Stories from Israel

TEHILLA & OTHER ISRAELI TALES (271 pp.)--Abelard-Schuman ($3.50).

This anthology offers a sampling of a new national literature that is still in the process of being born. While all nine of the stories were originally written in Hebrew, only three of the authors are sabras*, born in Palestine and accustomed to the language from infancy. The others, coming as immigrants, had to learn vernacular Hebrew at ages ranging from 19 to 33. Most of the stories reflect the authors' predominantly European culture, and echoes of Voltaire, De Maupassant, James Joyce and Sholom Aleichem sound more clearly than do the wild notes of Oriental imagery or the deep rhythms of the Old Testament.

Curiously, none of the stories reflects the drama-packed years that marked the national struggle against Britain, the creation of Israel as a state, or the 1948 war against the Arab League. In David's Bower by Yitzhak Shenhar there are young men in uniform and offstage gunfire, but the plot deals with a day's events in a Jerusalem boarding house--marital intrigue, religious argument, family bickering--and could just as easily have taken place in any Western capital. Two of the tales--Barhash and Hamamah--are about Arabs, not Jews, and reveal a surprising attachment for the way of life of Bedouin and fellahin. Others hold a mirror to contemporary Israeli life: Yehuda Yaari's pastoral The Shepherd and His Dog reflects the sabra's passionate love of his barren land; Jerusalem-born Yehuda Burla writes wittily of the marriage between a stolid Oriental Jew and his hopelessly romantic Russian Jewish wife--which is also a marriage between two very different civilizations.

The title story, Tehilla, is perhaps the one most deeply infused with the Jewish past. On the surface a straightforward account of the saintly life and pious death of a venerable matriarch, it is luminous with ghetto wisdom, Hassidic mysticism and that sense of close kinship with God that has been the buckler of the Jews through the centuries. The Israeli writers are clearly still groping toward a native form of expression, and this book gives an indication of their potential. No other group of writers, except possibly the Anglo-Indians, have so great an opportunity of drawing on the inexhaustible treasure houses of both East and West.

* Literally, cactus plants, used to distinguish the supposedly tougher natives from the tenderfoot newcomers.

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