Volume 41, Number 21 · December 22, 1994
Escape Artist
By Alfred Kazin
The Book of Intimate Grammar
by David Grossman, translated by Betsy Rosenberg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 343 pp., $22.00
'Israel is an ideological state,' Yitzhak Shamir declared when he was Israel's right-wing prime minister. Even in the Labor Party the ideology is more and more removed from its old vision of Jews united by the dream of socialism, but of course the official consensus in Israel remains that Jews belong together in a state of their own just because they are Jews. That desire for togetherness, now based more on terrible memories and common fears than on Zionism as a political philosophy, is the residual ideology of Israel. For some it can be hard to live with. A leading Hebrew University political scientist confided to me that he had taken to keeping a personal journal just to keep from feeling sucked in by the pressures of common opinion in a state already so regulated by images from history and so organized against enemies. 'Holocaust' is now such a figure of speech that it is used by settlers to protest the slightest impediment to Jewish expansion in the occupied territories.
Review, 2027 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |