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SILBERSCHLAG / ARABS IN HEBREW FICTION
33
A helpless, harm less individual is b rough t into the world in pov
erty and leaves it in u t te r destitution. What he does is useful; what
he experiences is exploitation.
As a m e tapho r o f aggrieved humanity, Jum a rep resen ts the
innocence o f an Arab Alyosha. Though Shami lacks the vigor o f
Dostoevsky, he creates — like his Russian predecessor — a life o f
innocence against a background o f greed and corrup tion . And in
“In the Sands o f the Desert” he conveys the p roud and passionate
devotion o f the Bedouin to an Arabian mare — a story o f love for
equine grace, “the best, the most beautiful mare of Arabia,”
w ithout the sensationalism and violence o f “Equus.”
What Shami did for the Arab man, Menahem Kapeliuk has
recently done fo r the Arab woman. Especially in the first of three
stories which is also the title o f the collection — in “T he Bitterness
o f the Women o f Holholita”— he concentrated on the d rab life of
the Arab woman in an Arab village. The subjection to the hus
band, the insults su ffered in silence, the brutality borne with
dejection and despair, the petty rivalries with the second and even
th ird wife in the household — these are the daily measures o f
misery alloted to her. In squalor and degradation she raises her
children and perform s h e r housework — the menial and the
not-so-menial tasks — with inne r protest and ou te r fatalism.
T rad itional Islam favors the man. Hence the fear o f women,
particularly young women, o f “marriages-in-exchange” : old
Arabs marrying o ff daugh ters to ano ther old Arab who, in tu rn ,
would re tu rn the favor and marry off his daugh te r to his newly
acquired father-in-law. In Kapeliuk’s story a girl is on the verge of
suicide because her b ro th e r plots h er dismal marriage to an old
man.
The novelty o f the plot in Kapeliuk’s stories is a refreshing
antidote to the hackneyed intrigues o f love in the European
novel. Though his characters lack the resilience and the indi
vidual traits which are the hallmarks o f Shami’s stories, they are a
significant addition to the meagre gallery o f Arab women in
Israeli fiction.
BURLA’S THEMES
Kapeliuk is not the discoverer o f Arab womanhood; he is the
portraitist o f her inner life in fiction. In he r relationship to men —
Arab o r Jewish — she had an earlier discoverer. Yehudah Burla