"Yetomim" ("Orphans") by Sami Berdugo, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 196 pages, NIS 82

The narrator of "Ahi hatsa'ir yehuda" ("My Younger Brother Yehuda"), the first of the two novellas that make up Sami Berdugo's new book "Yetomim" ("Orphans"), is Yechiel, also known by his Mizrahi name, Yihye. Yechiel has a few months to go before being drafted into the army, and he is a bundle of nerves. As he says himself, "Everything could burst in the army. You never know. It seems to have such tremendous power. Everyone who is touched by it ends up transformed." This encounter with the military is meant to turn Yechiel into an integral part of the state, in keeping with the conventional wisdom that the Israel Defense Forces is a crucible for Israeliness.

But the promised transformation into a full-fledged Israeli is only skin deep. Throughout the two novellas, this path that supposedly leads to Israeliness is treated with ambivalence. For Berdugo, it is a fiction. It may not even exist.

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"My Younger Brother Yehuda" and "Orphans" break down Israeliness. Berdugo expands the boundaries of the Israeli canon: Israeliness is revealed as layered and nuanced. It is a study in opposites. Israeliness is not some solid, one-dimensional thing. Berdugo's stories tell a tale of Israeliness in many hues, with all its dissonances and contradictions. They probe Israeliness, but also cast doubt on its existence. This is the book's greatest accomplishment: a painstaking portrait of Israeliness that turns out to be breathtakingly accurate.

Ambivalence toward Israeliness pervades nearly every episode in the book. In "My Younger Brother Yehuda," Yechiel, while musing about the army, remembers with nostalgia how he played the part of David Ben-Gurion in a school play on the eve of Independence Day. As he read out the Scroll of Independence and looked out at the audience, he felt as if he were "his own leader."

Yechiel remembers how fully he identified with the Israeli-Zionist enterprise back then. But what he remembers is only a meaningless ceremony and an impersonation. In fact, he was not "his own leader." A bit of playacting created the illusion that he was the thing itself (Ben-Gurion) and not just a schoolboy. Yechiel realizes today that the ceremony, which was more like a parody, no longer affects him in the same profound way. Instead of nostalgia for a fleeting moment of belonging, he begins to question the role of Zionist history in his life. "Today, it's hard for me to grasp the importance of this history," he says.

Moment of clarity

On the one hand, Yechiel is nostalgic for this moment of clarity that came to him in childhood, but he has also doubts about whether it has any bearing on the present. Now he wants to know "how all these heroes and founding fathers from the olden days are connected to the families that live here." In this way, he challenges the idea of any natural, sequential link between Israel's Zionist past (for which he still has some feelings of nostalgia) and the present in which he lives. At the same time, Yechiel clearly hopes that the army, which he will soon be joining, will draw him into some kind of mainstream Israeliness. "Only the army can get me out of here and pull my life toward the center," he declares.

This ambivalence and uncertainty as he awaits the draft is paralleled by his anticipation of the birth of a brother as his mother goes through an unconventional and physically taxing pregnancy at the age of 52: "I understood there was a chance this new brother of mine might not come through the pregnancy safely."

Berdugo thus builds an analogous, symbolic plot, using Yechiel's upcoming draft and the birth of a much younger sibling to create a future strewn with obstacles, contradictions and blanks. The narrator, in sharp contrast to the relaxed response of the rest of the family, is very anxious about what the future holds, in what appears to be an allegory for Israeli utopia: "Even now, after this miracle [the late pregnancy - H.H.], they don't seem very worried about what is going to happen any minute now, when the new baby comes and I leave home and go off to the army."

The nonsequential plot development ties in with the allegorical nature of the book: On the one hand, there is a link to Zionism through Ben-Gurion, but on the other, the narrator wonders if there is any connection between the past and the present. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether Zionism itself involves a historical progression and is linked historically to what went before - i.e., the Diaspora.

Actually, moving from the Diaspora to Israel in order to achieve Israeliness is not so clear-cut in Yechiel's case. Israeliness as a cultural option is severely challenged; it falls to pieces, with each piece standing alone and representing different interests. Even then, the duality is never resolved: Jacota, Yechiel's maternal grandmother, is a symbol of emigration from "there" to "here," because "she has always lived with us." She "came to Eretz Yisrael with her mother and Rafael because they couldn't just leave her there." But Jacota is also the one who preserves the memories of "there." She "holds the memory inside of her and guards it like a secret key."

