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PAINTING A STORY: ARS‐POETICA ANDIDEOLOGY IN A STORY BY BENJAMINTAMMUZ AND A PAINTING BY NAHUMGUTMANChaya ShachamPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

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Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 4, No. 3 November 2005, pp. 309–322ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online © 2005 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725880500298260

Chaya Shacham

PAINTING A STORY: ARS-POETICA

AND IDEOLOGY IN A STORY BY

BENJAMIN TAMMUZ AND A PAINTING

BY NAHUM GUTMANTaylor and Francis LtdCMJS129809.sgm10.1080/14725880500298260Modern Jewish Studies1472-5886 (print)/1472-5894 (online)Original Article2005Taylor & Francis Ltd43000000November 2005

The article discusses the story "Our National Artist" by Benjamin Tammuz, in which thehero is an artist and a pioneer whose ideas do not conform to Zionist ideology. The presentauthor’s claim is that this is an implied ars poetic-ideological story in which Tammuz hintsat his own beliefs regarding Zionism, namely his severe reservations about it. He allows hisartist hero to express what he himself could not openly express at that time. The article goeson to discuss a well-known painting by Nahum Gutman which Tammuz chose for the coverof his collection, The Bitter Scent of Geranium, in which “Our National Artist” appears,and which serves as an allusion to the “non-Zionist” nature of this collection. Tammuz’s choiceof Gutman’s painting testifies to his conception: in this painting he “reads” the pre-Zionistor the non-Zionist space as a dominant “text”, thus shifting attention from the Zionist consen-sus to its margins and beyond.

I

Study of the art of literature within and through literary works themselves is well knownand indeed widespread. This literary tendency is particularly evident with regard topoetry, whose special sensitivity to language seems to invite engagement in its ownlanguage (see Kartun-Blum, Shira bere’i atzma, Yad kotevet yad and Introductions). Yetsuch study is no different qualitatively from reflexive self-examination in other arts:paintings that peruse painting as art (for example, Velasquez’s famous painting LasMeninas, 1656), films that delve into the concept of cinematic art (such as Felini’s 8 ),or plays engrossed in the writing and staging of dramas (like Pirandello’s Six Charactersin Search of an Author).

Self-reflexive artworks of this kind may well probe their medium, for example byplacing the figure of an artist at their centre (the writer/poet in literature; the artist inpainting; the filmmaker in a movie; the playwright or director in theatre). They may alsouse sets of special symbols for each individual medium, which serve as a meta-languagethrough which the reflexive study is realized.

Frequently the outcome of this artistic activity is a work replete with ars-poeticelements, a work that exposes, through its inner codes, principles deriving from itscreator’s artistic outlook. This type of art extends to works whose ars-poetic side appearsnot through reflexive study of its own medium but by touching on other media. For

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example, a story about an architect may refer to artistic principles affecting perhaps,mainly, the art of literature; a film whose hero is an artist may contain an ars-poeticstatement about filmmaking; a play about a composer can indirectly reveal principles oftheatrical staging.1

Being able to say significant things about one art through another undoubtedlyconcerns the close proximity of all the arts, a perception held since antiquity. In moderntimes this perception was made manifest particularly by Wassily Kandinsky, the painterand theoretician, who sets forth his views in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art andPainting in Particular. Kandinsky reaches this definitive conclusion by comparing theways in which painting and music act on the human soul, and studying the responses theykindle in it (see Kandinsky 46). Even a severe critic of this perception such as SusanneK. Langer allows a basic proximity of all fine arts: “All art is the creation of perceptibleforms expressive of human feeling” (Langer 80). She goes on to explain: “Essentially,then, all arts create forms to express the life of feeling (the life of feeling, not the feelingsan artist happens to have); and they all do it by the same basic principles” (ibid.).

Regarding literature and its immanent ties with other arts, an old saying attributedto Symonides of Keyus runs: “Painting is mute poetry, and poetry— a talking painting.”This adage sparked a wealth of discussions and debates on the subject from antiquity tomodern times.2 The analogy between literature and art is addressed—to mention butone example—in Proust’s monumental work A la recherche du temps perdu. The authorconducts his investigation through the encounter of the writer Bergot with Vermeer’sfamous painting View of Delft (see Johnson 147–91). The principal problems rising fromthis meeting touch on the differences between literature as a temporal art, and paintingas a spatial art (a problem discussed repeatedly in the philosophy of art),3 but they alsotouch on the possibilities for the novel that are encapsulated in such a meeting. Thenovel adopts—following the art of painting—a technique of “time layers” in order tobreak the linear nature of time which is typical of graphic art.

***

The short story discussed in this article belongs to the group of works that look into oneart by means of another, namely a written text that deals with the art of painting whiletrying to say something meaningful about writing. I deal with two questions here: howdoes a writer reveal his or her own ars-poetic ideas through another art form, and whydoes he or she do so. I try to show that the art considered in the story functions, in fact,as an ars-poetic metonym which, in a different, indirect way, illuminates the author’spersonal poetics. Since the art of painting is at the centre of the story, I found it inter-esting and meaningful to address the book’s cover as well, attempting to draw conclu-sions about the author’s ideology and concepts regarding his own art from the paintingreproduced on it.

