SHAI GINSBERG

"THE ROCK OF OUR VERY EXISTENCE":  ANTON SHAMMAS'S ARABESQUES 

AND THE RHETORIC OF HEBREW LITERATURE

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Prime Minister, ordered the opening of a new gate to an archaic tunnel that connects the precinct of the Western Wall/Buraq with the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. In the shaft, Netanyahu asserted, he touched “the foundation stone of our [national] existence, without exaggerating.”

Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques was published ten years earlier, in 1986. A few pages into the novel, the novel’s protagonist-narrator and author’s namesake tells of a key moment that took place in the mid-1950s when—as a young child—he stood on a boulder in the center of the garden behind his Uncle Yusef’s house and learned that he was named after a cousin who either died in infancy or was adopted by an affluent Lebanese family. Rather than a foundation stone that affirmed Anton’s identity, the boulder became a point of departure for a tortuous search both for his lost cousin and for his own identity as an Israeli, a Palestinian-Arab, a Christian, and a storyteller (not necessarily in that order).

In what follows, I propose to read Anton Shammas’s Arabesques and the critical debate that followed its publication between these two moments or topoi: Netanyahu’s identification of the “foundation stone of our existence” and the boulder in the center of the garden behind Uncle Yusef’s house. I shall argue that the two correspond to two rhetorical tropes—symbol and irony, respectively—that shape not only Shammas’s novel and its reception but also, ultimately, Israeli political discourse.

a.

The publication of Anton Shammas’s Arabesques stirred a heated debate both in Israel and in the United States, a debate that still echoes in recent essays and articles: how is one to read a novel written in Hebrew by a Palestinian-Arab? How is one to account for Shammas’s decision to “forsake” his national language—Arabic—and to adopt Hebrew as the language of his novel? And how is one to read the novel’s rich and resonant Hebrew, which among other things testifies to a command of the language that far surpasses that of most of its Jewish native speakers? This critical preoccupation with the language of Arabesques echoes Shammas’s own ruminations in numerous articles and essays on the political implications of his choice of Hebrew. In “Your Worst Nightmares,” for instance, he writes:

What I’m trying to do––mulishly, it seems—is to un-Jew the Hebrew language, to make it more Israeli and less Jewish, thus bringing it back to its Semitic origins, to its place. This is a parallel to what I think the state should be. As English is the language of those who speak it, so is Hebrew; and so the state should be the state of those who live in it, not of those who play with its destiny with a remote control in hand.

Underscoring the inseparability of the aesthetic and the political, Shammas in effect demands that his readers perceive fully the political implications of the aesthetics of Arabesques.  The novel’s Hebrew should, he argues, be perceived as part of a strategy to challenge, in Baruch Kimmerling’s words, the construction of Israel “as a homogenous ethno-national entity and identity,” in an attempt to replace it with “a new local national identity, or nationality, common to Jews and Arabs of the country, and based solely on state citizenship and territory.”