Gloss

I'm flattered that Waggish considers me a "noted expert on Israeli literature," although I'm not quite sure that I deserve the title. But since he does cite me in his review of David Grossman's See Under: Love (1986) I do need to make something clear (and out myself in the process). Waggish writes:

A noted expert on Israeli literature tells me that the book had a massive impact when first published in Israel in the mid-80s, because unlike the strict narratives of authors like Wiesel and Appelfeld, Grossman's approach was out to contextualize the Holocaust in language and literature.

This isn't exactly what I said. With respect to the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, I remarked that up until Grossman, Appelfeld was the major (but not only) voice of the Holocaust in Israeli prose. That Appelfeld himself survived the Holocaust is no small matter but rather further legitimized his Holocaust fictions. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that his narratives are "strict" (What does this mean?) or even realist. Appelfeld skillfully exploits the conventions of realism to create narratives that are deeply concerned with language, history, memory and the looming threat of their breakage. His recent memoir contains long ruminations on losing the mother tongue and what it means to remember and to write in Hebrew, the adopted sfat ha-em (mother language). Like Dan Pagis, a Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor, the relation between the language of experience (Romanian and German, in this case) and the language of memory and writing (Hebrew) is tense, vexed, and problematic. Elie Wiesel fits in here in that he, a native speaker of Yiddish, writes of the Holocaust primarily in French (although an earlier and much longer version of La nuit was written in Yiddish). But the point that I was making when we talked (while measuring flour for a peach cobbler) had to do specifically with the novel's reception in Israel and how it compared to the Holocaust narrative of another Israeli author. Wiesel did not factor in that particular comparison. What distinguished See Under: Love was that Grossman was not a Holocaust survivor, and his novel attempted to imagine the Holocaust from the perspective of the second-generation, particularly (and this is a crucial distinction to keep in mind when reading the novel) the Israeli second-generation.