The story on which I focus is “Hatzayar hale’umi shelanu” (Our National Artist) byBenjamin Tammuz (1919–89), from his collection of short stories Reiho hamar shel hage-ranium (The Bitter Scent of Geranium, 1979). Tammuz was born in Russia and immi-grated to Palestine (Eretz Israel, “Land of Israel”) as a boy in 1924. He was educated at areligious school and then at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. As a young manTammuz was among the first to join Tnu`at ha`ivrim hatze`irim (The Young Hebrews; the“Canaanites”),4 a movement led by the poet Jonathan Ratosh. In 1942 the group decided

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to broaden its range of activity by operating within larger groups. Tammuz (and YitzhakDanziger—the great sculptor-to-be) then joined the Palmah in which they both servedfor some time.5 Tammuz left the Young Hebrews because of ideological differences overthe solution to the Jewish–Arab conflict. His departure was accompanied by an ideolog-ical change in him, as well as by his rejection of the principles and beliefs of the ‘Canaan-ites’. Tammuz retracted his denial of Jewish nationalism, and became a severe critic ofZionism. He held that the implementation of the Zionist idea, which took the form of asovereign state, was a deadly blow to Judaism. To his mind it accelerated the dissociationprocess of Zionists in the State of Israel from the Jewish people in the diaspora by neglect-ing the spiritual aspects of Judaism and stressing the practical and earthly ones instead.6

Among his other occupations Tammuz wrote a satirical column for the Ha’aretzdaily, edited the Ha’aretz literary supplement, and served as cultural attaché at the Israelembassy in London. His first short-story collection, Holot hazahav (Sands of Gold),appeared in 1950 to warm critical reception (see Shaked 505). Traces of the author’sCanaanite tendency are obviously present in these stories. The Bitter Scent of Geranium,mentioned above, was published in 1979,7many years after Tammuz’s ideologicalabout-face, and not unconnected to it. In fact, from 1950 he did not cease strugglingwith Ratosh’s conceptions while writing his own stories (see Porat 383).

“Our National Artist” centres on the life events of Misha Lubotsky, native of a smalltown in Ukraine, whose circumstances caused him by chance to engage in art and to goto Palestine where he eventually attained the title of “National Artist”. The story’s title(with a ring similar to that of “National Poet”) arouses associations of a very particularsort. Presumably, a person bearing such a title has won it for his fulfilment of certainartistic expectations conceived by “the nation”. Here, apparently, is a brilliant exemplarof the national ethos, by implication the Zionist ethos, in both the artist’s life and in hisoeuvre. The tale itself, however, wholly overturns such an assumption.

Behind the title “National Artist” there is, it seems, not a person with a formednational consciousness and a decided purpose in whose light he directs his life, but onewho has taken his chances as they have come. He has achieved his present status throughhistorical events in which, of course, he has had no hand, and by which his fate had beendetermined. His migration to Palestine, aged just over 20, after the outbreak of theRussian Revolution, happens to make him a member of the Third Aliyah, those “swampdrainers, road labourers, builders”, or the madmen who “went about the small townsinging, at night dancing. And if they were very hungry they fainted, or killed them-selves” ((Reiho hamar—shel hageranium,) 74), as Tammuz ironically puts it. But aftertaking note of these manifestations of Palestinian reality, Misha Lubotsky resolvescontrary to others among the young immigrants – that “he will not enter into any othercraft than the craft of painting” (ibid.). And as if it were not enough that this newcomerspurns all the pioneering commitment of his contemporaries, in his first paintings hegives no committed expression to the sights of the land. His heart still longs for red-brick houses and streams, for the soft light and the abundance of green in the Ukrainiancountryside, namely the matrix of his childhood landscape. Even when he does startpainting scenes of Eretz Israel he depicts only metonyms of a landscape, primarily onefrom which any trace of the Zionist pioneers is absent. Examples are the fence of theWhite Fathers’ Tower in Ramle, the rear wall of the sabil (a place where wayfarers drinkwater) outside the town, two or three trees in the pomegranate and date orchard, or theentrance door of a monastery beside the road.8 Opposed to the perception represented

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in Misha Lubotsky’s work in which he ignores the pioneers’ enterprises, the storypresents another one, Zionist and engagé, exemplified by his wife, Lubochka. In her eyesa good painting is identified with the predominant symbols of the age,9 which she spec-ifies as the “landscape of the homeland, with pioneers, camels, and perhaps even peopledancing the hora” (77).10She criticizes his metonymic perception, which sees the frag-ment instead of the whole: “Why do you always paint, how shall I say, not the thingsthemselves but some small part of them?” (ibid.). Misha’s answer expressly contradictsthe “constructive line” that characterized much of the art of the time, and draws a clearline between artistic endeavour and any other kind: “Painting is not a house—it isperhaps paper and paint—but it may also be paper and pencil” (ibid.).11

In a television interview marking his 85th birthday, Misha Lubotsky is asked by artcritics, among other things, “why he never painted in the manner of most of the rest ofour painters, who joined in the enterprise of national rebirth, and gave expression topioneering, self-defence, and wars of the Jews in recent generations” (78). The painter’shalting answer, sounding apparently confused, unfocused and off the point, in factcontains his ars-poetic statement. First, art is to be placed on a level not inferior topioneering: “The pioneers, certainly, it’s important. But so is painting” (79). Next comethe principles: commitment to and respect for art and not for ideological demandsoutside it (“Carefully, carefully—whoops, a painting. But it’s also very important thatit’s clean. Mustn’t be dirty”); and also the retention of some mystery about reality andits not being exposed for all to see (“Keep a secret. Shouldn’t give away a secret”) (79).

