"Subduing the Terrible Sound of Silence:" Israeli Memoirs of Incest Victims

• In Event: New Approaches to Hebrew Literature

Abstract

My talk centers on memoirs of incest victims, published in Israel over the last two decades. The memoirs reveal women’s voices that have hardly been heard in Israel before. One of the main stylistic features of these memoirs is that they tend towards a mixture or an amalgamation of genres. By reading this pattern of artistic choices in the unique context of the experience of incest, my talk reveals the rhizomatic nature of the texts as one which enables victims to express that which might evade detection in direct descriptions. Hybrid writing defies any immediate, one-dimensional, and monotonous message about incest and enables the writers to fluctuate on emotional and psychological borders, to engage with the constant friction dwelling within the edges of their experience and language, and to conduct a dialogue with the personal and social unconscious. Moreover, the rhizomatic structure of the memoirs—as I will show—constructs a kind of de facto alliance between the writers and their readers, an alliance that aims to communicate the harm while creating an environment of joint exploration and mutual influence. The memoirs, thus, reflect insights about—and bring awareness to—the emotional and social needs of the writers, as well as to the challenges and barriers of the readers, and they generate creative spaces that enable them to communicate their world and to have a lasting social impact.

Author

• Ilana Szobel