The whole household lurches back and forth between "here" and "there": "There are no memories of the old country at home, although there is one testimony and reminder of that ancient link - the picture hanging in my parents' bedroom, over the bed." At the same time, the pregnancy, the major event in the household, locally perceived as aberrant and problematic, sets up a clear distinction between Israel and the Diaspora: "Maybe pregnancy late in life was common in the old country, and nobody meddled or thought anything special had to be done ... It must be a holdover from the generations of living abroad ... but here things don't work like that."

Family breakdown

In "Orphans," the second novella, Berdugo portrays the process of family breakdown. The narrator, an immigrant named Shmuel, describes how his wife Rachel, diagnosed with a serious illness, suddenly leaves home, abandoning her two small children, who are henceforth referred to as orphans. "What did you do to me, Shmuel? What were you trying to do?" Rachel shouts at her husband, who tries to figure out why she left. This incomprehensible act, which seems to be equally unfathomable to Shmuel, remains a kind of half-secret or partly resolved mystery that is never worked out entirely or made clear - either to the reader or, by all appearances, to Shmuel.

What is clear is the analogy between Rachel's illness and the situation in Israel. Says Shmuel: "I can't get rid of this rotten feeling. Working on myself doesn't help. What the hell happened to her? She and this damn country seem to blend together." Or: "Everyone feels it. Even Rachel knows that this country is going through a rough period and it's temporary."

The disintegration of the family is never resolved, in the same way that Shmuel's immigration to Israel is never resolved. On the one hand, he has acclimated to a degree: "I wasn't born in this country, but I've adjusted." On the other hand, he lives with the memories of his former home, Africa - memories that keep rising to the surface as he sees the white ghetto around him. Thus the Israeli synthesis of assimilation and memory is only a facade. "I have this Israeli song running through my head about how sad it is in the fall, with the wind blowing and all. I try to console myself, but it doesn't work."

The ambivalence toward Israeliness is delineated all the more when it is contrasted with its opposite: Arabness. Switching between Yechiel and Yihye, or wallowing in memories of the Arab "diaspora," help to play up the contrast. In his novels, Berdugo creates characters who sound Mizrahi (with origins in North African and Middle Eastern countries), but he does it very subtly, steering away from anything that might be interpreted as a linguistic stereotype. He comes out with something mid-way between Arabness and Israeliness, with Israeli disdain for Arabness portrayed with the utmost caution. The final product moves gently between Israeliness and Arabness, fully attuned to the subtlest linguistic nuances of the speaker's voice.

Hebrew is the normative language: "These Hebrew words of ours are so important. The Hebrew letters come together to form words that allow us talk to one another," says Shmuel. But in the next breath, he turns around and says: "It's easy for me to use Hebrew, but that fragmented conversation with Rachel last night keeps coming back to me ... those uncontrollable flashes, like little bolts of electricity, like a series of sparks that run together in a streak."

Yechiel's nostalgia for Arabness is filtered though an Alfred Hitchcock movie filmed in an Arab country, creating a complex image that lies somewhere between Europe and Africa: "The landscape of that movie helps me imagine their country. It's a different kind of beautiful. Nature over there is palm trees and coconuts and pure water that gushes out of the ground. The climate is hot, because it's on the African continent ... They walk together on the hard soil, breathing in the wind, and stop to have vanilla ice cream, which makes them happy, because they know Europe has reached them, too. The boy licks fast, and feels as if there is no other time in the world, as if there isn't such a thing as time. The only thing that exists is the clear night, which pushes away his fears and his bad thoughts.

In "Orphans," Shmuel says: "No one explained what race we belonged to, or where its rightful place was, or what language we should speak, or where this infiltration of French came from, or how it fit together with the Arabic spoken by the good Muslims, or why the Jewish prayers had Hebrew words thrown in. How could you tell what belonged to what, and which songs you are supposed to sing on the holidays of the non-Jews and our own holidays, and what kind of food they ate, and how we should eat it, maybe without the meat stewing in the big pot, together with all kinds of vegetables?"

The fluidity of race and Arabness in this book encourages Sami Berdugo's readers to shape their own image of Israeliness, not as some fixed identity but as a bustling marketplace full of color and contrast. Berdugo creates a Mizrahi perspective that cannot be rejected by the Israeli canon, but at the same time, cannot be swallowed whole. The Israeli canon will never embrace it all and turn it into part of itself, but that would only serve to neutralize it and divest it of its uniqueness. This is Berdugo's critical contribution to expanding the Israeli literary canon - and enriching it immeasurably.

Prof. Hanan Hever's book "Producing Modern Hebrew Canon" was published by New York University Press.