As noted, Tammuz describes his protagonist’s migration to Palestine as accidentaland his remaining there as non-voluntary. Still, although he is anxious to find his “real”homeland he realizes soon enough that “all the places in the world are the same place”so he stays in Tel Aviv. Clearly, Tammuz is alluding to a certain kind of artist, an immi-grant who is occupied with art in Palestine not as a “typical”, committed Palestinianartist.

The volume Sippurah shel omanut Yisrael (The Story of Israel’s Art), edited (with anintroduction) by Benjamin Tammuz, contains comments by an art critic about the Israeliartist Yosef Zaritzky (1891–1985). Zaritzky, winner of the Israel Prize for painting(1959), was one of the first Jewish abstract painters in Palestine, and the founder of theartistic group named New Horizons (Ofakim hadashim). According to the critic,“Zaritzky is not a national and not a Palestinian artist. Those who claim that he is wouldbe correct if the title Palestinian National Artist were a certain guarantee of nationalism andlove of the land…. The painter Zaritzky gazes from afar. Theatricality and sentimentalismare remote from him. Zaritzky grasped the hidden secret in the Palestinian landscape, whichcould not be expressed in words, and revealed it in his paintings” (LeVite 49, emphasisadded).

It is difficult to ignore the resemblance between the artistic portrait of Zaritzky andthe fictional portrait of Misha Lubotsky, as portrayed by Tammuz in the story that bearsthe significant title “Our National Artist”. Note, among other things, that both Zaritzkyand Lubotsky were born in a small town in Ukraine and studied art at the art academyin Kiev. That Misha Lubotsky painted views seen from the window of his wife’s roomcalls to mind the method of Zaritzky who was famous for painting scenes seen from awindow. These implied allusions may point to a model that lurks behind the story. Ifthis is indeed Zaritzky, the universalist-modernist artist, of whom the critic wrote thathe was “not a national and not a Palestinian artist”, the story obviously acquires a

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subversive dimension regarding the Zionist stance and commitment of Palestinianartists to the land.

Although the ars-poetic fundamentals placed in the mouth of Misha Lubotsky soundsomewhat parodic, they are in fact very close to the principles that guided the writer inproducing the collection The Bitter Scent of Geranium, in which this particular story islocated. The period in which most of the stories in this collection are set is the 1920sand 1930s, and the place is Tel Aviv. This, in itself, presents the writer with a kind ofinherent imperative to give expression to the “enterprise of national rebirth”, as did vari-ous writers identified with its values. But although immersed in a series of themes andfeatures relevant to the enterprise of national rebirth (for example, migration to Pales-tine, the Maccabiah sports festival,12 the revival of the Hebrew language and theHebrew Language Protectors’ Brigade [Gedud maginei hasafa ha`ivrit],13 patriotic songs,and so on), this writer’s treatment of them runs diametrically counter to the nationalimperative.

In this collection Tammuz is not intent on portraying the great deeds that shapedthe face of the land and of Jewish-Palestinian society, but actually that very “rear wall”,as in the paintings of his protagonist Misha Lubotsky. Translated into the craft ofwriting, his concern is to depict marginal figures who are not known for their valiantdeeds: the first Hebrew thief, the pair of inept robbers, the tricot manufacturer turnedrestaurant owner, the waiter, the lame dressmaker, the obscure poet and their like.These carry with them the experience and atmosphere of Jewish migrants and are notattached to the Hebrew language or any other clear-cut Zionist value. They and otherssimilar to them are the other side of the Zionist coin, non-heroic, non-exemplary, theside that embodies the daily trivialities, that carries a certain aroma of diaspora life whichthe ideological literature chose to ignore.14

Tammuz’s proximity to the plastic arts is apparently what underlay his choice of theart of painting as an ars-poetic metonym for his own art of narration in this collection.15

The quick succession of short stories and the world drawn in them with rapid strokesbut with attention to salient and typical detail becomes a gallery of small, stylizedpictures of neglected corners of life in Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 1930s.

II

The cover of The Bitter Scent of Geranium shows a detail of the well-known painting byNahum Gutman16 Pardesim beyaffo (Orange Orchards in Jaffa) otherwise known as Yomhag bepardesei yaffo (A Festive Day in the Orange Orchards of Jaffa).17 This painting,chosen by Tammuz as a kind of metonym for his book,18 can—and in fact should—beinterpreted as a simultaneous allusion relating interestingly to the story “Our NationalArtist”, as well as to the attitude of the other stories in the collection, to the hegemonicZionist narrative.

This picture is liable to mislead the naive viewer, because it seems to be about thePalestinian landscape, painted by an artist of the so-called “Eretz Israel” school. In fact,the painting has no pretensions whatsoever to contain or highlight signs of “Land-of-Israelness” in the form of well-known symbols of Zionist ideology (a Jewish village scene,Jewish workers and the like). The picture is quite devoid of any symbols of the pioneeringactivity of that period. At its centre is an orange grove belonging to Arabs, with women

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in ethnic robes.19 In the distance a train passes by belching smoke: the train from Jerus-alem; this, too, is not a metonymic representation of the pioneering Zionist experience.

