Fragments from the Past: Kaniuk's Witnessing and the Poetics of Displacement

Abstract:For over sixty years, the traumatic memories of the 1948 war haunted the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. His experiences of the fighting, his injuries, and the friends who were wounded or killed left their mark on Kaniuk's personality and became a source of inspiration for his writing. This article discusses the phases in Kaniuk's writings on the war by examining the numerous variants on an identical episode that reappear in his books and his written drafts. It argues that Kaniuk's process of writing on the traumatic events of 1948 shifts from a distal standpoint in the 1950s and 1960s to a much more intimate vision of personal testimony in his seminal novel 1948 (Tashaḥ) and shows that tracing Kaniuk's poetics of displacement can shed light on his process of becoming a witness.