“But Both Their Hands Reach Out:” Father-son Relationship in Preliminaries and in the Binding of Isaac as a Critique on Ideology

In his autobiographic novel Preliminaries, S. Yizhar tells the story of his family who settles in Palestine during the 1920. The novel’s double narration, told through the perspectives of the child-narrator and the grown-up, enables a complex view of the Zionist ideological project. My talk will focus on a mundane scene of the child-narrator and his father buying a soda, and its disproportionate intertextual charge connecting it to the story of the Akedah. Relying on Robert Alter’s view of biblical key words as conveying “thematic ideas through their recurrence at different junctures”, I identify appearances of the word “hand/s” and the verb “reach out” as recurring excessively in depictions of the father-son’s experience in Preliminaries. Whereas in the Binding of Isaac these words embody the potential violence encapsulated in sacrificing Isaac, in Yizhar’s novel they reinforce the close and non-verbal connection of the child-narrator and his father, while underscoring the grotesque, over-blown importance attributed by socialist-Zionism to the taboo on consumerism. Drawing on Ziva Ben-Porat’s model of intertextuality about the relation between the alluding text and the evoked text, I argue that Yizhar creates an ironic analogy between the father-son experience in the novel and the biblical story in order to criticize the high seriousness of the socialist Yishuv’s code of conduct. Following Chana Kronfeld’s theory of intertextuality as triggering a bilateral re-reading of source and target texts, I will conclude by examining how Yizhar’s work provides a counter-mirroring of the Akedah, eliciting new interpretation of this foundational text.