Finding Work in Israeli Fiction

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that contemporary Israeli literary criticism posits the nation as its horizon of interpretation, which has eroded Israeli literary criticism’s ability to detect newness in its objects of inquiry, and to present Israeli literary history as advancing through engagement with new social problems. I examine three literary works: A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 novella “Facing the Forests,” Etgar Keret’s Missing Kissinger (1994), and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007). For each, I show how critical commentary puts the nation as the center of interpretation. I then elaborate a critical position that sees the nation not as the point of critique’s termination,but as means toward trying to solve, in imagination, real social contradictions of its time. Thus, I argue that the fire in “Facing the Forests” is a figure for the threat of proletarian revolution under welfare-state capitalism; and that the fusion of realist narrative and its interpretive code in Keret’s Missing Kissinger signals a crisis of historicity whose origin is the proletarianization of Palestinians after the 1967; and lastly that Exit Wounds reestablishes Israeli historicity, using events of national significance – such as Palestinian suicide bombings – to represent the experience of precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism.