village are resigned to the absolute sway their men have on their lives, as dictated by Islamic law; they will not come to the rescue of this woman or her rebellious daughter. The villagers mock her, saying, “She used to be a Jew, she used to be a Christian, and she used to be a Moslem—not one God wanted her” (196).
Clarissa resolves to kill her cruel son’s two-month-old daughter, entrusted to her care because the baby’s mother is ill. The grandmother’s decision to drown her little grandchild in a well is a horrendous deed that combines both revenge on her son and compassion for his daughter. Death is preferable to a woman’s existence in this kind of reality, Clarissa thinks. She sees herself as performing an act of charity—a mercy killing. She cleans the baby, feeds her, and hugs her, making her last moments as pleasant as possible, then gently puts her in the water.
The murder, which to some extent is also a symbolic suicide, is an act of desperation, meant to spare the little girl the suffering that is every woman’s lot in the Arab village: “the homelessness, the helplessness, her father and her brothers and her uncles, her husband and her husband’s brothers and her sisters’ husbands, who would close in around her, the household chores from one night to the next, the loneliness, the heart fluttering, encased in the body, the man in her bed, rolling her over as he wished, coming into her as into a wound, and the fear for her daughters and their spilled blood” (200).
This description attests to Liebrecht’s unique ability to explore a foreign reality and to grasp, with great sensitivity, what takes place there. She gives expression to the suffering of women in the Arab village, but without purporting to fully understand it. By making the protagonist a Jew who married a Moslem of her own free will, Liebrecht deliberately eschews “speaking for the ‘Other.’”23 Against this alien background, she is able to depict a woman in distress so extreme that it produces a horrendous reaction, and to make an emphatic protest against the kind of conditions in which infanticide might be understood as an act of loving kindness.
FEMINIST REVISION
In her first published story, “Apples from the Desert,” Savyon Liebrecht has pointed to a possible way out of the impasse that faces every woman in patriarchal society. Rivka, the young heroine of the story, recognizes the need to free herself from economic dependence on men in order to achieve equality with them. She joins a kibbutz, where she works for a living and is independent in every respect.24 Her decision to live with the man she loves without marriage is meant to ensure her absolute emotional freedom as well. For Rivka, her move is a revolutionary one, since the secular, basically Ashkenazic kibbutz is so different from the traditional, Sephardic community in which she grew up. Her decision is an expression of her rebellion against her father, who has ignored her all her life, thought she was an inferior specimen of womanhood, and tried to find a match for her without even consulting her.
In fact, Rivka’s departure from home is a concealed rebellion, since she never confronts her father. The confrontation takes place via her mother, Victoria, who comes to the kibbutz in order to bring her rebellious daughter home. But Victoria betrays the mother’s traditional role, dictated by the patriarchal system, of making daughters conform and accept male domination. Victoria not only fails to quell her daughter’s rebellion; she actually colludes with Rivka in keeping the father in the dark about what is going on. This surprising development has several causes. The first is Victoria’s rediscovery of her daughter through the eyes of the young man with whom Rivka lives. Victoria is moved by the way her daughter has blossomed and is amazed at the changes in her. Another reason is her identification with the young couple’s love, viewed against her own missed opportunity in her youth, an episode she recalls upon witnessing her daughter’s loving relationship.
Victoria decides to help her daughter realize her dream of a love-filled life, and not let Rivka languish, as she herself has, in a cold, loveless marriage. The bond between the women allows Rivka to help her mother gain a measure of freedom and independence, and at the same time allows Victoria to protect her daughter and offer her emotional support. Victoria’s decision to become her daughter’s ally is motivated by a symbolic dream she has in which the image of the lost beloved of her youth is merged with the image of the young man who wishes to marry Rivka. In the dream, this composite figure appears in the Garden of Eden, hinting at the wondrous nature of love. The apple held in the figure’s hand turns out to be “precious stones,” indicating the riches that love harbors (71).
But “Apples from the Desert” is a subversive story not only by virtue of its plot. It also employs “emancipatory strategies,” as defined by Patricia Yaeger. The suggestive title of the story highlights the motif of the apple, linking it through the dream to the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden. But Liebrecht’s Garden of Eden is an inversion of the biblical one; sexuality is not a sin here, and the woman is not viewed as responsible for the expulsion from paradise for having tempting the man to eat the apple. This is a sensual paradise, where the sin punishable by expulsion is the refusal to heed the call of love. Here it is the man who offers an apple to the woman, and she who must recognize its power.
The power that grows apples in the desert is the power of devoted love. The story creates an analogy between growing apples in the desert and making it bloom and the blossoming of Rivka, whose life was a wasteland as long as she lived in Jerusalem among family members who did not appreciate her virtues. Only when she found love did she become handsome—“milk and honey,” as her mother says. This expression, used in the Bible to describe the land of Israel as “the land of milk and honey,” creates an analogy between the love of the land and the love of a man for a woman. Liebrecht depicts an ideal reality, where love and fertility coexist in the image of a kibbutz named “Neve Midbar” (oasis). The heroine’s name, Rivka, also has symbolic overtones, since it recalls the independent spirit of the Biblical Rebecca, as discussed by Nehama Ashkenazi (12); the mother’s name, Victoria, underlines the triumph of sisterhood over patriarchy.
THE HEALING POWER OF STORYTELLING
This first publication in English of Savyon Liebrecht’s selected stories is indeed an important event. For readers outside of her native land, Liebrecht’s stories provide essential insights into contemporary Israeli society. But as really fine literature does, they also reach toward deeper truths that know no national boundaries. Liebrecht’s protagonists, in their own ways, commit quiet acts of courage or achieve small epiphanies of understanding, which change and often enlarge them as human beings—and through her fiction, she offers her readers the opportunity to do the same.
Liebrecht’s skill as a writer, combined with her perceptiveness, her compassion, and her deep humanity, create a body of work that is testament to the healing power of storytelling. It is a power that can help to close old wounds, to inspire new levels of empathy and understanding, to build bridges across the chasms that divide people—to make apples grow even in the desert.
Lily Rattok
Tel Aviv
March 1998
NOTES
1. In her youth, Liebrecht wrote two novels that were rejected by the publisher she approached, but her mature output in fiction consists entirely of short stories. Liebrecht has also written prize-winning film scripts, and one of her short stories has been made into a play.
2. Amalia Kahana-Carmon is one of the central figures in modern Hebrew literature, and, in my opinion, one of the two founding mothers of Israeli women’s literature (see Rattok, xx–xxv). A strong friendship formed between the well-known author and the fledgling writer, although it should be noted that Kahana-Carmon’s artistic influence on Liebrecht has gradually diminished over the years.
3. Quotations in this and the subsequent two paragraphs come from Liebrecht’s 1992 interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea.
4. In two stories, “Written in Stone” and “Dreams Lie,” the dynamics are of hostility giving way to reconciliation. “Dreams Lie” (from the collection Apples from the Desert), contains descriptions of an astonishing physical struggle between an old woman and her granddaughter. “Like two blind women, their fingers clutched at each other’s throats, grabbing hold of it with hatred, with a true intention to hurt, to beat unconscious, to cleanse the body