In his book Ir ketana ve’anashim ba me`at (A Little City and Few People in It) Gutmanrecalls childhood memories. Among other things he describes the orange grove oppositea new neighbourhood being built (namely Tel Aviv); the grove was of the kind depictedin his famous painting. He writes:

The big red gate was always locked, closing off to us the green world that borderedthe sand dunes of Tel Aviv. Anyone wanting to enter had to bang for ages on theiron knocker before someone came…. Veiled women dressed in black would goin…. Sometimes men came out, girt in colourful woollen belts…. The grove wasthe complete opposite of the way of life in the new neighbourhood, whose streetswere wide open to the four winds and inhabited by diverse people from differentcountries (160–61).

This painting by Gutman is a distinct representation of a perception of the Jewish-Pales-tinian reality as not necessarily typified by a “Zionist” landscape but also embracingelements of a world that stood on its own, indeed one essentially contrary to thepioneering Zionist ethos. Unlike Tammuz’s inarticulate artist, Gutman very clearlyspecified his attraction to the pre-Zionist landscape of Palestine: “All my life … I triedto express my love for the colourful, closed, special oriental beauty which conquered myheart with its vividness, a doorway to the oriental world as it had existed before theymanaged to spoil its landscapes” (Gutman and Ben-Ezer 28, emphasis added).

Gutman is expressing a view shared with other artists (Israel Paldi, Reuben Rubin,Ziona Tajer, Menahem Shemi, Haim Glicksberg, and more), the founders of the EretzIsrael school. They painted the country’s landscape and its Arab inhabitants, since “every-thing that was conceived as exotic was naturally related to the land” (LeVite 38). Beingone of the eminent artists of this school, Gutman was indeed drawn to the exotic aspectsof Eretz Israel and, much like Tammuz’s protagonist, he did not give expression in hisearly paintings to the pioneering and Zionist way of life.20 Gutman declared that whenhe painted he customarily began with colour rather than with an image or a theme:“Sometimes I begin with three stains of colour, and then images and themes are created.The theme does not appear at the beginning—but as a result of creating a balance of stainsand images; and then, as if by itself, from my roots here, themes that tell a tale of EretzIsrael emerge” (Ben-Ezer 130). Indeed, Gutman’s painting, like the painting of the entireEretz Israel school, is considered to be narrative: it always tells an anecdote or a story.21

The Gutman version of “a tale of Eretz Israel” is not necessarily a “Zionist” one, asalready noted. Gutman preferred landscapes and people who—to his mind—embodieda kind of earthy pre-Zionist primitivism. The Arab orchards encircling the new neigh-bourhood, which was being built on sand, are a metonym for this strange, primaryworld. These green, dark orchards are an obvious contrast to the arid sand whereGutman was describing them.

Dorit LeVite notes the tendency of the artists of the Eretz Israel School to darken theirlandscapes after having lived in Paris, owing to the influence on them of European paint-ing. Gutman, who painted this picture in 1926, the year he returned from Europe(where he had been studying, in Vienna, Berlin and Paris), is an outstanding example ofthis tendency.

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In A Festive Day in the Orange Groves of Jaffa the influence of Henri Rousseau and RaoulDufy is evident. The trees of the orange grove are depicted in a naive-primitive way; theleaves impress in their dark, rich colours and their clear contours. The vivid green of theforeground, where the leaves are drawn clearly, is gradually replaced by patches of darkgreen to the right of the living green area and in the upper left section of the painting.As a contrast to the shades of green, which fill most of the area of the picture, yellow isevident. This is the colour of the paths in the grove and of the sandy expanses beyond.This contrast between the “cold” colours (shades of green) and the “hot” colours expresses,among other things, the contrast all around between the cool within the grove and theburning heat in the exposed areas.

As for composition, the surface of the picture is organized by means of three hori-zontal lines that create four bands: the orange orchard, which covers most of thepicture, is separated from the open area beyond by means of a dark-green wavy linerunning across the upper third of the area. The next area, namely the part stretchingbeyond the orchard, is separated from the yellow sandy area by a railway line. On theline of contact between the green and the yellow sections, a train belonging to the Jaffa–Jerusalem line is seen. The smoke billowing out of the engine’s funnel blurs some of theline of the horizon, which is the third horizontal line, indicating the meeting of sand andsky.

On the right of the picture, from the bottom to the middle, there is a vertical yellowpatch with defined borders. This is the path on which stand four female figures withtheir backs to the viewer; they are close to the visible end of the path. Their stancestresses the vertical direction of the yellow patch, while the colours of their robes some-what “disrupt” the exclusiveness of the yellow rectangle. Similarly three women, theirbacks to the viewer as well, are placed in the yellow area bounded by the areas of greenin the upper third of the picture. They seem to be looking at the train. At the bottom ofthe painting is yet another female figure with her back to the viewer. Unlike all theothers, this one waves her right arm towards the train. To her left sits a girl in the whitegown of a bride. The veil does not cover her face, which is turned to the viewer. A sharpcontrast is created between her white garb and the black dress of the woman waving herarm. The black and the white recur and echo this contrast in the dresses of two of thefour figures standing on the yellow path to the right of the painting, and in the parasolof the third figure among them. The contrast also exists in the robes of two of the sevenfigures located in the bright-green area, enclosed between the yellow and the dark greenin the upper left section of the painting.

