Cover girls

Is anyone still afraid of Virginia Woolf? In other words, hasn't the debate about women's writing and women's literature worn thin in recent years? If you ask literary and culture studies scholar Tamar Mishmar, a poet, the answer is no. According to Mishmar, questions such as "Is there such a thing as women's writing?" and "What does writing like a woman (if there is such a thing) mean?" have not been subject to meaningful discussion in Israeli culture. Now Mishmar has edited a special book-format edition of the Iton 77 literary periodical entitled "Who's afraid of the Virginias?" which has just been released.

Though it has been a long time since women were a minority in each successive generation of Hebrew writers, Mishmar said the book seeks to examine what women in Israel are writing now, what concerns them in life and art, and in this way to see whether their work contains a critical attitude toward the dominant male culture.

The list of contributors is long, distinguished and multigenerational: the poets Agi Mishol, Maya Bejerano, Tirza Attar, Sharon Hass, Bracha Serri, Yehudit Shahar and Sabine Messeg; scholars Orly Lubin, Tova Cohen, Yaffa Berlowitz, Ketzia Alon, Roni Halperin, Dina Haruvi and Yael Munk; writers Leah Aini, Anat Einhar, Esti G. Haim, Sara Shilo, Yehudit Katzir and Einat Yakir; and artists Chen Shish, Eti Abergil and Tal Shochat. The book's art editor is Ruti Direktor.

The topics of discussion include relations among women, gender identities, relations between the sexes, auto-eroticism, anorexia, socioeconomic class and ethnicity. Mishmar noted "a highly visible and unapologetic feminist viewpoint in some of the poets writing over the last decade, such as Anat Zachariah and Yonit Ne'eman. These women, in their late twenties or thirties, grew up differently."

The book was written exclusively by women. Why? "We thought we needed to create a temporary ghetto in order to start talking about the issue," Mishmar said.

Orly Lubin situates the discussion about women's writing in its current context. Yehudit Katzir examines the legacy of Virginia Woolf in a personal essay on her influence on contemporary Israeli women's writing. Ronit Libermansch presents a dialogue between two women that refutes the automatic connection between motherhood and femininity.

The contributors also include Palestinian Samia Atout, whose stories, "with their particular symbolism, remind us that women under occupation are doubly oppressed and perhaps even triply," Mishmar said. "The inclusion of stories by Palestinians in this so Jewish-Israeli book is itself a reproduction of the occupation, but also a reminder, a refusal to ignore it."

Mishmar admitted that in the United States and Europe this discussion is not new; there, it began in the 1970s. But in Israel, she said, it has still not enjoyed a full public airing.

"There's a difficulty in establishing continuity in Israeli culture," she explained. "A discussion is considered 'old' before it has been taken seriously." She added that the contemporary Israeli debate revolves around the very validity of the earlier one.

In the past, the subject was viewed in terms of the "feminine" characteristics of writing, those connected to images, plot and content, Mishmar said. Positioning a relationship between mothers and daughters at the center of a work, for example, was considered such a characteristic, and innovative at the time. Today the question is not about the content, but about the narrator's relation to the world she is presenting: Is it shaped by the values of the dominant culture or critical of them?

Thus in theory, Mishmar said, perhaps a man could produce "women's writing." But "we believe there is something in women's life experience, in our education, in the conflicts we run across, in the very questioning of traditional women's roles, that puts us in another place."

Mishmar emphasized that "the conversation about women's writing is part of a larger conversation about the image of Israeli society and power relations within it." Those who doubt this should note that just recently, in an interview with Haaretz on a completely different topic, the poet Uri Bernstein said that the mediocrity of current Israeli literature stems from the fact that most of it is written by women. Whether his statement was a provocation or something else, it seems that the subject of women's writing is still not taken for granted, and therefore necessary to broach.