NEAR EAST.

Boullata, Issa J. ; Simawe, Saadi A. ; Ben-Chaim, Michael 等

General Area

Roger Allen. The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism. New York. Cambridge University Press. 1998. xxxvii + 437 pages. $95. ISBN 0-521-48066-3.

To write a one-volume historical survey of over fourteen centuries of Arabic literary production and put it in the context of its complex cultural environment is the challenge that Roger Allen has accepted when others may have considered it to be an unwise and well-nigh impossible task. The result is this very readable book, The Arabic Literary Heritage, useful and accessible to the general public and helpful as an introduction to the study of Arabic literature. True, the book has no footnotes and its "Guide to Further Reading" at the end of the volume is not a comprehensive bibliography. It is not a book for scholars looking for new findings of recent and original research. It is admittedly indebted to the translations and the critical and historical studies of many scholars, who are not acknowledged except very occasionally and inconsistently by in-text parenthetic references. Allen suggests that those who know the unacknowledged scholars might tell those who do not, in the manner of jokester JuE[degree sign]'s advice! Be that as it may, the book offers vast information based on the author's wide readings and presents an intelligible synthesis of the development of the Arabic literary heritage.

Allen does not follow the traditional periodization of Arabic literary history, which usually begins with pre-Islamic times, moves to the early Islamic period, then to that of the Umayyads and on to the golden age of the Abbasids, before passing quickly over the period of "decadence" to reach the nineteenth-century renaissance and the novelties of the modern period. Rather, he offers a diachronic analysis of Arabic literary genres, devoting successively a chapter to each, following a short essay on his organizing principles and another on the civilizational contexts of the Arabic literary tradition.

He rightly begins with the Qur'[degree sign]n because of its centrality in Arab life as a sacred text and as a cultural yardstick, continually affecting all things including literature. Studying its structures and imagery, he shows the Qur'[degree sign]n to be a genre of its own. Then he moves to the book's longest chapter, the one on poetry, analyzes the Arab concept of poetic art, and examines its themes and place in Arab culture, citing in translation good but brief illustrations from segments of well-known poems. He then moves to a shorter chapter on belletristic prose and narrative, showing their elite and popular varieties, and ends with the development of modern Arabic fiction. His next, still shorter chapter is on drama; it begins with references to the Shi'[superscript one] ritual of the passion play of Husayn's martyrdom and medieval dramatic arts like the shadow play, puppet shows, and oral storytelling, then moves to modern developments in the Arab theater, with a special section on Tawf[superscript one]q

al-Hak[superscript one]m's achievements. The final chapter, on the Arab critical tradition, covers the earliest philological works, then moves to the major critics of the Abbasid period, including those dealing with the Qur'[degree sign]'s inimitability, and ends with a variety of modern critics.

The book contains many errors that the usually alert Cambridge editors should have eliminated. For example: the date of al-Ma'aar[superscript one]'s death is given as 1058 (pp. 5, 201), 1057 (121, 187, 268), and 1958 (163)! The date of al-Sayy[degree sign]b's death is listed both as 1964 (12, 100, 211) and 1956 (xxxv, 103, 405). Wrong transliterations from Arabic include marthiyya (156) for marthiya, Sifr al-faqar (211) for Sifr al-faqr, and [inverted question mark]aflat samr (350) for [inverted question mark]aflat samar. The definite article al- is wrongly used on page 199 in Scrat al-Hcd (correct: Scrat Hcd) and on page 215 in Al-A'zar 1962 (correct: La'[degree sign]zar 1962). But these and other infelicities should not detract from the value of Allen's book, which satisfies a need among general readers and is of great help to beginning students of Arabic literature.

Issa J. Boullata

McGill University, Montreal

Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor, Stefan Wild, eds. London. Saqi. 1998. 342 pages. [pound]35/$55. ISBN 0-86356-727-4.

Writing the Self is a collection of twenty-four studies of autobiography as a genre in modern Arabic literature. The book is divided into three thematic sections, titled "Voyages of Self-definition," "Autobiography from Theory to Practice," and "The Female Voice." Edwar al-Kharrat's foreword provides a useful novelist's perspective on the alchemy of autobiography and fiction. Some of the articles, in particular Stefan Wild's and Susanne Enderwitz's, are devoted to questioning the view that autobiography is a new genre in Arabic and therefore it must be, like the Arabic novel, an imported Western art, or at least influenced by the West.

