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characterizations of woman in contemporary Israeli literature, its
heroine Hannah is, on the simplest level, a moody, intelligent
woman married to a dutiful, if somewhat dull geologist named
Michael who lives in Jerusalem in the fifties. Michael’s father calls
Hannah a poet who doesn’t write poetry and indeed, the old man’s
compliment points to a recognizable type of woman who, sensitive
and perhaps, self-dramatizing, finds no outward forms or goals to
express this sensitivity. Hannah is attracted to Michael because of
his fineness and steadiness, but he is not exciting or sexually ag
gressive enough to satisfy or contain her violent emotions. He does
not create the hard reality for Hannah that she had expected from
him initially.
W e were together. I breathed his smell. He felt very real.
So did I. I was not a figment of his thoughts; he was not a fear inside me.
W e were real.
But Michael’s hard, everyday reality is too narrow for Hannah.
It does not satisfy her, yet she has nothing larger to replace it with.
So she escapes into a fantasy world where everything is possible. As
the book develops Hannah emerges as more than a dissatisfied, ro
mantic housewife. She lives increasingly in a sinister, nightmare
world peopled by demonic forces. She becomes more and more
hysterical.
I would still wake before dawn wide open to the evil voices and recurrent
nightmares, changing and limidess in their nuances. Sometimes a war. Some
times a flood. A railway disaster. Being lost. I was always rescued by powerful
men who saved me only to betray and abuse me.
Hannah’s violent underground world is obsessed by Arab twins,
boys whom she knew as a child. Now, she sees them as terrorists,
lurking in wait to attack from the other side of the then-divided
city. At the end of the book Hannah, submitting to fantasies fed by
powerfully destructive erotic-sadistic needs, dreams that she is
leading the Arab twins to attack Jewish Jerusalem.
Images o f Women