The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artifacts, texts, and paintings, selected by more than 120 internationally recognized scholars.
When Ronit Matalon, the widely admired and controversial Israeli writer, journalist, and professor, died last month, at 58, the reaction varied greatly: silence from some quarters, grief and tributes from others. This was not surprising. Matalon was divisive, and she spent her adult life—her writing life, and her teaching life—exploring the conflicts among Israelis, between Israelis and non-Israelis, and within individual Israelis, including herself.
Matalon, who wrote in Hebrew and whose works were translated into six languages, including Italian and Turkish, taught at Haifa University, where she ran the creative writing program. Her final work of fiction, a novella called “And the Bride Closed the Door,” won Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize, a capstone to a long (but still too short) career. “The Bride” was emblematic of her fiction. Its plot is contained in its title: the reluctant bride simply decides, sorry, not today, and locks herself in her mother’s apartment. Like her creator, she realizes the power of the word No.
Indeed, a stubborn, courageous refusal to accept the world’s conditions (marital, societal, geopolitical) characterized Matalon’s life and work. The daughter of Egyptian immigrants, Matalon never minced words about the inequities in Israeli society, especially its treatment of Mizrahim (explored—and deplored—in her novel The Sound of Our Steps). In a way, refusal was Matalon’s great theme, both on the page and off. Pressured to write more prolifically, she demurred: she would wait, she told her importuners, until she had something to say.
She had much to say in her 1995 novel The One Facing Us. In a short excerpt published in Volume 10 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization and on the Posen Digital Library, a father vanishes, only to be found, weeks later, hiding in a crevice in his own home. A few paragraphs later, we’re told of a bride’s hegira from a wealthy but callous husband. She escapes. Indeed, that’s how things go in Matalon’s fiction: people either escape or they don’t, those being, in Matalon’s view, life’s two possibilities. That may sound grim, but the characters’ tenacious efforts to assert their will in a harsh, straightening world might be seen as something else—the triumph of hope over experience.
