אליק נולד מן הים “Elik was born from the sea.” This famous first line of the book With His Own Hands, novelist Moshe Shamir’s memoir of his brother who died in the War of Independence, captures an attitude about Israeli society and history prevalent in the years before and after the rise of the State of Israel. Even as tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world were converging on the old-new homeland of the Jewish people, many felt that they were creating something new, entirely different from the Jewish past. The expression of Jewish pioneers, “We came to the Land to build and be built“–לבנות ולהיבנות–was understood by many as a call to cast off the Diaspora qualities of Jewish life, often seen as dependent upon the goodwill (or lack thereof) of others, as overly intellectual/spiritual and cut off from the land, as confined to a narrow range of professions. Many early Israeli stories gave voice to this feeling of alienation from the Jewish past and community abroad; a “Canaanite movement” of writers identified themselves with the ancient settlers of the land, bypassing some 3500 years of Jewish history.
With Israel’s growth in population and as a mature state, the relationship with the Diaspora deepened and that initial feeling of opposition softened (though never entirely disappeared). Israeli writers developed an interest in biblical stories, often seeking their resonance for contemporary events in Israeli life. Moshe Shamir himself authored two historical novels about King David, King of Flesh and Blood and The Hittite Must Die. David Grossman brought his novelist’s eye to the character of Samson in Lion’s Honey; Meir Shalev, who has written wonderful modern tellings of biblical tales for children, wrote the novel Esau as a story of modern sibling rivalry. For these and other writers, modern life in Israel is saturated by the presence of ancient Israelite characters.
With the era of the Abraham Accords, perhaps we will witness a new age of Israeli storytelling and historical self-consciousness. Will the new access to allies in the Middle East, with increased tourism and commerce with Arab countries, bring with it a sense of the revival of the Golden Age of Spain, when Jews and Moslems lived and worked in close proximity, and Hebrew and Arab writers inspired each other to produce masterpieces in both languages? A. B. Yehoshua’s novel A Journey to the End of the Millenium, set in the year 999 CE and published in 1999, similarly on the cusp of a new millenium, imagines an encounter between a Jewish businessman from the bustling city of Tangier, his two wives, and his Muslim partner with a third colleague in the backwater town of Paris. The book came out at a time of hope for new inroads between Israelis and their Arab neighbors, before several intifadas and military conflicts with Palestinians. Time will tell whether the new openings will usher in a new era for Israel and the region.