruch Kimmerling, “Militarism in Israeli Society,” in Theory and Criticism: An Israeli Forum 4 (1993): 123–40.

14 An early literary rendering of the national role division between mothers and soldier-sons appears in Brenner’s 1905 short story, “Hu amar la,” written after the Zhytomyr pogrom. The story consists of a monologue by a seventeen-year-old boy, whose father was killed in a pogrom even before the boy was born, and who asks his mother not to stand in the way of his decision to join in the defense of his people. Though the mother takes no active role in the story, she serves as an internal addressee whose support and simultaneous opposition the narrator needs in order to act on his resolve. Yosef Ÿayim Brenner, “Hu amar la,” Writings, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad), 596–601.

15 Hannah Naveh, who has studied representations of mourning in contemporary Hebrew literature, argues, following Immanuel Sivan, that the state generated mechanisms that have allowed it to transform expressions of mourning into “transient phenomena.” Naveh discusses the tension between the “eternal mourning” of the bereaved families in Hendel’s Har ha-to’im and the state’s effort to conduct rituals justifying the deaths while simultaneously keeping a limit to the time and energy invested in them; and see Hannah Naveh, Beshvi ha’avel: ha’avel bare’i hasafrut haivrit haÿadasha (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993), 14–76. On the myth of the “family of the bereaved” (mishpaÿat hasheÿol) and the changes of bereaved families’ own attitudes to it, see Eliezer Witztum and Ruth Malkinson, “Bereavement and Commemoration: The Dual Face of the National Myth,” in Loss and Bereavement in Jewish Society in Israel, ed. Ruth Malkinson, Simon S. Rubin, and Eliezer Witztum (Jerusalem: Ministry of Defence Publishing House Cana, 1993), 231–58.

16 The first to use the notion of em habanim—the mother of the sons—was Asher Barash, editor of Sefer habanim, referring to Rivka Guber (without putting it in quotation marks or giving it any meaning beyond its immediate use), in the introduction to the first edition, published in 1950. It is nevertheless clearly Ben-Gurion’s use of the term that turned Guber into an icon, allowing her to become a national ideal in the contemporary consciousness.

358 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

17 The story of Hannah and her seven sons appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 57b and in other sources, and is considered a Jewish martyrology incul-cating national devotion. In the context of such devotion and maternal support, one is also reminded of Ben-Gurion’s famous statement starting with the words “Teda kol em ivriya” (Let all Hebrew mothers know), at an IDF convention in July 1963. Here Ben-Gurion explicitly rendered the gendered division of roles supporting the normative national ethos, in which mothers “give” their sons to the army’s officers, who assume the care of their sons. Ben-Gurion’s phrase became a byword in the national discourse, at times reproducing the original conditions in which the phrase was first used, and at others more subversively suggesting how hollow it has come to ring. This is, for instance, what Aviva Shalit, mother of Gilad Shalit, wrote in a message to members of the Knesset and other public representatives, on the sixth eve of the Jewish New Year after her son’s capitivity: “Let all Hebrew mothers know that the fate of their sons is forfeited by those responsible for their security.”

18 Guber, Im habanim (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1950), 7.

19 As concerns the status of writing for Guber, Sheila Jelen identifies an internal debate between two notions of the author’s subjective autonomy. Jelen points out that the first part of Guber’s memoir, Morasha lehanÿil (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1979), takes the form of a Bildungsroman that puts a young, urban, intellectual Jewish woman at its center. Gradually, however, the narrative changes as a result of the attempt to forge an ideological continuity between the Guber’s family life in Eastern Europe, which included a key component of agricultural work, and Guber and her partner’s choice to immigrate to pre-state Israel and start a farm. According to Jelen, in spite of Guber’s effort to adjust her life story to an ideo-logical narrative in which agriculture plays a major role, her fundamental remoteness from such a narrative shows between the lines. My reading, unlike Jelen’s, emphasizes Guber’s tendency to marshal her intellectual powers and her familiarity with dominant literary forms in order to confirm and deepen the validity of a Zionist ideological narrative based on self-sacrifice and on a gendered division of roles. Sheila Jelen, “Israeli Salvage Poetics: Gender, Migration and the Image of Eastern Europe in Israeli Women’s Memoirs,” paper presented at the NAPH International Conference on Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture (2013).

