ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Spoiling the Stories, Tamar Merin presents the as yet untold story of the rise of prose by Israeli women, while further exploring and expanding the gendered models of literary influence in modern Hebrew literature. The theoretical idea upon which this book is based is that of intersexual dialogue, a term that refers to the various literary strategies employed by Israeli female fiction writers expressing their voice within a male-dominated and (still) inherently Oedipal literary tradition. Spoiling the Stories focuses on intersexual dialogue as it evolved in the first three decades after the establishment of the state of Israel in the works of Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana Carmon, and Rachel Eytan. According to Merin, these three women writers were the most important in the history of modern Hebrew literature: each was a significant participant in the poetic development of her time.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

TAMAR MERIN is an Israeli novelist, literary scholar, and critic. She is currently a research fellow in the Gender Studies Program of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her critically acclaimed novel in Hebrew Yeladim (Children) earned her an Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize, the Kugel Award, and a literary prize from the Yitzhak and Rachel Goldberg Foundation. She received the 2014 Bernstein Award for Literary Criticism.

REVIEWS

“Merin accomplishes an important task: centralizing an unjustifiably marginalized body of literature whose unique value can now be understood. The subject matter is so interesting, so novel, and so paradigmatic that there is no doubt it will prove a valuable contribution to the fields of Women’s Studies and Israeli Literary Studies. This work is also a potentially useful tool for the understanding of Israeli culture in the 20th century, and the development of inter-sexuality in a society which was based on an invented masculine definition of the Jewish male." —Karen Alkalay-Gut, Professor, Tel Aviv University and Founder of the Israel Association of Writers in English

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"...Merin has done much to advance the field, offering a nuanced theoretical approach as well as subtle close readings that refresh rather than spoil our appreciation of Israeli women’s writing." —NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Intersexual Dialogue
Modern Hebrew Literature and the Bonds of Oedipus
Towards a Feminist Historiography of Hebrew Prose Fiction
Intersexual Dialogue in Israeli Women’s Prose Fiction

Chapter One
On the Absent Pen: Intersexual Dialogue as Melancholia in Yehudit Hendel’s Prose of the 1950s

Yehudit Hendel and the 1948 Generation
Hendel’s “melancholic” intersexual Dialogue with Agnon
The Fake Sabra: the Young Hendel Rewrites “The Doctor’s Divorce”

Agnon as an imaginary father
The return of the repressed past

Cracking the Mirror: Intersexual Dialogue as Melancholia in Re’hovha-madregot

Cracking Lacan’s mirror
In the wake of the absent mother
Aginut as melancholia
Cracking the realist mirror of the 1948 Generation

5. Getting Through the Dead Day with the Living Man
Chapter Two
The Secret that Makes a Hero of the Weak: Imaginary Fathers and Cross-Gender Identification in Amalia Kahana-Carmon’s Early Prose
1. Kahana-Carmon and the “New Wave”
2. Beyond the female Oedipus: intersexuality as cross-gender identification
3. “Ne’ima Sasson Kotevet Shirim”: Towards a Female Künstlerroman
* Ne’ima Sasson Writes Poems
* Ezekiel revealed
* “Ne’ima Sasson Kotevet Shirim” in dialogue with “In the Prime of Her Life”
* The secret that makes a hero of the weak
* Ne’ima Sasson writes prose
4. My Husband Was Revived at Night: Intersexual Dialogue in “Lev ha-kaits lev ha-or”

Ronen the Old Child
My husband was revived at night

5. To a cross gender ars poetica
Chapter Three
Spoiling the Stories: Rachel Eytan Revisits the Hebrew Künstlerroman
1. Where Has Rachel Eytan Disappeared To?
2. The Fifth Heaven: Towards a Subversive Künstlerroman
* Always spoiling the stories

3. Shida veshidot: The Hebrew Künstlerroman Revisited
* Eros or writing?
* Literary anti-initiation in “Ha-tzida”
* ‘Sendril the Housewife’ as a famous writer: Fogel’s Married Life
4. Rachel Eytan Returns
Epilogue
The Past that Cries Out for Change:
New Directions in Intersexual Dialogue

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