The title A Festive Day in the Orange Groves of Jaffa makes one think of a special eventthat the picture intends to express. The hint is present, perhaps, in the white dress ofthe seated female figure, who looks like a bride, and in the gesture towards the trainof the one standing next to her. The festivity may be the wedding-day of the girl, await-ing the arrival of her groom and her wedding guests on the train. The train is an impor-tant focus in the picture, despite its appearance in the distant background, both becauseof the hand waving towards it and because at least ten of the sixteen female figures inthe painting, set in four groups, are looking towards it, directing the viewer’s attentionto it. The viewer sees the women from behind, and his or her eyes are drawn in thedirection in which their gaze is fixed.

The painting “tells” a story with a strange, mysterious flavour. The women’s longdresses and their headgear are ethnically Eastern in their style. They look like the figures

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of Arab women, and the story is therefore their story. An interesting element that standsout in the picture concerns the yellow shades in the orchard and on the path leading fromit. These shades differ in their hue from the strip beyond the railway line. This differenceis not accidental. The darker yellow, that of the sand dunes, is the mark of the worldoutside the orchard, the world of the builders of Neve Zedek and Ahuzat Bayit, whichwas to become Tel Aviv. This is the world “between the sand dunes and the blue sky”,like the title of Nahum Gutman’s memoirs. In its colours, its isolation, its exposure tothe dazzling light of the Land of Israel, this is the opposite of the reticent, mysteriousworld, concealed in the shadow of the orchards.

In his article “The Secret of Gutman’s Orchard” the art critic Gideon Ofrat writes:

Gutman animated Palestinian reality, clothing it in myth. The orchard, as itemerges in his depiction, is the local substitute for the European forest tale with itsvarious mythological secrets (the good forest and bad forest as defined by NorthropFrye in his Anatomy of Criticism). Here, sheltered from the blazing light and heat, theEuropean newcomers found a refreshing physical, as well as spiritual, haven, wheretheir collective imagination could travel back to their northern-European origins.Thus, Gutman transformed the orchard gate into a legendary, magical gateway: thegate to the Garden of Eden. (Ofrat 77)

Tammuz’s protagonist too seeks an escape from “the white, cruel light”, which “is notgood for the eyes, and certainly not for painting” (Reiho hamar shel hageranium p. 75),whereas other characters have serious reservations about the Zionist conquest of the land-scape. Tel Aviv, the crown of the Zionist enterprise, is described time and again as a place

FIGURE 1 Reproduced with the kind permission of the Nahum Gutman Museum.

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far from the realization of an ideal dream. Moreover, as one of Tammuz’s characters putsit: “it is all made of plaster. Lime and sand. This is a shaky, fragile material, that will notlast for long” (“Bno Shel Dr Shteinberg” [Dr Steinberg’s Son].22 The fierce criticism inthis statement marks the writer’s sceptical stance not only about one of the peaks of theZionist enterprise, the establishment of the first modern Hebrew city, but it also reveals,by inference, his misgivings about the entire Zionist endeavour.

Tammuz’s choice of Gutman’s painting for the cover of his book testifies to hisconception: in this painting he “reads” the pre-Zionist or the non-Zionist space as adominant “text”, thus shifting attention from the Zionist consensus to its margins andbeyond. The painting thus becomes attached to the statement that arises from the storiesin this collection, and it functions as an analogous symbol of a fundamental ars-poetic andideological perception.

III

Benjamin Tammuz and Nahum Gutman were both multidisciplinary artists: bothengaged in more than one art. Tammuz began his artistic career as a sculptor and apainter (see Ofrat The Story of Israel’s Art) and later took to writing, whereas Gutman,who persisted as a painter all his life, at some point started writing as well. Both there-fore experienced the two arts concerned in this study, and interestingly they bothexpressed themselves regarding these arts, and commented on the way in which theyviewed their relationship to them.

Tammuz has one of his characters in the story “Erev Shabbat birehov sheinkin”[Sabbath Eve on Sheinkin Street] (in The Bitter Scent of Geranium) say the following:“Everybody writes—it’s not hard. But to paint a picture—that’s a different storyaltogether” (81). This self-deprecatory phrase clearly grants priority to the art of paint-ing over writing. This phrase, however, is placed amid a collection of stories in whichmost of the characters are engaged—or eager to be engaged—in writing.

In contrast to Tammuz, Gutman expresses his opinions in his own voice, comparingpainting with writing: “I don’t see a contrast between a word and a painting. Sometimesit seems to me that painting is a much easier process. It’s difficult to find the exact wordand the correct order in a sentence; covering a sheet with a painting is much easier thancovering a sheet of paper with a story” (Gutman and Ben-Ezer 127).

Considering the many stories in The Bitter Scent of Geranium whose protagonists turnto writing, it seems somewhat odd that Tammuz chose a painter and the art of paintingto express his own ars-poetic views. In general, we may ask why an artist employs thedevice of using one art form to express the ars-poetic principles of another. A few possiblereasons may be proposed. First, artists do this because another art form, one in whichthey are not engaged, may well be a more appropriate place in which to say, and throughits means to express, things touching them personally and intimately. That way they arenot wholly and disconcertingly exposed, and the evidence is placed at a distance. An ars-poetic statement becomes possible without full assumption of the responsibility involved.

