The Gates of Gaza: Gender, Ethnicity and Space in a Forgotten Novel

• In Event: New Approaches to Hebrew Literature

Abstract

This paper analyzes the intersection of gender, ethnicity and space in the forgotten Hebrew novel, THE GATES OF GAZA (1960), by Shoshana Shrira. The novel unfolds an intricate family saga, about a woman-dominant Jewish Turkish family immigrating to Israel during 1950s. The main relationship in the novel is between Etti, the young daughter who marries a rich merchant and settles in Tel-Aviv, and her aunt Sara, who is “deployed” by the Zionist authorities to settle on the border on the Gaza Strip. Spanning from Turkey to Israel, the narration often contests, negotiates and re-articulates the divisions between East and West, tradition and modernity, and self and other. In this context both Turkey, as a country situated between Europe and Asia and THE GATES OF GAZA emerges as borderline spaces where spatial-cultural oppositions are alternately destabilized and re-asserted. Written by a woman author, and presenting two unconventional women as the main protagonists, the novel associates between questions of space and questions of gender, through rich and poetic landscape descriptions delivered through consciousness of Etti who always interpret space in gendered feminine terms.
A decedent of an Ashkenazi East-European family, Shoshana Shrira’s memoire disclose her admiration of the Egyptian Jewish writer Jaqueline Shohet-Kahanoff and her idea of “the Levant” as a space marked by colonial and imperial histories making it a hub of complex identities, and defined by constant movement of groups and individuals between unstable geographic and political entities. Arguably, Shrira’s novel attempts to constitute such a space, as the site of an Israeli immigration plot. Taking into account also Ronit Matalon’s important intervention in reading Shohet-Kahanoff and constituting her as her own literary ancestor, this paper concludes by considering Shrira, Shohet-Kahanoff, Matalon as representatives of alternative poetic sensibility deriving from the site of the Levant.

Author

• Orian Zakai, George Washington University