Contributions by Enderwitz and Boutros Hallaq explore the possibility of "honest" autobiography in the perennial absence of democracy in the Arab world. The impact of tradition combined with the absence of human and civil rights makes writing the self almost impossible or only possible by pushing autobiography closer to fiction. The volume includes studies by Paul Shakely and Yumna al-Id on the overlapping of autobiographical fiction and fictive autobiography in modern Arabic literature. But this generic hybridity should not be considered peculiar to Arabic autobiography, since the genre itself is controversial in Western literatures. Recent theories of autobiography, especially Paul de Man's and Gerard Genette's, further complicated by the notion of the death of the author, make one wonder whether democracy is a relevant issue. Writing the self or writing the self's fantasy inherently involves fictional elements and cannot escape the tropological demands that the very nature of writing necessitates.

Another important issue which several articles discuss is the complex relationship between Arabic autobiography and the discovery of the West as a result of European colonialism. This issue figures prominently in articles by Rasheed el-Enany, Rosella Ceccato, Paul Shakely, and Richard van Leeuwen, all of whom discuss early Arabic autobiographies by authors from Egypt and Lebanon, the two Arab countries that historically have been more open to the West. In the autobiographies discussed, the narrators go to the West for education and experience culture shock, which makes them keenly aware of their own culture. The crisis of this new self-awareness occasions the need to write the self. Each author of these autobiographies, as the studies show, writes not the self but the self in its encounter with the West. Hence early Arabic autobiography becomes both a defense of the colonized self against the West and an occasion for both self-criticism and a search for identity.

Yet the studies make one wonder, as Hallaq does, whether the self in the autobiographies represents the author's self or the collective or national self, as is the case in most literature of subjugation. The issue becomes even more complex in the discussion of female autobiography. Colonized both by the West and by Arab patriarchy, the female voice, as Ndja Odeh and Dina Manisty argue, tends not only to be more fictive, but even more symbolic-a fact that profoundly complicates the generic definitions of autobiography in the Arab world. By exploring tensions between gender and genre, the West and the Arab East, the private and the public, and the autobiographical and the fictive, Writing the Self offers stimulating possibilities for teachers of Arabic literature, Arabic studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Saadi A. Simawe

Grinnell College

Israel

Aharon Appelfeld. The Iron Tracks. Jeffrey M. Green, tr. New York. Schocken. 1998. 192 pages. $21. ISBN 0-8052-4158-2.

Aharon Appelfeld was eight when he witnessed the murder of his mother by the Nazis. After escaping from a concentration camp, he wandered for a while in postwar Central Europe and emigrated to Palestine in 1946. He has been exploring the existential themes of the Holocaust for more than forty years.

For many Jewish survivors of the Nazi horrors, the Holocaust presents an experience and a memory that defies the language human beings ordinarily use to describe their world and life. In The Iron Tracks, as in Appelfeld's other books, the reader is invited to share the survivors' experience, but is never taken directly or explicitly into the Nazi hell. The experience itself is apparently too singular to be rendered meaningful in the context of our everyday life. So The Iron Tracks sets out a thought experiment: if one were to experience the most horrible trauma possible, and yet survive it, what would his or her life be like afterward? It would definitely be a human life, but what would its human content be, and what would remain of its vitality? Are there any human qualities and dispositions which are indelible, come what may? What is the meaning of love and friendship, curiosity or jealousy-or, for that matter, how does a good meal taste-in life after hell?

Erwin Siegelbaum lives through such a thought experiment, because he somehow feels that he has no other choice. He does not want, perhaps cannot truly envisage, nor believes in, "normal" life again. So what does he do? He has no home, no permanent relations. He is emotionally and mentally unable to stay in one place, and so he finds himself living in trains, roaming from one station to another, visiting for short periods small villages along the way. Every station is marked out by recollections of the world of his childhood, his parents who devoted their lives to the ideals and illusions of revolutionary communism, and the Jewish tradition they deserted. The train, which has become for many survivors of the Holocaust the symbol of transportation to death, is now the vehicle for the pilgrim's journey through a beautiful country which, at the same time, maps out the desolate, barren wasteland of people who are no longer alive. In his endeavor to rehabilitate himself, Siegelbaum becomes an expert in discovering Judaic articles that were left behind by the dead. He sets up a business which enables him to keep on going and eventually brings him to the final station of the pilgrimage, where he meets the Nazi officer who had once murdered his parents.

