'Arabs Dancing in a New Light of Arabesques': Minor Hebrew Works of Palestinian Authors in the Eyes of Critics

摘要

The attitudes of Arab intellectuals to texts written in the language of the 'other' have usually been ambivalent; but when Arab writers who were Israeli citizens have written in Hebrew their antagonism and disregard have been particularly pronounced. Apparently, this attitude stemmed from their ignorance of the language, its marginality relative to other languages, and the existence of a great many political, ideological and psychological prejudices resulting from the long-standing violent Arab - Israeli conflict. This article discusses three novels—Atallah Mansour's In a New Light, Anton Shammas's Arabesques, and Sayed Kashua's Dancing Arabs—which are representative of three generations of Hebrew writing by Arab authors. All three seem to be hybrid works, on the margin between Hebrew and Arabic, combining personal and political elements to express the collective experience of Palestinian Arabs within Israeli society. All of them are novels with some autobiographical elements, but there are artistic, stylistic, linguistic and thematic differences between them, particularly in the way they represent the collective experience and the Palestinian narrative. Arabic criticism, though at first inhibited by the language barrier, related to them in a variety of ways. Shammas's novel was assessed favourably by some well-known Arab critics, not only because of its artistic sophistication, but primarily because it succeeded in presenting the Palestinian narrative clearly and distinctly, whereas the other two writers, whose style was more journalistic and less sophisticated, presented only a vague, equivocal and incomplete Palestinian narrative; as a result, Arab critics ignored them or criticized them severely.