"Hamakom harek" ("The Empty Place") by Yehudit Hendel, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 114 pages, NIS 60

In an afterward she appended to the reissue of her first book of short stories, "Anashim aherim hem" ("They Are Different People," 1950, reissued in 2000), Yehudit Hendel described a meeting with David Ben-Gurion and his entourage in the Knesset's corridors at the end of the 1940s. The prime minister, who had read the title story of the volume, stopped near the young writer and said to her: "Don't you have anything else to write about?" Ben-Gurion was perturbed by Hendel's identification with a viewpoint that was considered alien and marginal in those days - that of the Holocaust survivors. In her book she depicted the hard feelings of the refugees who were sent with no prior preparation straight from the boat to the battle front. From their perspective, it was the sabra fighters, on whom most of the writers of that generation focused, who seemed alien and inaccessible. Ben-Gurion's reaction was typical.

In fact, to this day, Hendel's writing has not been accorded the status it deserves. Literary scholars do not usually count her among the "1948 Generation" of writers, even though she is a contemporary of Moshe Shamir, Igal Mossinsohn, Hanoch Bartov, Haim Gouri and others. Gershon Shaked, in his monumental mapping project "Hebrew Literature 1880-1970," concluded that Hendel really belongs to the writers of the 1960s, and even among them he found it difficult to accord her pride of place. Thus, instead of acknowledging her primacy, Shaked formulates his critique of her early book "The Yard of Momo the Great" (1969) as though it had been influenced by Yehoshua Kenaz's later book "The Great Woman of the Dreams" (1973): "In its atmosphere this novella is closer to Yehoshua Kenaz's later novellas ... than to the tradition of the members of her generation, or rather Kenaz is closer in these works to Hendel."

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It is hard for Shaked to place Hendel among the '48 Generation, and to acknowledge her influence on writers who eventually became far more central than she. But Yehudit Hendel began publishing her first stories in the 1940s, and her writing was unusual in the context of her contemporaries. Even the editor of that first book, "They Are Different People," thought this, and allowed himself to change one of the stories so that it would be more suited to the spirit of the times.

From the margins

From the distance of half a century, it is now possible to acknowledge: Her difference was indicative of a trend that is today perceived as the main successor to an earlier time. In Hendel's subsequent books it emerged that the view from the margins to the center was not random. In contrast to the male writers of her generation, she did not depict life in the kibbutz nor the experience of battle; she did not take part in the "comradeship" or the esprit de corps; she did not place the offspring of the founders and the pioneers in the center, nor was she interested in the first-person plural that represented the usual collective at the time of its national crystallization. Nevertheless, over the years her writing has focused on an image that also disturbed and occupied the 1948 writers, that of "the living dead." Unlike them, Hendel does not prod the dead to speak. When she writes about bereavement she has no lines like Gouri's "Here lie our corpses" or Natan Alterman's "We are the silver platter." When she deals with the Holocaust, she does not put words into the mouths of the dead, like poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, who declared in their name that vengeance is more important than life ("Were they asked their desires: resurrection of their bodies / or David's-sword-in-a-blood-redeemer's-hand, / they would reply: Let the redeemer live in our stead, / this is their wish and their dream," from "Streets of the River"). Hendel does not deal with the national heritage of the collective dead but rather with the heritage of suffering of the particular dead individual. During all the years she has been writing, her interest has been in those who have died but continue to live by means of those who are still alive, and in the life that bears them along.

In addition to Holocaust survivors, she has also written about the experiences of members of the Jewish communities from the Muslim countries, about the specific problems of women, about sick people, about old people and about people who have been driven insane by sorrow. But above all Hendel has written about death: the restless characters who wander through her books all share a common characteristic - these are people who have been changed beyond recognition by the death of someone close to them. In a paraphrase of Ben-Gurion's comment, it could be said that it isn't that Hendel "does not have anything to write about," but rather that she writes about the "not." Whether she is describing the wholesale death of World War II ("Near Quiet Places") or its effect on the survivors who came to this country ("The Yard of Momo the Great"), whether she is depicting the irremediable trauma of bereaved parents ("Sons' Grave," in the collection "An Innocent Breakfast") or dealing with the losses that are perceived as the most private and the most personal, such as the death of a spouse ("The Other Power" in "An Innocent Breakfast"), the death of parents ("Low Down, Close to the Floor") or the death of friends ("My Friend B.'s Solemn Feast") - Hendel is interested in those upon whom death has made an ineradicable impression.

In her new book, "The Empty Place," the chain of the transmission of that impression is clarified in another way. Hendel appears there in a new role, as a mother whose illness and the knowledge of her approaching death are irreparably inscribed upon her son's flesh. In the letter that is quoted on the book cover she describes the writing of the first stories in this collection in the shadow of that illness: "I wrote both of them after that cursed illness, during which I was also about to die, and the doctors summoned my son in the middle of the night and told him that I would not live until morning, and he should prepare the funeral. Of course that night a lot of his hair turned white, and to this day, whenever I see him, I see that my illness is still there on his face."

Sealed deep inside

The letter relates concisely the story to which Hendel returns in her writing: Family ties and friendship do not recede with the death of the beloved individuals, but rather continue to have their effect. The suffering of people who are close, and their dying and their death, are inscribed on the bodies of their relations and their friends. In this way the dead pass themselves on and continue to live for a while longer, until those of whom they are the materials also disappear.

