In both cases, the women literary workers existed and could be found. But is there no end to the aggressive need to ask that question, “Where are the women writers?”
I am particularly happy to welcome Apples from the Desert by Savyon Liebrecht. These are wonderful stories. They are told by a woman who knows she is living in a country occupied by two nations. She knows she is a citizen, a speaker, in a country, Israel, where one nation, the Israeli, looks down on or looks coldly upon the other nation, the Palestinian, and the other language, Arabic. And then she tells everyday stories about what those cultural and political facts are doing to the characters and ordinary lives of both groups of people—the way in which both are deformed: one by pride, one by despair.
She understands, as well, the damage rendered by the chasm of misapprehension and mistrust between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, between men and women, and between people of different generations—especially the older generation that lived through the Holocaust and the younger generation that would like to forget it.
She tells her stories with domestic irony—but it’s all straightforward history. The stories are elegantly understated and movingly personal—but they are also fierce pleas for understanding and justice. I compliment Savyon Liebrecht on her achievement. And I thank The Feminist Press again for bringing us women’s words in our own language and in translation from the rich other languages of the world.
Grace Paley
Hanoi, Vietnam
January 1998
The Healing Power of Storytelling
SAVYON LIEBRECHT IS considered one of the most impressive voices in contemporary Hebrew literature, and is among the most prominent women writers of fiction in Israel. She gained immediate public recognition with the publication of her first collection of short stories, Apples from the Desert, in 1986. Her maturity as a writer and her mastery of the art of short story writing were amply demonstrated in that first volume, which garnered her the Alterman Prize. Liebrecht continued to develop the short story form in her next three books, Horses on the Highway (1988), What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him (1992), and On Love Stories and Other Endings (1995).1 (It is from her first three collections that this volume of her selected stories—the first book by Liebrecht available in English—is drawn.) Her books were favorably received by the critics, and they also became bestsellers—an unusual phenomenon for a collection of short stories.
Liebrecht’s success, in literary as well as in commercial terms, stems from the fact that she knows how to spin an intriguing story. She excels in weaving gripping plots without sacrificing psychological insight and rich symbolic meaning. The dramatic element in her stories involves a clear conflict between characters—a conflict whose significance and implications are gradually revealed and whose solution is always surprising and interesting.
The social involvement that characterizes Liebrecht’s stories undoubtedly also figures in their warm reception. Her work deals with topics on the public agenda in Israel and have contributed a measure of profundity to the current debates. Liebrecht’s eloquent and fluent linguistic style has captured the unique qualities of various social and ethnic groups, and her stories reflect the diversity of the reality evolving in present-day Israel.
Liebrecht’s stories focus on issues that are specific to Israel but at the same time, because of her great sensitivity to human suffering and distress, they also address universal themes. Nearly all of her stories demonstrate a special compassion for characters who are oppressed or disempowered in society—members of the Arab minority, Sephardic Jews (the weaker ethnic group among Israeli Jews), women, children, and aging Holocaust survivors. In fact, this ability to empathize with the victim draws in part upon the experience of the Holocaust, which is at the center of Liebrecht’s writing—and her life.
BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
Savyon Liebrecht was born in Munich, Germany, in 1948, to parents who were both Holocaust survivors from Poland. She was their eldest daughter, born shortly after her parents’ liberation from concentration camps. When she was a year old, her parents brought her to Israel, where she was raised and educated.
During her military service, required of all young Israeli men and women, Liebrecht requested to serve on a kibbutz. After her discharge she went to London to study journalism. Disappointed with the level of instruction at her London school, Liebrecht returned to Israel and obtained a B.A. in philosophy and English literature. She married at the age of twenty-three and six years later had a daughter, then a son. She has raised her family in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Liebrecht admits that she guards her privacy jealously. This fact may be connected to the silence that reigned in the house of her parents, the Holocaust survivors. This silence was born of the parents’ inability to talk about their past experiences, and of the children’s fear that their questions might open up old wounds. In a 1992 interview with the poet Amalia Argaman-Barnea, Liebrecht spoke about the “silent home”; she cited as an example of the conspiracy of silence her own reluctance to question her father about the family he had before the war. The existence of that family was revealed to her only through an old photograph in a family album, in which her father is seen smiling happily in the company of a woman and a little girl.
The wall of silence did not crumble when the writer took a trip to Poland with her parents. Even though her father made an attempt to tell her about his past life, during a train ride to Treblinka concentration camp, he did so in Polish, a language that he had never spoken to her before and that she did not understand. One can feel the anguish in her realization that “he was finally telling me his story, but to this day I have not heard it.”
In an article Liebrecht wrote about the impact of the Holocaust on her writing (125), she again emphasizes the fact that she knows practically nothing about her parents’ past: how many brothers and sisters they had, what these siblings’ names were, and what happened to them during the war. She knows that her father was incarcerated in several concentration camps, but she does not know which ones. The silence her parents maintained regarding their experiences during the Holocaust was total. Liebrecht contends that this historical lacuna resulted in children of survivors developing problems of identity.
Her family background had a significant impact on one of the major developments in Savyon Liebrecht’s professional career: the delay in the publication of her first collection of short stories. She began writing fiction at eighteen, but her first novel was rejected by a publisher and she shelved it; later, she wrote another novel, but it was also rejected by the same publisher. When she got married, she stopped writing and channeled her creativity in other directions. She studied art and sculpture at an art institute, but soon sensed that this was not the right art form for her.
When she was thirty-five, she joined a creative writing workshop under the guidance of Amalia Kahana-Carmon,2 who immediately noticed her talent and encouraged her. Kahana-Carmon submitted Liebrecht’s story “Apples from the Desert” to a literary magazine, Iton 77. Following its publication, one publishing house offered to issue a collection of her short stories. Liebrecht wrote half the stories in her first book while it was in the process of publication.
This turning point in the acceptance of Liebrecht’s work can be attributed to several factors. One is the maturation of her artistic craft in the years between the rejection of her earlier works and the enthusiastic reception of her later ones. Another is the receptiveness to the female voice that has developed in Israel only in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Rochelle Furstenberg (5). In addition, Israel’s more open attitude and its acceptance of the Holocaust, a subject that Liebrecht sees as “the biggest riddle, not only regarding my own life, but regarding the entire human existence,”3 opened before her an avenue of expression that had perhaps been blocked, both for internal and external