the background of typical behavioral codes in his community. “I fell madly, proudly in
love with the pretty calf and pledged myself heart and soul to love him and to repay his
love with my own love.”<fnref n="19" />

The Hebrew word *ahavah*, which means love, is repeated several times in this sentence, underscoring Hofni's feelings to the calf. The word *ahavah* also appears in the next sentence, when Hofni's mother tells his father that the calf is about to be slaughtered next week in order to be roasted and served for the Shabbat, just the way he loves it. Hofni's love for the calf is thus ironically confronted with his parents' love for the calf's meat. Truly shocked, Hofni asks his mother if she really intends to kill the pretty calf, and she scornfully replies: “People would laugh at you if you talk that way in front of them.”<fnref n="20" /> Consequently, poor Hofni does not talk about this issue, but no longer restrains himself from expressing his intense feelings for the calf:

> When I returned from the kitchen to visit my calf, my pride and my joy, and saw
> him lift his eyes to me as though suing for mercy, I burst into tears. I threw myself
> on him passionately and stroked his sides while the hot tears trickled down my
> throat. The more I kissed him, the harder I cried.<fnref n="21" />

Hofni also cannot stop thinking. He portrays his thoughts as the voice of a little bird that hatched in his head. The little animal within his head further connects the little boy with the little calf:

> Why was such a calf even made? To be slaughtered? But what for? Why slaughter
> a sweet little calf? And if he really was made to be slaughtered, why was he made
> so pretty? Wouldn't it have been enough if he had been born just a piece of meat
> inside a leather bag? Why does your mother want to kill him? Who gave her the
> right to kill such a pretty calf?"<fnref n="22" />

In his dream that night, he sees the calf bound (*'aqud*), and the slaughterer's knife spills
his blood. This nightmarish scene alludes to the biblical story of the binding of Isaac
(*'aqedah*). While in the biblical story the horrific sacrifice of Isaac is prevented by
sacrificing an animal instead, in Hofni's dream the very sacrifice of the animal is itself the
horrible act.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Ibid., 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Ibid.</footnote>
The next evening, Hofni finds the slaughterer talking figures with his mother. Obeying his mother, the child says nothing, but instead holds an internal monologue, constructed as a series of questions that are not to be answered:

> Was I really such a fool, I wondered? But why? Who said that I mustn't have pity on the pretty calf? My mother? But I'd heard her say more than once that we were commanded to be merciful to animals and not treat them cruelly! Not treat them cruelly—but slaughter them? Be merciful—and slaughter them? So she said, but who said she was right? Could she be wrong then? Could mothers be wrong too? Dear God, my mother and the calf are both in Your hands—why did You make the calf live and make my mother want to kill him? God! Why should this calf, that You created perfect in all his parts so he should be able to live for years on the face of Your earth, have to be slaughtered?<fnref n="23" />

This series of questions delves into the inconsistency in Judaism's treatment of animals—banning cruelty to animals, but allowing their slaughter, which inevitably involves cruelty.

At some points, Hofni's theological quest exposes a family tragedy: "and what about my little brother who died when he was eight days old?"<fnref n="24" /> The child's questions shift from the forthcoming death of the little calf to the death of his little brother, connecting these two death events, and also presenting the calf as analogous to Hofni's little brother. And, indeed, the calf is about to be killed on his eighth day,<fnref n="25" /> just like Hofni's little brother. Moreover, in the original Hebrew, this sentence ends with a question: *ve-ani anah ani ba?* (and as for me, whither shall I go?), which is a clear biblical allusion to the words of Joseph's eldest brother Reuben. In the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, Reuben persuades his brothers not to kill Joseph. Later, thinking that Joseph is dead, Reuben rends his clothes and says to his brothers: "the child is not; and as for me, whither shall I go?" (Genesis 37: 30). Quoting biblical Reuben, Hofni expresses his brotherly love for the calf, whom he regards as his little brother, as well as his wish to save him.

