Coming to grips with the Shoah in Hebrew fiction

This essay examines several Holocaust tales written by Shulamith Hareven, was one of Israel’s pre-eminent authors whose stories constantly emphasise the profound estrangement and sadness of life that her immigrant principals, many Holocaust survivors, who settle in Israel, experience as they are burdened by a stifling past and a smothering psychological legacy that cannot be shed. Lacking comforting and sustaining relationships, their inner balance is vulnerable to the assault of the indelible European tragedy that is engraved and carved onto their damaged psyche, persistently threatening to unravel their personal peace or sanity. The article explores how Hareven crafts characters whose fragmented, harrowing memories, are foregrounded in a constellation of quotidian gestures, accents, longings and nightmares, deeply overshadow the lives of the characters trying to reconstruct a shattered existence in Israel. Hareven revels in probing the irony of a people who left the Diaspora to find a home in Israel but failed to do so, emotionally severed from society and living as outsiders in their new adoptive country. In alliance with the sorrowful undertow of the tales, the author infuses her settings, in particularly Jerusalem, with a wounded landscape, redolent with shadows and inescapable darkness