The protagonist in Orly Castel-Bloom’s short-short story “Ummi Fi Shurl” repeatedly denies any relation to her mother, an old Arab woman dressed in black whom she discovers under a bench in a city park. Similarly, in the short story “Passing,” the African American writer Langston Hughes follows a man who ignores his mother on the street. Hughes’ protagonist is passing as white and acknowledging her would give away his secret.
Many scholars of Hebrew literature have discussed Israel’s repression of Mizrahi identities. In a recent critique, Gil Hochberg described the separation of “Jew” and “Arab” in “Ummi Fi Shural” as the “dark abyss of national amnesia.” My research draws a connection between the erasure of Jewish ethnic identities in Israeli fiction, and the erasure of one’s past through acts of passing in African American literature.
In this paper I will argue that Castel-Bloom’s story is more than a story about repressed identities: it is a story of passing. Both Hughes and Castel-Bloom’s characters achieve certain freedoms through passing, but the act of passing also prevents the two from having familial ties. I will show that passing is a circular condition: it involves a tragic loss, a void, and an obsessive uncovering of that void—a literary trope which Bialik called ״גילוי וכיסוי״ (revealment and concealment).