Another explanation rests on looking at the familiar, that is, the art of writing inwhich the writer is occupied, by means of the less familiar. This may refresh the pointof observation and sharpen the features. In the engagement of literature with other arts,the special qualities of the art of writing become still more lucid. This comes about

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through the implied comparison with other arts and the illumination of the familiar artthrough them.

A third reason for the use of one art form to illuminate another derives from theproximity between the arts. Despite the uniqueness of each of them, expressed in theirdifferent raw materials and techniques, a point may be reached where even oppositesbecome united at the root. The condition for this perhaps lies not only in the individualtalent of each of the artists who set about this kind of work that sheds light on anotherart, but also in the immanent properties of the arts themselves. Kandinsky calls this “thedeep relations among the arts” (46), and these leave room for discovering the similarprecisely in the different.23

Which of these suggestions best explains Tammuz’s choice of painting as ametonym through which he reveals his ars-poetica in his book? As already mentioned, inthis story, “Our National Artist”, Tammuz relies on his intimate acquaintance withpainting as well as writing. Yet artistic reasons alone do not seem to be behind hischoice; other reasons were apparently involved as well. The 1970s, the decade in whichthe stories of The Bitter Scent of Geranium were written, were marked in Israel by manychanges and upheavals caused by the Yom Kippur war (October 1973). The perceptionof the failure of Zionism that underlies Tammuz’s novel Jacob as early as 1971 becameeven sharper following the 1973 events. But vulnerable public opinion in Israel at thattime could not tolerate any blunt criticism that subverted or doubted the Zionist solu-tion as the ultimate one for the Jewish people.24 Tammuz therefore divides his criticismamong several characters in this collection of stories. Yet he has his most important ars-poetic statements, those that shed light on his own ideological and literary perceptions atthis particular time, spoken by a painter rather than a writer. Since Tammuz is identi-fied both as a writer and as an artist, his choice is a deliberate act of simultaneouslyconcealing and unveiling. By hiding behind the art he chose to abandon, Tammuz is likeone who places a transparent mask over his face: seemingly hiding, but in fact fullyrevealing himself.

Notes

1. Avner Holtzman writes: “Sometimes one gets the impression that the choice ofdescribing the lives of painters is nothing but a transparent mechanism of camouflage,while the real interest of the writers is in the ambience of writers and writing whichis better known to them, but for various reasons they do not want to give it directshape (Melekhet mahshevet, 170–71).

2. See the chapter on the history of comparing literature and art in Holtzman (Sifrutve’omanut plastit, 12–32).

3. Holtzman draws attention to the fact that the discussion about comparing literatureand art, which begins with Aristotle, “jumped from the Neo-classical context of theeighteenth century right into the modernist context of the beginning of the twentiethcentury” (Sifrut ve’omanut plastit, 18, 19). Holtzman cites the explanation that centreson the prevalence of the Romantic school in the nineteenth century, “which switchedthe focus of interest from problems of artistic imitation – mimesis – to problems ofexpression, in the context of which it is much more convenient to compare literatureto music, rather than to art” (ibid., 19).

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4. The “Canaanites” were a political and ideological movement that stood for establishinga Hebrew nation uniting all ethnic groups within the natural borders of Palestine byrenewing the ties with the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. The movement wasformed in 1944 and called the Young Hebrews. Its members held that since Judaismwas a religion without a territory, Palestinian Jewry should sever all connections withthe Jews in the diaspora, and instead, establish connections with neighbouringpeoples.

5. The Palmah was the elite force of the Jewish self-defence organization (Haganah) inPalestine. It was established in 1941 in cooperation with the British army, and laterbecame the most active force against the British Mandatory regime in Palestine.

6. Menuha Gilboa (90) alludes to the possible origin of this outlook. She mentions thephilosophy of the German Jews Herman Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, and attributesa more concrete influence on Tammuz to the Russian Jewish historian ShimonDubnov. Elsewhere in her book she tends (following Yosef Oren) to ascribeTammuz’s conception to the influence of George Steiner’s views (ibid. 97). GershonShaked (506, note 23) does likewise. Steiner held that the Jewish genius could attainexcellent achievements only in the diaspora. Tammuz gave literary shape to hisconception in the novel Jacob. At one point he has his protagonist say, “Judaism is, infact, a diaspora. Even a voluntary diaspora…. The whole people has chosen, as itwere, this way of existence…. The Jews even perfected monotheism in exile, inBabylon; not in Eretz Israel” (Tammuz, Jacob, 155).

7. The other books by Tammuz are: Gan naul [A Locked Garden], 1957; Sippur antonha’armeni vesipurim aherim [Anton the Armenian and Other Tales], 1964; a trilogywhose hero is Elyakum: Hayei elyakum [The Life of Elyakum], 1965; Besof ma`arav [ACastle in Spain] 1966, and Elyakum – sefer hahazayot [Elyakum, the Book of Hallucina-tions] 1969; Ya`akov [Jacob] 1971; Hapardes [The Orchard] 1972; Mishlei bakbukim[Bottle Parables] 1975; Requiem lena`aman [Requiem for Na’aman], 1978; Minotaur1980; Pundako shel yermiyahu [Jeremiah’s Inn] 1984, and Hazikit vehazamir [Chameleonand Nightingale] 1989.