As a writer, Hendel is interested in this transmission and in the way it exists outside of language. In the story "The Tale of the Lost Violin," which describes her apprenticeship as a writer, she writes: "At an early age I learned to know that there is no possibility of talking about the things that hurt, and that they remain sealed deep inside." The person who teaches her is her Aunt Nella's lover, a consumptive musician, with whom the girl narrator has discussions about death. "I know that it is possible to miss someone who is dead," says the child to the man who is about to die, and he clings to her the way all of those who are about to die in Hendel's books cling to life:

"Suddenly he looked at me strangely.

And will you miss the dead person? He said.

Yes, it is possible to miss the dead person, I said. I will miss his violin and even his stories about Bach.

And you'll also miss the way he spat blood, he went on to tease.

Then he gave me a long look, no longer teasing.

...

But that person will already be buried in the ground, he said.

It is possible to miss a person who is buried in the ground, I said."

The dread passes from the man who is about to die to the girl, and she echoes back the nonverbal message by means of meager words. The repetitions that are characteristic of Hendel's poetics indicate what cannot be stated in words about the pain that inscribes itself on the body. In this latest book, that role is passed along to others. In the letter that is quoted on the back of the book, the mother-writer passes along the role of the "witness" - the one who remains alive and enables the dead to continue to play a role within him, a role that until now had been hers - to her son. His body is the text upon which her approaching death is written in ineradicable signs: his white hair, and her illness is "there on his face."

Later in the letter, the 81-year-old Hendel describes the obsessive act of writing that she experiences: "What has saved me, what has kept me alive nevertheless, I do not know ... And even though I have not yet entirely recovered from that cursed illness, in which I was in a semi-coma, and I am very weak ... nevertheless I work for hours every day, and write even while I am eating (on my right a plate and on my left the notebook, lest sentences escape me)." The tendency of sentences to flee is present in the book at full strength. In a book that was written when its author was on the brink of death, Hendel focuses her concentration on the "not," that is, on what cannot be stated in words, and magnifies it. The "empty place" is already present in the title of the book, and it appears in the lives of the characters as well as in the spaces between the words and inside them. Hendel is interested in the impossible that is beyond the word "death," or beyond the words "pain" or "longing," which are no more than a shell that covers the tangible that can perhaps be felt, but not spoken.

The sentences, be they spoken by the characters or by the narrator, echo the vacuum that wraps the words and pierce it, and by means of the echo they indicate the fullness that is beyond them. The vacuum fills this book. Sometimes this is a geographical-spatial emptiness, like the narrator's apartment, or the empty space on the bench in the park near her home. But the physical empty space is full of human ghosts. This is the case in the title story of this collection. When the narrator wants to sit on a bench in the park, next to a strange man, it turns out that the space on the bench only appears to be empty and is in fact taken: "He made a strange gesture with his hands and I said, is this space free? May I sit here a while? He shook his head in negation and said: I'm sorry, this space is not free, it only looks like it, and I said: But it's empty. Can't I sit here a while?

"Again he shook his head.

"It's not possible, he said, I've already told you, it only looks that way, and I said: But it's empty.

"It's not possible, he said."

Later on it emerges that the empty space is full of the man's dead wife. "For me she is still sitting here," he says.

Like the narrator, the man with whom she is conversing is concerned with the gap between the experience and the word. After he describes his wife's sudden death to the strange woman, he goes on to talk about speech itself: "It's odd that I'm telling you this. You are a complete stranger, a woman who is a complete stranger to me, whom I've never met and all of a sudden I'm telling you this story.

"I did not know what to reply. I said nothing and I sat down in the empty place, looking at the empty park and lighting a cigarette in embarrassment and inhaling the smoke deeply.

"And after that I kept on falling, he said, also looking at the empty park. Everything is a vacuum, he said, and I said to myself, after all, I am familiar with this, when a person feels a terrible vacuum."

The narrator, the woman who is a stranger, sits down in the empty space that is full of the dead woman. She is able to do this because she herself is made of vacuum. The inner vacuum that she knows enables her to listen, out of empathy, to the man who is full of his wife's absence. She regards him attentively and listens to him - that is, she becomes his reader. And she transmits his story, which is also her story, to her readers. This is also their story, and this transmission relies on the fact that the "terrible vacuum" is known to them as well.

Hendel's writing has dealt with this vacuum from the outset. Reinstating her in the place she deserves among the writers of the '48 generation reinforces current research trends that are revealing the ambivalence of this literature, of which the criticism of the time was unaware (see for example the new readings of Moshe Shamir's "He Walked in the Fields").

Even though she has been described as a lyrical-impressionist writer, Hendel's writing has a political dimension as well. Not only in the national sense, but also in an ethical-universal sense, the implications of which for our lives are turning out to be essential. She has written openly about things that other writers of her generation kept veiled: about the ambivalence concerning the price that the Zionist story exacted, about the suffering.

Hendel's reinstatement to a central place among the writers of her generation will help this voice, which did exist in its day, if only on the margins, be heard. This is an important voice that calls for empathic listening, for the willingness to penetrate the pain of the "other," to comprehend the absence of which it is constituted in the inner vacuum. In this, her latest book, too, she proposes listening to the empty space, to the impossible, allowing the longings for the dead the expanse they deserve. Thus far she has taken this role upon herself. Now she is asking us to sit down beside her for a moment in the empty space, and listen.

The writer teaches in the Hebrew literature department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.