The death of Blessed Memory: A Crisis of Israeli Secular Identity in Yaakov Shabtai's "Departure"

• In Event: Reading, Representing, and Creating the Nation—Zionism and Literature

Abstract

Yaakov Shabtai’s short story “Departure” seems, at first glance, merely to chronicle the protracted illness and death of an unnamed Grandmother, as witnessed through the eyes of her grandson, who becomes increasingly empathetic and melancholic as the narrative progresses. The Grandmother, a political and religious Zionist, was among the first wave of 20th century immigrants to Israel. A traditionally observant, Yiddish-speaking woman with marked socialist politics, liberal social views, and a robust array of friends and correspondents, differs markedly from her immediate family. They are intensely secular Jews who keep a kosher kitchen only as long as Grandmother lives, and, after she dies, abandon this practice, do not observe Pesach for one year, and fail to keep the rites of mourning or yahrzeits for Grandmother or any of their other relatives. After coming upon the Grandmother’s prayer book by chance after her death, which is one of her few objects that the family has not given away, sold, or re-purposed, the grandson finds in her handwriting the dates of the death of her mother, father, and brother. The story ends with the narrator realizing that he has no memory of the date of Grandmother’s death except that it was an overcast day.
This paper contends that this sad, seemingly straightforward narrative has profound historical, referential, and symbolic meanings, as indicated by the divide between Grandmother’s and the family’s Jewish identities. The story functions as an allegorical critique of escalating social divisions and economic differences in Israel, as well as the dangers posed by an unconscious drift into post-Zionism. “Departure” reveals that the process of dis-identification and disavowal begins at the level of the family, and, symbolically, with the figure of the observant traditionalist Jewish Grandmother, whose rich, peaceful, and sociable identity, which keeps bonds with the departed, stands in peril of becoming removed from the possibilities of influencing future generations, who will lose the chances of coming to know her.

author

• Corinne E. Blackmer, Southern Connecticut State University