20 The components of the archetypal narrative of the “birth of the hero” were identified by scholars of literature and folklore such as Edward Taylor (1871), Johann-Georg


Winter 2013

Von Hahn (1876), and Vladimir Propp (1928). Their research served as a main tool for the psychoanalytical interpretation of myths by Otto Rank (1909) and Karl Abraham (1909). Folklore scholars pointed out the fixed and frequently repeated elements in stories and legends about the birth of the hero, in diverse national and cultural contexts. Such elements are, for instance, birth itself as a problematic, distressing, and charged event; the miraculous rescue of the infant; and the hero’s early death for a lofty cause. These features also appear in Guber’s narrative about her eldest son Ephraim’s life. Robert A. Segal, “Introduction,” in In Quest of the Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 7–41.

21 Guber, Im habanim, 37.

22 In Sparta, fearfulness was considered a family disgrace. Men or boys who were publicly deemed cowards reduced the chances of marriage of the unwed women in their families. There are stories about Spartan mothers who killed their sons for having acted cowardly in the battlefield; see Pomeroy, 37.

23 Guber, Im habanim, 78.

24 For a discussion of Guber in the context of the Zionist ethos of bereavement, see Dorit Yosef ’s article “Hakrava, meha’a, umashma’ut: iyun betekstim shel shtey imahot shehulot, Rivka Guber ve-Manuela Dviri,” in Masekhet 9 (2009): 81–110.

25 The formulation, which first appeared in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, was quoted in the historical section of the Declaration of Independence, “This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations” (see the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site, mfa.gov.il, for a full English translation).

26 Hamutal Tsamir, “Mihistoria lemitos: mitizatsiot shel yelidiut beshirat dor hame-dina,” in Mishakey zikaron: tfisot shel zeman vezikaron batarbut hayehudit, ed. Yotam Benziman (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008), 100–102.

27 Sylvia Bizawi, the sociologist, argues that the model of gender conduct reflected by these notices persists in the Israeli public sphere; and see Tamar Rotem, “Ima adama,” Haaretz, May 16, 2002.

28 See, for instance, how the mother in Mordechai Tabib’s play Kinoro shel Yossi describes her imagined encounter with her dead son: “Oh my son! Oh Yossi! How good you came, how good you came. . . . It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, I have been yearning to see you . . . I’ll quickly prepare you a bath and nice

360 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

clothes. . . . You must be hungry, I’ll make you a meal too . . . ,” Mordechai Tabib, Kinoro shel Yossi (Tel Aviv: The General Workers Union of Eretz Israel, 1959), 9.

29 Moshe Shamir, Hu halakh basadot (Tel Aviv: Am Oved/Yediot Aharonot, 2010 [1947]), 218.

30 Michal Arbel, “Gavriut venostalgia: kriya be Hu halakh basadot le Moshe Shamir al reka beney doro,” Mada’ey hayahadut 39 (1999): 53–66.

31 Michael Gluzman, Haguf hatziyoni (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 198.

32 Yehoshua Bar-Yosef, “Ha-em,” in Bni hamagad—misipurey hamilhama (Tel Aviv: Tversky, 1950), 7–22.

33 See Michal Arbel’s article on the “ job-nik” soldier in the literature of the 1960s, and on the critical take regarding the Palmach ethos which it implies: Michal Arbel, “‘Minzar hashatkanim’: aliyato shel ha job-nik veir’ura shel hazehut hagavrit haloÿemet,” Mehkarey Yerushalyim besafrut ivrit 20 (2006): 285–307; and also Gershon Shaked, Gal ÿadash basifrut haivrit: masot al siporet yisraelit tse’ ira (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1971), 11–25.

34 “He wrote a private letter to Yolek himself, asking a personal favor. He wished his son to be allowed to volunteer. The mother was emotionally unstable. The boy would make a first-rate paratrooper. Shimshon himself accepted full responsi-bility. And incidentally, he had never before asked a personal favor. And he never would again. This was the one and only time in his whole life. He begged Yolek to see what he could do.” Amos Oz, “The Way of the Wind,” in Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Philip Simpson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 46.

35 And see, for instance, Yehoshua Kenaz, Hitganvut yehidim, trans. Dalya Bilu (South Royalton, Vt.: Zoland Books, 2003), 7, 18, 28.

