Digitally signed by
Joseph H Zernik
I \\
LOS ANGELES TIMES
:, --_ .. _ '
Luminous ales 0 a Bygone Middle E t
\
S
,
• 20th century, like S.Y. Agnon anti
By MERLE RUBIN
SPEGAL TO Ii rE T1MES
I ago. The value of these stories can- man inadvertently responsible for
I lished numerous articles on Jewish
HEBRON STORIES
by Yitzhaq Shami
Labyrinl hosl
$12,234 pages, paper
itZhaJ Shami was born in
18'88-in-the ancient town of
Hebron, the burial place of
Abraham and Sarah. His parents
were Orthodox Sephardic Jews.
Young Shami read the traditional
Hebrew tcxts at school but also
spoke Arabic with his father and
Ladino (the Spanish-derived ian-
guage of the Sephardic diaspora,
as Yiddish is the German-derived
tongue of the Ashkenazic diaspo'ra)
with his mother. He may also have
learned Gedllan in the two years
he spent at a Western-style school
in Jerusalem.
Shami made his living as a
teacher in places like Haifa, Tiber-
ias, Damascus and his native He-
bron. He dic9 in 1949, a year after
Israel won its independence. The
poet and fiction writer's literary as-
,I sociates were the predominantly
I Ashkenazic writers who came to
I Palestine in the first decades of the
,
Joseph Chaim Brenner. But, while
they wrote as cyjles and pioneers,
Shami wrote as a native. He pub-
and Arabic culture, but just seven
short stories, only now being made
available to English-speaking read-
ers. (The volume could have used
more careful copy editing perhaps,
but it docs contain a helpful glos-
sary.)
Four of the stories feature Se-
phardic Jews, and three, including
one that is really a 'novella, feature
Arabs. They are remarkable for the
sympathy the author shows
toward all his characters. In his in-
troduction, Arnold J. Brand points
out a sharp contrast bet'Ncen the
world in which Shami "lived and
that of his fiction: "Though Jews
had lived among Arabs in Hebron
for centuries, the city w.}S virtually
emptied qf its Jewish population
after the 1929 massacres...." Al-
though Shami was deeply dis-
turbed by this event, Brand notes,
"his stories reflect a world free of
these hostilities."
But, while it may be tempting to
look at Shami's oerwre in the con-
text of Middle East politics, only
the most naive of optimists would
pin hopes for a lasting peace on
-- --------~-_.~~
DN: cn=Joseph H
Zernik, o, ou,
email=jz12345@earthl
ink.net, c=US
Location: La Verne,
California
Date: 2009.12.30
21:18:28 -08'00'
the fact that a gifted writer could portray the sorrows of a barren
portray Jews and Arabs with equal wife, an elderly man being taken td
empathy more than half a century live at an old-age home, a young
not be mp.asured in mere political an infant's oeath and a devout fa-~
tenns. E~en in ~ranslation (the four ther who returns to his family after
Sephardlc stones have been ren- seven years to find them changed
dered into English by Yael Lotan, almost beyond recognition.
the three Arab talcs by Israel Shami's novella, "The Ven-
Schen, Aubrey Ho~es and Richard. geanee of VIe Fathers," was in-'
Fla.nt~1' the m~glcal_ beauty at spired by at1 incident in the early
Shamr s prose shmes through. The 1900s at a riot between groups of'
wo rln hp
--- -~v
"ummo nc "P ;~ rle~ol_'-
~ Idll;;,
': Palestinian Arabs at a religious pil-
:" ':
awesome ~nd arc~~I.c. I~ Its land- grimage. Shami's protagonist is the
scape and Its scnslbilIt~e~. , leader of the pilgrims from Nablus.
. S~me.?f these stones have the Repeatedly insulted by the leader
mevitabllIty, though not the happy f 'h H b- '. . hI>; f 'Ii.
· f f' tal' "~",rn" ,h· 0 l e e lonllCS, <8 .Ina.)
en dmg, 0 aIrY es. A AU.LuUmau.
v
• d' kill' h' Fl'
A Talev'of the Arabian Desert" tells goaae mto . I~g 1m: ,.eemg,
of a gallant Bedouin tribe famed h~ holes UP. 111 CalIO, a.,snactow. of
for its horses: ,"Bred of the waste:---~-Jl-ls-fermer_ self. .Sham1 s descIlIk
land and the ruogl>d' rocks
were tlOns oftEe settirtgs, the misery of
th~y; and from th~~ they acqUired ~xile and the P,OW~I of rem?rs~ are
their impetuous nature and sclf. Incandescent, f~stng tho 1llSlg~tS
reliant spirit." When a powerful of p~ychol.ogy, WIth those of faIth,
sheik sets his heart on Hamamah, as 111 thIS passage about the"
the prize marc, her owner has no buildup to violence: "The Devil
wish to sell her and the stage is set' had driven his nose-ring through
for conflict. Still more poignant is, their nostrils, using them as tools
the story of "Jum'ah the Simple- ... to profane the pilgrim-
ton," an Arab shepherd mocked by 'age. . . . The passion for honor
his fellow humans hut at home and revenge burning inside them
with his animals on the sun-baked darkened the light of their, rcason,
hills of the Negev. The four stories dragging thein anc1 driving them
with Jewish characters touchingly from error to error. '"
...
_.~---_ -_.-