Uri Kahana's Impossible Autonomy: Moshe Shamir's He Walked in the Fields and the Question of Social Freedom in 1950s Israel

Abstract:This article provides a new reading of Moshe Shamir's He Walked in the Fields (Hu halakh basadot). In Hebrew literary historiography as well as popular culture, Shamir's novel—specifically its main protagonist, Uri—is read as an ideal, almost mythic representative of Zionist values, embodying patriotic sacrifice and virile masculinity. Contemporary readings of the novel have rightfully challenged this understanding, showing that Uri's character is not an ideal type of Zionist patriotic masculinity but a figure of its impossibility and failure. The reading in this article generally agrees with this revisionist line, but it is different from current readings in that it moves away from the main preoccupation of Hebrew literary studies to categorize Hebrew novels as affirmative or critical of Zionist ideology. Instead, it expands our understanding of Zionism from narrative and ideology to a historical form of life and situates the novel as a response to the historical tensions underlying it in the period during which the novel was written. Specifically, the author sees Shamir as trying to think through political questions of autonomy and heteronomy and to experiment with structure and character in order to engage with the question of freedom. In this effort, I retrieve the character of Rutka, who is usually sidelined in readings of the novel, and show her importance for Shamir's political thought.