The Iron Tracks is a fascinating literary attempt at coming to terms with a collective Jewish identity for whom redemption perhaps has always been the business of life.

Michael Ben-Chaim

Israeli Institute of Technology

Yitzhak Ben-Ner. Rustic Sunset & Other Stories. Robert Whitehill, tr. Boulder, Co. Rienner. 1998. v + 183 pages. $25. ISBN 0-89410-804-2.

The characters in Yitzhak Ben-Ner's eight stories are plodding through lives of quiet desperation, housed in settings that match their moods. In "Cinema" the protagonist is an impotent Tel Aviv resident who spends his life going to films in order to avoid situations he cannot cope with. He bears the mockery of everyone, from his employees to his ex-wife, in silence. Similarly, the controversial military ex-hero in "Nicole" is "a closed book," a tormented man who has never cried but who can no longer sleep, for he is too afraid of where his dreams will take him. Cut of the same cloth, the protagonist in "Dime Novel" calls himself "a man who's lost his way" and his wife, a poet who attempts suicide, "a high priestess of torment."

Not only individuals lead tortured lives in Ben-Ner's world; so do whole communities. In "Winter Games" a rural Israeli village is at war with itself as well as with the Mandatory British government. Its "twenty years of life [have] been twenty years of old age." In poverty-stricken Kokomo, a town in rural Indiana, when a family converts to Judaism, they are ridiculed equally by their Christian relatives and their Jewish "fellow" congregants. And in "Rustic Sunset" the circumscribed world view of the narrator's native Israeli village has destroyed his potentially happy marriage. There, even nature conspires against mankind, and the sunset is "drowning [the] village in a hostile crimson."

In every story the social and physical environments are actively destructive. The bereaved father in "Eighteen Months" is unable to find comfort in anything or anyone. After his son's death he senses that catastrophe is waiting for everyone, just around the corner. The mood of despair reaches a climax in the final story, "A Tale of Two Brothers," as the death of a brother leads the narrator to speculate on the demise of his entire heritage.

Sleepless nights, recurrent dreams, and nightmares plague Ben-Ner's major characters, and any significant decision that his usually indecisive protagonists make is regretted by them for the rest of their lives. From love gone awry to the loss of a spouse, from the abandonment of one's native land to the end of history itself, every nuance of human disappointment and failure is represented in his stories. What makes all this anguish quite bearable-to the reader, not the characters themselves-is the author's remarkable control of language and his absence of sentimentality. His style is highly descriptive, and his sensitive handling of colloquial conversation portrays social class, level of intelligence, personality, and mood better than any string of adjectives. Finally, the translation seems quite faithful to the richly detailed text and leaves the reader convinced of the authenticity of the dialogues.

Leslie Cohen

Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Israel

Savyon Liebrecht. Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories. Marganit Weinberger- Rotman et al., trs. Grace Paley, foreword. Lily Rattok, intro. New York. Feminist Press at CUNY. 1998. 234 pages. $19.95. ISBN 1-55861-190-8.

The stories collected in Apples from the Desert are pentimento portraits of people whose current personalities and behaviors are a fragile patina over the tragic events that have shaped them. Some of the underlying anguish in Savyon Liebrecht's characters originates in the Holocaust. Their emotional crippling also stems from intergenerational conflict, cultural and sexual stereotyping, animosity between Arabs and Jews, or the untimely death of a loved one. Most of the stories are told through a feminine narrator or focus on a female character. The resolution of conflict, as well as the preservation of memory, is in the hands of Liebrecht's women.