Alas, Hofni could not save the calf. His last thought, before concluding the story with the report that the calf was slaughtered, was whether he should consult with the rabbi about this issue, a thought he raises and immediately dismisses: "No. I wouldn't even ask him. He would just laugh at me like my mother and call me a fool."<fnref n="26" /> This closing thought

<footnote n="23">²³ Ibid., 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Ibid., 35.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Ibid., 36.</footnote>
emphasizes that the conflict over the calf's slaughter is not solely determined by the
generational gap between a child and his mother. It rather indicates that albeit the child's
anti-slaughter stance stems from the very Jewish thought, it is not accepted by the Jewish
community and its leadership.

Abramovitsh’s Calf

Three years after the publication of Feierberg’s “The Calf,” Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (1836-1917) published a short story in Yiddish with the same title, “The Calf.” Abramovitsh, better known by his pseudonym Mendele Mocher Seforim (Mendele the Book Peddler), is widely considered the founder of modern Jewish literature. His deep engagement with the natural world has been long recognized by various scholars of modern Jewish literature,<fnref n="27" /> and the centrality of the theme of compassion for animals in his oeuvre has been also acknowledged by several critics.<fnref n="28" />

Abramovitsh’s short story “The Calf” is narrated from the perspective of a Jewish youngster, who is deeply attached to a calf. It starts, like Feierberg’s story, with the protagonist’s excitement when a calf is born in his home. Similarly to Hofni, he also lovingly bonds with the calf and is likewise shocked into realizing that his mother plans to slaughter the calf.

<footnote n="27">²⁷ David Aberbach, *Realism, Caricature, and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim* (Washington DC: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 77-79; Joseph Klausner, *History of Modern Hebrew Literature (1785-1930)*, trans. Herbert Danby (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 133; Benny Mer, “Aharit davar: tevat Mendele,” in *Massa’ot Binyamin ha-shelishi va-aherim*, ed. Benny Mer (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2007), 266-268; Dan Miron, *Ben hazon le-emet: nitzane ha-roman ha-’Ivri ve-ha-Yiddish ba-me’ah ha-tesha’-’esreh* (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1979), 305-322; Dan Miron, *A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century* (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 136-137; Gidi Nevo, “Kama hirhurim ‘al ha-tev’a bi-yetzirato shel Abramovitsh,” *Mehkere Yerushalayim be-sifrut Ivrit* 18 (2001): 163-185; Theodore L. Steinberg, *Mendele Mocher Seforim* (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), 115.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Aberbach, *Realism, Caricature, and Bias, 6*; Klausner, *History of Modern Hebrew Literature*, 424; Noam Pines, “A Radical Advocacy: Suffering Jews and Animals in SY Abramovitsh’s *Di Kliatshe*,” *Jewish Social Studies* 23, no. 2 (2018): 24-47. Gershon Shaked has closely analyzed Abramovitsh’s representations of animals, but focused merely on their symbolic function. See Gershon Shaked, *Ben tzhoq le- le-dim’ah: ‘iyyunim bi-yetzirato shel Mendele Mokher Sefarim* (Tel Aviv: Masadah, 1974), 46-56.</footnote>
My love for the calf grew stronger every day, and so at the same time did my anguish about his fate. For my childish heart would pound with terror, overhearing talk about slaughtering the calf and bargaining with the butcher. The animal stood and looked at us so innocently, and licked my mother's hand so tenderly, while she was estimating the value of the tongue which licked her. It felt, really, like a murder.<fnref n="29" />

