Egon Bruner, a Nazi and the Jews: A. B. Yehoshua's MR. MANI and Israeli Holocaust Fiction of the Second Generation

• In Event: New Readings in Modern Hebrew Fiction

Abstract

A. B. Yehoshua’s MR. MANI (1990) is not usually discussed in the context of Holocaust fiction, let alone the fiction of the second generation. Yehoshua’s biography and thematics differ significantly from those of David Grossman and Savyon Liebrecht. Yet, MR. MANI’s second conversation joins second generation Israeli Holocaust fiction through one of the corpus’ most innovative and dominant poetic markers: the complex and humanizing characterization of the perpetrator, which undermines the victim/victimizer dichotomy. Egon Bruner, the speaker in this monodialog, reluctantly joins the German military and critiques Nazism while also serving and inadvertently advocating it. Not only is Egon conflicted regarding his perception of Jews, Nazism, and his Nazi task – thereby undermining the prototype of the Nazi perpetrator – his character also demonstrates a variety of Jewish conventional qualities and a rich web of ties with the Jewish textual tradition. A dreamy and feeble young man, away from his native ground in an intellectually stimulating environment, rebelling against tradition and authority in favor of an innovative vision and search of identity – Egon echoes, paradoxically, an “uprooted Jew” (“talush”), the typical turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish literary and biographical figure. Egon’s vision of a “new man who can cancel the scab of history. . . and put the dark, moldy rooms full of warm-eaten books . . . behind him for the sunlit aperture” shows striking resemblance, if not allusion, to the Jewish Enlightenment and Hebrew writers such as H. N. Bialik and Ze’ev Feierberg. Furthermore, within the world of the novel, the pattern of generational mixture in which grandfathers substitute for fathers, applies to both Egon’s and the Mani family, and the young German’s helpless wandering in Crete parallels that of Jewish characters in other sections of the novel. Having closely examined this thick system of analogies between Nazi and Jewish characters, the paper continues to discuss its implications on blurring the boundaries between Holocaust victims and perpetrators and the domains they inhabit. The talk concludes with contextualizing MR. MANI within Israeli fiction and attitudes towards the Holocaust, especially in regard to the paradigmatic shift in Israeli perception and portrayal of the perpetrators.

author

• Or Rogovin, Bucknell University