But Both Their Hands Reach Out: The Father-Son Relationship in PRELIMINARIES and in the Binding of Isaac as a Critique on Ideology

• In Event: Potpourri: Jewish Language, Literature, and Writing

Abstract

PRELIMINARIES, written by S. Yizhar when he was 75 years old, tells the story of a Jewish family that settles in Palestine in the period of the Yishuv, the new Jewish settlement in Palestine during the first decades of the 20th century. Although S. Yizhar narrates the experiences of his own family and childhood, the novel is not written as a straightforward autobiography, but rather told through a complex focalization—delivered through the third-person point of view—in which the focalizer is both the child in the narrative present and the child as an adult, adding to and commenting on the events.
Through the dual lens of the child and the adult who used to be that child, S. Yizhar presents a complex view of the Zionist ideological project and the social community surrounding his family and his upbringing in Palestine in the 1920s.
In one of the novel’s chapters, the child and his father share a special experience which contains an allusion to an experience of another father and son, namely, Abraham and Isaac in the Genesis story of the Binding of Isaac. In both texts, the yizharic and the biblical, the hand is a key-word, which recurs and characterizes, by means of comparison, the relationship between Abraham and Isaac, and the father and son in PRELIMINARIES. But while the scene in Genesis deals with an extreme situation of life and death, the episode in PRELIMINARIES tells of a father and son who visit a local café on their way home. Why is the Binding of Isaac narrative, with its tragic irony and near mythical significance in Jewish culture, mapped onto the mundane scene of a father taking his son out for a soda? In my talk I will attempt to show how Yizhar’s subtle comparison between the biblical couple and the one in his novel enables him to criticize Abraham’s blind obedience and to support the resistance to the strictures of ideology, which the father in PRELIMINARIES embodies. Modeling the father’s inner struggle about whether or not to buy a glass of soda for his son on the story of Abraham and Isaac’s ordeal of the Akeda also creates a humorous comparison, I will argue, enabling Yizhar to expose the grotesque and highbrow seriousness of the Yishuv’s “voluntary collectivism.” Relying on Intertextual theory I will then reexamine the biblical story, which, illuminated by PRELIMINARIES, will disclose the heavy price of ideology and the irreparable breach between Abraham and his son.

Author

• Hanna Seltzer, Northwestern University