8. Tammuz’s choice of these landscape features is, of course, not accidental. This is anattempt to reveal and illuminate the local pre-Zionist landscape by a writer who at acertain point declared himself “non-Zionist”, and expressed this view explicitly in hislate works.

9. What the painter’s wife has to say expresses the demand on artists “to create local artthat will be a mirror of social ideal”, as Dorit LeVite puts it (33). LeVite points outthat such a demand called for “overlooking the past in the diaspora, and emphasizingthe remote past which was populated with Biblical characters” (ibid.). It also called fora close relationship between artist and society: “the artist must describe the values ofsociety – and simultaneously justify his status where art was considered a luxury, anddid not qualify as work” (ibid. 38).

10. Hora – an Israeli folk dance. Its origins are Romanian. It is renowned as the most typicalIsraeli folk dance since the time of the first pioneers.

11. It is interesting to compare what Misha Lubotsky says with the words written by thepainter Haim Glicksberg in 1933: “our painters made a fuss, painted large canvases,sort of pictures/illustrations painted decoratively, without any attempt to solve artisticproblems; for the important thing used to be the theme and the content: the externalPalestinian picture. Canvas and paint served only as means to all that…. No wonderanyone who painted a pioneer, a camel, a donkey or an Arab village on canvas wasconsidered an Israeli artist” (LeVite 49).

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12. The Maccabiah sports festival is an athletics competition for Jewish sportsmen andsportswomen from all over the world, held every four years in Israel (since 1931).

13. “The Hebrew Language Protectors’ Brigade” was an association established (1923) inPalestine to fight for the enforcement of Hebrew as the only, or the most common,language spoken by Jews in the country.

14. Yosef Oren (“Sheva yipol vekam”) characterizes the stories in this collection as ones inwhich Tammuz strives “to sketch a life story describing an individual who listens to hisown heartbeat, while he struggles valiantly with the rush of History”. Gershon Shakeddefines stories like those in The Bitter Scent of Geranium as representing “the crisis of theZionist super-narrative”. See Shaked (19–105). He locates the crisis of the “NewHebrew” already in Tammuz’s novel Jacob (1994/1971) (ibid. 88).

15. Tammuz himself graduated from an art school, and is known to have worked in sculptureand painting at the start of his artistic career (see Gilboa 16). He also edited a series ofbooks on art, and wrote an introduction to the book by Dorit LeVite and Gideon Ofrat,The Story of Israel’s Art (1980) and to an album of paintings by A. Hofstetter (1989).

16. Nahum Gutman (1898–1980): an Israeli painter and writer, winner of the Israel Prizefor painting (1978). He painted Tel Aviv in its early days, as well as various otherPalestinian landscapes.

17. Interestingly, in 1972 Tammuz published an allegorical novella entitled The Orchard.The orchard here is the place over which two brothers (sons of the same father) areengaged in a bloody struggle. The brothers, Ovadia-Abdalla and Daniel, are linked byobvious allusions to the Jewish–Arab conflict over Palestine, which is likened to anorchard.

18. In a conversation I had with the Israeli writer Alexander Senned, who was the head ofthe Hakibbutz Hame’uchad publishing house when Tammuz published his book there,Mr Senned told me that Tammuz, who was very knowledgeable about art and verystrict about the design of his books, would himself decide what appeared on the coversof his books. This accords with my assumption that Gutman’s painting was purposelychosen by Tammuz for the cover of The Bitter Scent of Geranium. (The conversation washeld on 7 January 2004.) In this context I may also cite Avner Holtzman again: “Incontemporary Israeli literature there is another widespread phenomenon that drawsone’s attention: illustrating book covers with reproductions of existing works of artwhich are supposed to reflect by subtle, complex analogy, something profound andessential in the book” (Sifrut ve’omanut plastit, 53).

19. The complete picture shows female figures (some 16 in all) arranged in four groups.Their long dresses and characteristic head coverings indicate that they are Arabs.

20. Dorit LeVite points out: “It is an interesting fact that [the artists] were sparing in paint-ing pioneers, and these appeared only later.” The reason, she maintains, is that thepioneer was not seen as an exotic figure; also, the description of a pioneer emphasizesideological aspects at the expense of artistic quality (LeVite 38). When Gutmanpainted working people, they were mostly images of Arab men and women. Never-theless, drawings of people at work were made by Gutman during the First WorldWar when he was a student at the Bezalel art school. He left Jerusalem for Petah-Tikvato seek work, as Nathan Shaham relates in his introduction to the volume NahumGutman, a Man To His Work (1986).

21. On narrativity in painting see Steiner (7–42).22. This story, which takes the form of a monologue delivered by Haim Har-Even, one of

the distinguished Tel Aviv residents, sets forth most of Tammuz’s ideologicalconcepts at the time it was written. See also Gilboa (61).

