Customer Reviews

Preliminaries (Hebrew Classics S.)

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I can't praise this novel enough.



However, I need to start writing about it by calling into question the allegorical comments posted about from Booklist:





Hazel Rochman rightly says that the story is told from the point of view of a child. She then goes on to say that,



"The memory of being stung by wasps as a toddler is terrifying; it is also a metaphor for the land's response to invasion. Powerful coming-of-age fare, yet the style will limit the audience to adults."



In this Hazel follows the introductory remarks by Dan Miron who insists on the allegorical nature of the novel.



This claim is convincingly contradicted by the eminent American Hebraicist Robert Alter how in an important review of the book in The New Republic says about this incident:



"This small and weak boy is from time to time scared, as one would expect: when he suffers multiple hornet stings (Miron makes this a virtual allegory of the hostility of the environment and its natives to the Zionist settlers!); when he is lost in a masked crowd during a Purim carnival; when he passes an abandoned building with smashed windows, which looks to him as though some terrible act of violence had been perpetrated on it. Yet the recurrent thread in the novel is the child's constant discovery of the unguessed richness of the world." From The Flow by Robert Alter TNR 06.18.07



http://tinyurl.com/2vfl49







In other words reading the novel as an allegory about Zionism misses the rich narrative texture which explores existential realities and not political ones.



Alter says it best:



"Is Preliminaries in fact "about" Zionism? Miron seems to think that it is, representing the book as an unflinching account of the historical failure of Zionism, "a great prose threnody for the dream that has faded away." There is an element of truth in this contention, but the way Miron insists on the idea comes close to transforming Yizhar's autobiographical fiction into an allegory of the doomed fate of Zionism (allegoresis being a chronic malady of Hebrew criticism); and finally this is not what the novel is about."







Aside from exploring the existential realities of a young boy the narrative also plays with the richness of the Hebrew language enlarging it. As Alter says:







"The newness of the language, with a very old tradition behind it, is paramount to Yizhar's enterprise. His prose embodies an extraordinary degree of linguistic innovation. He invents words from existing Hebrew roots with an Elizabethan zest; he finds abundant ways to make the new Hebrew vernacular literary, while also drawing on the forms and the syntactic strategies of earlier Hebrew writing, both modern and classic. Reading him, one senses a Promethean impulse to refashion the Hebrew language so that it can comprehensively register the world in all its minute particularity--the landscape with its nuances of changing colors and textures and multifarious flora, the fluctuations of thought and sensation in the observing self."





The novel is then is a local story that like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist also embodies universal themes.



This too is excellently expressed by Robert Alter when he says:



"There is an odd paradox underlying Preliminaries that is directly linked to its strength as an autobiographical fiction. It is an intensely local novel, abounding in the social and cultural and material minutiae of Zionist life in Palestine during the 1920s and so also reflecting the course of the Zionist enterprise in this formative era and, implicitly, afterward. But it is at the same time a universal story, in some ways a very familiar story, about a sensitive child, something of a loner, discovering the multifarious world and beginning to glimpse the possibility that someday he might turn it into art."



Finally, rather than being a critique of Zionism the novel is a perfect expression of its success:



Alter again:



"Preliminaries is certainly an artistic success story, but in a peculiar way it is a Zionist success story, too. It includes passages of somber brooding about the ominous obstacles that stood in the way of the new settlement of the ancient land, and about the subsequent fate of the founding ideals of Zionism. Yet one aspect of the Zionist enterprise that is poorly understood outside Israel is that all along it has been not only about politics and geostrategic considerations, but also about the creation of a culture...."



People interested in Israeli fiction should read Alter's review alongside the novel. It is the introduction the story should have instead of the tendentious one it unfortunately is afflicted with.