36 Gluzman, Haguf hatziyoni, 226–27.

37 Sparta is mentioned several more times in the novel. For example: “’Would you have left him out there on the mountain with the lost children of Sparta?’ I asked. ‘But we’re all there already,’ said Micky. ‘Haven’t you realized that yet? This is the place!’” and also: “The stillness was broken only by the symphony of sounds coming from our sleeping squad. Snores, murmurs, a cough, a groan, a sigh, and a sudden cry. Yes, something sickly emanated from that building, like a foul miasma, the contagion of the flawed, rejected bodies of the lost children of Sparta, left out on the bleak mountain to die.” Infiltration, 30, 43, and 23. Also see Gluzman, Haguf hatziyoni, 223–25.


Winter 2013

38 Dror Mishani extensively discusses Mizrahi identity and the Mizrahi body in the novel, arguing that they are presented as a “surplus” identity and body that must be repressed and erased so that the physical unity to which the hegemonic national narrative aspires can be achieved. The reason for this is that Mizrahi bodies present their sexuality in a way that threatens Ashkenazi hegemony, whose aim it is to heal the effeminate and sickly Jewish body to the point of repressing its sexuality; see Dror Mishani, Bekol ha’inyan hamizraÿi yesh eyzeh absurd (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006).

39 I further discuss the mother-and-son relationship in Brenner’s story in my article “Ma hu amar la? Ha’em hayehudiya vabna haloÿem,” forthcoming in Teoria ubikoret.

40 I am referring to writers whose work critics have called “lean”—including Uzi Weil, Etgar Keret, Gafi Amir, Gadi Taub, and to an extent Ronit Matalon.

41 Aim Duelle Luski, “‘Dolly City,’” Teoria ubikoret 12–13 (1999): 359, 363.

42 Among those who wrote about the novel are Arianna Melamed, “Ha’epos ha’eymtani shel ha’imahut,” Ÿadashot, April 10, 1992, p. 22; Batya Gur, “Eymat ha’imahut shel Orly Castel Bloom,” Haaretz, May 8, 1992, p. 8b; Ariel Hirschfeld, “Tehomot me’ahorey ets hashesek,” Haaretz, May 29,1992, p. 8b.

43 Adi Ophir defined the concept of the “critical moment” in his introduction to a special issue of the periodical Teoria ubikoret as follows: “What is a ‘critical moment’? Something that has involved a critique of the ‘existing order’ (the ‘consensus,’ the ‘hegemonic culture,’ the ‘dominant ideology,’ etc.), or a refusal to accept this order, reflected in open opposition or in subversiveness of the kind that has undermined the basic assumptions of that order.” See also Teoria ubikoret: ÿamishim le’arbaim veshemoneh—momentim bikortiim betoledot medinat yisrael (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 9–10.

44 On the accords, see Yair Hirschfeld, Oslo: nus’ha leshalom, trans. Amos Carmel (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000); Ron Pundak, Aruts hasha’i: Oslo hasipur hamaleh (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2013).

45 Lev Grinberg, Shalom medumyan, si’ah milÿama (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007), 10.

46 Though some historians, today, believe that the Sinai War (Mivtsa Kadesh—the Kadesh Campaign), was a “war of choice,” i.e., a war initiated by Israel; and see Guy Laron, “‘Logic dictates that they may attack when they feel they can win’: The 1955 Czech–Egyptian Arms Deal, the Egyptian Army, and Israeli Intelli-gence,” Middle East Journal 63, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 69–84.

362 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

47 Raya Harnik, “Va’adat hakira takum,” Davar, May 5, 1985, pp. 7–8.

48 Lurie, Aviva, “Raya Harnik mahka et SHLG mehamatseiva shel Guni” Maariv, January 3, 1992, p. 7.

49 Translated into English by L. V. Snowman, in The Living Rampart, ed. Y. Haezrachi (London: Zionist Youth Council, 1948), 66–67.

