Yitzhak Shami: Ethnicity as an Unresolved Conflict

Abstract

Yitzhak Shami (1889–1949) wrote fiction in Eretz-Israel, but from an unusual perspective for the times—the Mizrahi perspective. He chooses for himself a complex speaking position—a speaking site located in the space between two cultural options. One is Hebrew Jewish literary writing, the norm of which is perceiving the Arab as an enemy endangering the materialization of the Zionist project. But at one and the same time his stories expose a profound commitment to give voice in Hebrew to Arab culture, and a strong fascination for it. This dual position comes to its solution through the portrayal of the major protagonists. His systematic mode of resisting the West and avoiding its rule over Arab culture, expressed especially in his novella "Fathers' Revenge," is by placing in the center of his stories, instead of an autonomous, independent subject typical to the national literature, characters who turn out to be fragmented and decentered, and who finally fall apart.