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23. A fourth reason for an artist’s preoccupation with another art form through his ownmedium may be discerned in Yosef Oren’s article (“Shlosha psalim baromanhayisra’eli, 40–49). Oren speaks of the envy of artists working in one art towardsthose in another, owing to their knowledge of the limits of their own. In this way, hestates, it is possible to explain “the envy of painters and musicians for writers becauseof the advantages of the verbal art which allows the latter to tell a story and to formu-late thoughts. It is thus also possible to explain the writer’s envy of his enviers whoseartistic materials grant them generously and freely the forms and the sounds” (40).However, this observation does not necessarily explain the use of ars poetica in one artform to shed light on another.

24. Only later, in the 1980s, did Tammuz dare to speak openly and explicitly in inter-views (not only in allusions tucked away in his writing) on the subject of his attitudeto Zionism. He did so, for example, in an interview with the daily Yedi`ot Aharonot of6 November 1987. The piece was headlined “I Have Fears that Zionism Will Bringabout a Downfall”; likewise in another interview in the daily Ha’aretz of 13 January1989, entitled “I Miss the Mandate”.

References

Ben-Ezer, Ehud, ed. and introd. Nahum Gutman. Tel Aviv: Massada, 1984 (Hebrew).Gilboa, Menuha. Halomot hazahav veshivronam: sifrut ve’ideologia bitzirat Binyamin Tammuz

[Golden Dreams and their Shattering: Literature and Ideology in the Work ofBenjamin Tammuz]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995.

Gutman, Nahum. Ir ketana ve’anashim ba me`at [A Little City and Few People in It: Storiesof the Beginning of Tel Aviv]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Dvir, 1959.

Gutman, Nahum, and Ben-Ezer, Ehud. Bein holot ukhol shamayim [Sand Dunes and BlueSky]. Tel Aviv: Yavne Publishing House, 1981.

Holtzman, Avner. Sifrut ve’omanut plastit [Literature and plastic arts]. Tel Aviv: HakibbutzHame’uchad Publishing House, 1997.

— Melekhet mahshevet: tehiyat ha’umah – hasifrut ha`ivrit lenokhah ha’omanut haplastit[Aesthetics and National Revival – Hebrew Literature as opposed to Visual Arts].Haifa: Haifa University Press & Zmora-Bitan, Publishers, 1999 (Hebrew).

Johnson Lee McKay. The Metaphor of Painting. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980.Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular. New York:

George Wittenborn, 1947.Kartun-Blum, Ruth. Ed. Shira bere’i atzma [Poetry as its Own Mirror]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

Hame’uchad Publishing House, 1982 (Hebrew).—, ed. Yad kotevet yad [Self-reflexive poetry: forty years]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

Hame’uchad Publishing House, 1989 (Hebrew).Langer, Susanne K. “Deceptive Analogies: Specious and Real Relationships Among the

Arts.” Problems of Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957. 75–89.LeVite, Dorit. “The 1920s: Exotics of Sands and Camels.” Sipura shel omanut yisrael [The

Story of Israel’s Art]. Ed. Benjamin Tammuz. Tel Aviv: Massada, 1980.Ofrat, Gideon. “The 1940s: ‘Canaanite’ Art’.” The Story of Israel’s Art. Ed. Benjamin

Tammuz. Tel Aviv: Massada, 1980.— “The Secret of Gutman’s Orchard.” Erotic Imagery in Gutman’s Oeuvre: The Magical

Orchard. Tel Aviv: Gutman Museum, Spring 2001.Oren, Yosef. “Sheva yipol vekam” [Seven Fall – and Arise]. Ma’ariv (16 May 1980).

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—. “Shlosha psalim baroman hayisra’eli” [Three Sculptures in the Israeli Novel]. Hatzda`alasifrut hayisraelit [A Salute to Israeli Literature]. Yahad Publication, 1991. 40–49.

Porat, Yehoshua. Shelah ve`et beyado: sipur hayav shel Uriel Shelah (Jonathan Ratosh) [The Lifeof Jonathan Ratosh]. Tel Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1989.

Shaham Nathan. Nahum Gutman, adam le`amalo [Nahum Gutman, a Man to his Work]. TelAviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1986 (Hebrew).

Shaked, Gershon. Hasiporet ha`ivrit 1880-1980 [Hebrew Narrative Fiction 1880–1980]. TelAviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad and Keter, 1998.

Steiner, Wendy, “Pictorial Narrativity.”’ Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Paintingand Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 7–42.

Tammuz, Benjamin. Yaakov [Jacob]. Tel Aviv: Keter Publishing House, 1994.— Hapardes [The Orchard][1972]. Tarmil, 1985.— Ed., Sipura shel omanut yisrael [The Story of Israel’s Art]. Tel Aviv: Massada, 1980.— Reiho hamar shel hageranium [The Bitter Scent of Geranium]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

Hame’uchad Publishing House, 1979.

Chaya Shacham is Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department ofHebrew and Comparative literature at the University of Haifa. Among her publicationsare Echoes of Melody – The Poetry of the Palmah Generation and its Ties with Alterman’sVerse, 1997 [Hebrew]; Women and Masks – From Lot’s Wife to Cinderella: Representations ofthe Female Image in Hebrew Women’s Poetry, 2001 [Hebrew]; Distant Relatives: Intertextu-ality, Contacts, and Contests in Modern Hebrew Literature, 2004 [Hebrew]. Address: Univer-sity of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel. [email: shacham@research.haifa.ac.il]

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