50 Raya Harnik, Shirim leGuni (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983), 29.

51 The acronym ahusali—which, in Hebrew, stands for Ashkenazi, secular, socialist, and patriotic—was coined by Baruch Kimmerling, the sociologist, to refer to the section of the population that took the leading role in the formation of the state and dominated its power structures until the 1970s and since then has been involved in a “culture war” with other groups in Israel that demand power, recognition, and influence (Kimmerling, Kets shilton ha’ahuslim (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Keter, 2001). On the legitimacy of Arba Imahot based as it is on the combat service of its founding women’s sons, see Orna Sasson Levy, Zehuyot bemadim: gavriut venashiut batsava ha-yisraeli (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Magnes and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006), 38. On the events around the foundation of Arba Imahot, following Eran Shahar’s article “Imahot besherut hatsava,” published in February 1997 in Hakibutz weekly, see the article by the organiza-tion’s chair, Rachel Ben-Dor, “Haza’aka sheholida tenu’a,” written in 2001, which can be found in the organization’s partisan archives: http://library.osu.edu/projects/fourmothers/cry_hebrew.pdf. The ahusali connection and militarist identification is also palpable in Raya Harnik’s protest activity, as interviews with her often evince, as, for instance, in her statement that “Golani commanders don’t grow up in defeatist families” (Lurie, “Raya Harnik mahka”), or her way of presenting herself proudly as a “mother whose four children have served in the IDF” (Raya Harnik, “Kemo kol ezrah,” Haaretz, May 18, 1992, p. 1b).

52 See also Sara Metzer’s article, “Kolan hashotek shel imahot leÿayalim kravi’im,” in Emilia Perroni (ed.), Imahut—mabat mehapsikhoanaliza umimakom aÿer (Jeru-salem and Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009), 257–63.

53 In parallel, the “cultural work” aimed to preserve the division of roles between mothers and sons in combat service went on persistently. A typical, familiar example, to which Tamar Elor in her article on Dolly City draws attention, is the popular radio show, “Kola shel ima,” which has been broadcast on IDF Radio, Galey Tsahal, since 1969, and in which mothers of soldiers phone in to send greetings to their enlisted children, mostly to their sons, and sometimes even get the opportunity to talk to them on the air.


Winter 2013

54 As Smadar Shiffman rightly observed in the chapter dedicated to this subject in her book Dvarim shero’im mikan: David Grossman, Orly Castel Bloom, ve-Meir Shalev—me’ever lemodernizm? (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007), 110–116.

55 Orly Castel Bloom, Dolly City, trans. Dalya Bilu (London: Loki Books/Unesco Publishing, 1997), 146–47.

56 Manuela Dviri, “Hashehol kehavaya gufanit,” in Emilia Perroni (ed.), Imahut—mabat mehapsikhoanaliza umimakom aÿer, 270.

57 Tamar Elor, “Tna’im shel ahava: avodat imahot misviv lamaÿaneh,” Teoria ubikoret 19 (Fall 2001), 109.

58 And see, for instance, Anat Weisman, “Post-modernism ‘ready-made’,” Davar, May 22, 1992, p. 24.

59 Tamar Elor states that while Dolly subverts the conventional Israeli model of motherhood, breaks its prohibitions, and does not obey its rules, “this whole linguistic enterprise, which offers the reader a forbidden language by creating alienation, fear, laughter, and criticism—leads to the son’s enlistment. He joins them, becomes ‘normal,’ copes, grows up, separates” (“Tna’im shel ahava,” 109). In Elor’s reading, in Israel the structure of relations between mothers and their sons is so deeply determined by the national agenda that even a “crazy,” rebellious mother like Dolly cannot keep her son out of its grip. Whereas my reading is congruous with Elor’s in some respects, it disagrees with its conclusions; and see below.

60 From this perspective one can see why Ben-Gurion’s “Let all Hebrew mothers know . . .” statement became so popular and meaningful, and see note 17 above.

61 Shiffman tellingly calls Dolly “ir va’em be-yisrael”—a city and mother in Israel (2 Samuel 20:19) a phrase that excellently captures the symbiosis between, on the one hand, the national, and on the other familial and intimate aspects of Dolly’s mothering (Smadar Shiffman, Dvarim shero’im mi-kan, 113).

62 Dolly City, 60.

63 Ibid., 84.

64 Ibid., 32, 57, 78, 92.

65 Ibid., 170, 173.

66 Ibid., 90.

67 Ibid., 44.

364 y Dana Olmert

PROOFTEXTS 33: 3

68 Uri S. Cohen, Likro et Orly Castel Bloom (Tel Aviv: Ahuzat Bayit, 2010), 95.

69 Hanan Hever comments that “the most conspicuous effect of drawing the map on the boy’s back is the refusal to repress, and hence also to justify, the violence of the [military] occupation of the national domain.” See Hannan Hever, Hasipur hale’umi (Tel Aviv: Resling 2007), 237.

Documents

Mothers of Soldiers in Israeli Literature: The Return of the Politically Repressed