Review of Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (original) (raw)
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Pelle Valentin Olsen, Review of Poetic Trespass
Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2014. 337 pp. isbn 978-0-691-16248-5 (hardcover). Poetic Trespass offers an important study of writing that exists between Hebrew and Arabic, and an insightful analysis that separates linguistic from national identity. Through an impressive number of writers Levy introduces her readers to this fascinating 'no-man's-land' , a term she borrows from a poem by the Palestinian poet Anton Shammas, of Hebrew and Arabic writing. According to Levy, the 'no-man's-land' is 'at once a space between Hebrew and Arabic and a space outside the ethnocentric domain that equates Hebrew with " Jew-ish, " and Arabic with " Arab " ' (3). Surveying the multiple ways of inhabiting this 'no-man's-land' created in the interstices of nationalist monolingualism, Levy sheds light on what it means to write across and in spite of linguistic borders entrenched by nationalist imaginaries and decades of conflict. In fact, one of the most pertinent undertakings of the book is that it consistently makes the study of language and literature not only relevant but necessary and indispensable. With a few asides into 'Ashdodian' (a secret language invented by the Moroccan-born poet Sami Shalom Chetrit), Baghdadi Jewish dialect, and Aramaic, the book is mainly concerned with Palestinian Israelis and Arab Jews writing in both Hebrew and Arabic, and first, second, and third generation Arab Jewish and Mizrahi writers who switched to Hebrew or who mobilize the remnants of the rapidly disappearing Arab Jewish linguistic reality. Poetic Trespass draws together narratives ranging from the pre-state to the contemporary period in Israel in an attempt to push the boundaries of the troubled present and its political realities. The first section revisits the history of the foundation and development of Modern Hebrew language and literature and succinctly describes how Arabic 'played a central, formative, yet paradoxical role in the self-definition of Modern Hebrew from the very outset' (21) while simultaneously explaining, and challenging, the Eurocentric and myopic narratives of the canonization of Modern Hebrew literature. Levy does so by drawing attention to the forgotten history of non-European and often multilingual Jewish modernity and literary production from Baghdad to the Balkans. She contends that 'Modern Hebrew literature was severed from the history and culture of Arabic-speaking Jews, and how the Hebrew cultural establishment became associated with the exclusion of Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Arab Jews' (102). As such, Poetic Trespass is also 'a historical counternarrative: an alternative story of the evolution of language and ideology in the Jewish state' (5). A welcome innovation is that Levy takes language itself, rather than identity, as her primary focus and highlights the influence of language in informing our
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Arts 8, no. 4: 157. , 2019
This research pinpoints a local pattern of migratory aesthetics recurrently employed by four Israeli artists in the early years of the 21st century. I argue that works by artists Philip Rantzer, Gary Goldstein, Haim Maor, and David Wakstein showcase a hybrid migratory self-definition that is embedded in the artistic language itself. By harnessing a collagistic language of juxtaposition and fragmentation, they frame Israeli identity as uncanny, reflecting a cultural mindset of being neither "here" nor "there". I contend that this pattern is used by a particular generation of artists, born in the early 1950s, and reflects a reaction, in hindsight, to the Zionist ethos of collective local identity. Employing old photographs from their family albums that they transform into framed detached figures, these artists draw upon childhood memories of immigration. Their art marks an identity clash between two homelands, which is the result of intertwined aesthetic and socio-cultural characteristics. The first is evident in the prevalent use of collage in local art-in itself a language of oppositions. The second is the negation of the diaspora in the Israeli socio-cultural mentality, which constructs identity through binary thinking. To date, no other study has acknowledged this aesthetic pattern nor the common ground these artists share in their works.
Arts 2019, 8(4), 159, 2019
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