Flesh of My Flesh looks at one of the most silenced and repressed aspects of Israeli culture by examining the trope of sexual violence in modern Hebrew literature. Ilana Szobel explores how sexual violence participates in, encourages, or resists concurrent ideologies in Jewish and Israeli culture, and situates the rhetoric of sexual aggression within the contexts of gender, ethnicity, disability, and national identity. Focusing on writings of incest survivors, Sepharadi authors, wounded soldiers, and Hebrew authors such as Shoshana Shababo, Gershon Shofman, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Yoram Kaniuk, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Tsvia Litevsky, Szobel unveils the various roles of sexual violence in destabilizing hegemonic notions or reinforcing norms and modes of conduct. Thus, while the book looks at poetic and social possibilities of action in relation to sexual violence, it also exposes the Gordian knot of sexualized gender-based violence and the interests of patriarchy, heteronormativity, nationalism, racism, and ableism.
Author(s): Ilana Szobel
Series: (SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture)
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 280
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Jewish Literature, Hebrew Literature
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction “A Great, Oppressive, Suffocating Blasphemy”: Sexualized Violence as an Insidious Trauma
The Trope of Sexual Violence
Sexual Violence: Affirming the Status Quo and Challenging It
“Your Own Private Bed”
The Illusion of Progress
Book Structure
Chapter One “Lights in the Darkness”: Prostitution, Power, and Vulnerability in Early Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature
“A Woman like That”
Gershon Shofman: Prostitution and Social Determinism
“And Ye Shall Suck One from the Other”: Gershon Shofman and Hayim Nahman Bialik
A Mise-en-Scène of Desire: The Trope of Prostitution
“My Sister . . .”
David Vogel: “A Suspect Hatred”
“From Nowhere to Nowhere / Without Me”: Conclusion
Chapter Two Sepharadi Jewry in Pre-State Israel: Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexual Violence in the Work of Shoshana Shababo
Arachne’s Legacy
The Daughter of the East: Writing Ethnicity
Sexual Violence and Ethnogendered Subjectivity
“While Bending She Could Not Bring Herself to Grasp the Land”: Zionism and Sexual Aggression
Nativeness: Shoshanah Shababo and Esther Rabb
“Quivering and Withering in Her Lusts”: Female Sexuality
Sexual Violence(s)
Conclusion
Chapter Three “Do Not Bandage the Wounded”: Wounded Soldiers and Nonconsensual Relations in Israeli War Literature
“In a World of Dark Horrors”
“You Easily Fall in Love with the Nurse”
Disability in the Heterotopian Hospital
Himmo, King of Jerusalem
“Like a Young Girl before Her First Intimacy”
“Break through the Siege”: Himmo’s Death
Access to Pleasure
A Doll’s Leg: A Story of a War Injury
The Seventh Glory: A Fighter’s Story
“Only a Brief, One-Time Baptism by Fire”: Conclusion
Chapter Four “Subduing the Terrible Sound of Silence”: Memoirs of Incest Survivors
Introduction
Intertwined Narratives
A Rhizomatic Story
“New Language”: An Alliance between Writers and Readers
The Person That Murdered You Is Also the Person That Made You the Best”
“Although the Selection and Fragmentation Err Reality, It May Actually Reinforce It”
“To Be Made Up of Separate Parts”
Summary: The Cliché of the Memoir
Chapter Five “The Girl with the Billy-Goat’s Hoof ”: Parental Abuse, Metamorphosis, and Poetics in the Poetry of Tsvia Litevsky
“Being Your Daughter”: The Father Figure
“Rebirth”
Calling It by Name: From Trauma to Art
“Any Distance / Is the Thrill of My Returning to You”: The Mother Figure
A Cry of Privation
“Ah, Let the Children Come”
Conclusion “Silence Cries Out”
The Untold Stories
An Apologetic Note
Amalia Kahana-Carmon: “Beer Sheva, the Capital of the Negev”
Wartime Sexual Violence
A Poetic of Dispersions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