Liebrecht is the child of Holocaust survivors and treats the related sociological phenomena from the vantage point of an insider. Her stories about unresolved Holocaust dilemmas are all aftermath stories: they do not describe Holocaust experiences, but rather the outcomes of those horrors. In "Mother's Photo Album" a young man, troubled by his mother's prolonged hospitalization in a mental institution, becomes a doctor. As the story unfolds, we learn that his mother went insane after her husband abandoned her, leaving her alone with her infant son. The husband had been married before the Holocaust, and his former wife located him years after he had given her up for dead, demanding that he return to her. Several other Holocaust-related stories deal with sexual abuse and its influence on the second generation of survivors. In "Excision" and "Hayuta's Engagement Party" the bizarre behavior of Holocaust survivors is explained via their flashbacks.

Several stories describe the uneasy relationship between Arabs and Jews. "A Room on the Roof" portrays a situation in which a woman's attempt to eschew the stereotypes only exacerbates the tension. In contrast, "The Road to Cedar City" shows an Arab and a Jewish woman who overcome their ethnic stereotypes, ignoring the adversarial voices of the males surrounding them to form a bond based on motherhood and nurturing. "What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him" depicts a mother-daughter conflict that persists even after the mother's death, but several other stories describe reconciliation between women of different generations, even mothers and daughters. "The Homesick Scientist" is written from the point of view of an aging man. By dealing with his unresolved conflict with his nephew, he comes to terms with his past and finds that he can accept his own death.

Apples from the Desert is the first English translation of Liebrecht's work, and it comprises stories from several of her earlier collections. Although the stories are distinctively Israeli-and can be read as an introduction to Israeli literature and society-they have universal elements that will find their parallels in many other cultures. More important, Liebrecht's prose is lyrical and has been rendered here in a poetic language that transcends sociocultural considerations.

Leslie Cohen

Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Israel

Aharon Shabtai. Love and Selected Poems. Peter Cole, tr. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Sheep Meadow. 1997. xxiv + 222 pages. $24.95. ISBN 1-878818-53-8.

The distinctively Israeli poetic diction was established in the early years of statehood by such Hebrew poets as Yehuda Amichai and Natan Zach, who introduced idiomatic language into a tradition that had hitherto been conventionally formal and literary. The Hebrew of the prominent practitioners of the earlier generation had been far removed from the new and sometimes raw argot that was becoming current and increasingly accepted as an expression of the nationalism of the new state.

The successor generation has taken the process a stage further. Aharon Shabtai's language is stripped down and direct in the extreme. This may sound paradoxical in view of the paramount use of classical Greek material, but the Greek sources are not stitched on for the sake of adornment or in order to insert an additional learned element, as might befit a university teacher of Greek. They are an inherent aspect of the natural expression of the poet. In the volume of English translations Love and Selected Poems, selections are made from nine of Shabtai's Hebrew collections, dating from the early 1970s to the present day. What is remarkable is the degree to which Greek expression and mythical modes have become integral to the feeling life of the poet, as expressed in these agonized texts. However "literary" the form, the language matches and contrasts with unadorned vernacular and scatological imagery. But we also see that the scatological is invested with the numinous. The Greek gods, and the powers that they send to us, reign both above and below, and they become part of the totality of base man, with his brain, his spirit, and his sex.

In response to the implied question posed in the sequence of poems "Love" (1986), "What is love?," which accounts for nearly half of the volume, the terms are reduced to their fundamental elements, literally from top to bottom. Shabtai's primary subject is the dual nature of man. But it is a duality which is also a unity. The difficulty of the lover, as described here, is to get hold of love's object, the beloved and the desired. But in the effort to achieve this, he is frustrated by the smoothness of the body grasped. Through Greek experience, the poet expresses his own love and passion; in maturity, he has learned about his youth. Love is the only antidote to death, the sole moment of compensation, as conveyed by Apollo. The holy and the profane exist side by side, set there by the gods and playing themselves out in man. Put less abstractly, these forces are rendered in the sensations thus expressed by the poet. This is the way that a love poem to "D" is composed. The poet not only accepts the dictates of the gods; he also challenges them.

Peter Cole's translations superbly capture the stark rhythms and cadences of the original, even struggling to convey wordplays and allusions. They also preserve the forms and genres of the Hebrew; the sonnets of the recent volume "The Heart" (1995) are rendered as English sonnets (there are thirty-two of them, as suggested by the numeric value of the Hebrew word for "heart," lev). Accurate and representative, they bring to life a substantial segment of the work of this enormously high-charged and talented poet.

Leon I. Yudkin

University College London