Killing the calf is described here with the word “murder” (*retzihah*, in the original text),<fnref n="30" /> which is typically applied to humans only. This choice of word indicates that the protagonist regards the calf as his peer, as someone and not something. “Torn in two directions,” he adds, “I was ashamed to look either at the calf or my mother—forgive me for the comparison—in the eye.”<fnref n="31" /> The boy has already likened the calf to a human by applying the concept of murder to the calf, and now he equates the calf with his own mother. He is torn between these two directions, namely the calf’s direction and his mom’s direction. Here too, the protagonist’s mother stands for the entire Jewish community and world, which is contrasted with the world wherein the calf belongs. Noteworthy, a decade after the Yiddish publication of “The Calf,” Abramovitsh reworked the story into Hebrew, thickening the original text with religious references and overtones, and also gendering the calf from scratch as female. When depicting the rift between his mother and the calf, the protagonist adds: “I try with all my might to divert the calf from my heart [...] she should die, as she was created for this purpose.”<fnref n="32" /> While this thought seems to religiously justify the calf’s slaughter, it echoes the Talmudic teaching of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi and the calf that was cited earlier, which actually challenges this very thought.

The unexpected death of the cow saves her calf from slaughter, allowing the friendship between the young protagonist and the calf to grow deeper. In the Hebrew edition of the story, the protagonist's experience with the calf raises further questions. He ponders over the relationship between man and beast, both flesh and blood made from one material, whether they all have the same breath.<fnref n="33" /> The words “they all have the same breath” (*ruah ehad la-kol*) in this context clearly refer to the following biblical verse, which analogizes humans and other animals, refuting human advantage over animals: “For the fate of the

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Mendele Mocher Seforim, “The Calf,” trans. Arthur C. Jacobs, *The Jewish Quarterly* 7, no. 2 (1960): 34-39, 35.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Mendele Mocher Seforim, *Dos Kelbl* (Warsaw: Ferlag Kultur-lige, 1926), 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Mendele, “The Calf,” 35.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Mendele Mokher Sefarim, *Kol kitve Mendele Mokher Sefarim* (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1966), 124.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Mendele, *Kol kitve*, 126.</footnote>
sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they
all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity"
(Ecclesiastes 3:19).

When the protagonist is out of school, he spends most of his time in nature, with the
beloved calf:

For both of us a new world opened up, a world which was bright and attractive
and free, and which neither I shut up in the *cheder* nor the calf in its shed had
before now experienced [...] Everything was alive and full of spirit [...] All kinds
of birds, bees and grasshoppers flew and leapt high into the sky and happily
among the grass were singing, humming and chirping. There was music to be
heard, there were scents to be savoured and all varieties of the colours of flowers
glittered before my eyes. Everything breathes so freely and easily.<fnref n="34" />

Just as the protagonist's mother signifies the Jewish world, the calf represents the natural
world. Like in Feierberg's story, and contrary to gender stereotypes, the mother here also
epitomizes the anti-compassionate stance. When the protagonist absentmindedly hums a
synagogue melody, while roaming in the fields with his bovine friend, "the calf looked at
me and mooed as though its meaning were, 'Stop! What's the matter with you?'"<fnref n="35" /> The
young Jew anthropomorphizes the calf, grants her with the common societal perspective,
according to which these two worlds—the Jewish world and the natural world—are in
opposition, and cannot be incorporated.

This common societal perspective is later critically thrown at him by his family. "What are
the fields and your woods making of you?", his family worryingly wonders, and their
conclusion is: "there is only one way for you to become a proper Jew, and that's to go to
the *yeshivah*."<fnref n="36" /> The nature-*yeshivah* binary is, however, viewed differently by the
protagonist: "I was really sorry to be separated from the calf, and from the piece of God's
world, which had fitted me with a new spirit."<fnref n="37" /> Ironically, he identifies the natural
world—and not the Jewish world, embodied here in the *yeshivah*—with God's world.

The abundance of nature stands in stark disparity to the scarcity of the *yeshivah* life. When
visiting home, the protagonist contrasts the fine and strong body of the calf with his own
"wasted, starved body, with my ashen *yeshivah* student's face."<fnref n="38" /> After being back in the

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Mendele, "The Calf," 37.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ibid., 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Ibid.</footnote>
yeshivah, he learns from his mother's letter that the calf has calved herself and became a full cow. "She doesn't want to be milked, but throws herself about and cries after her calf," she complains to her son. "Have you ever heard of such a thing, a cow which can't forget her calf? It's like a human mother and her child."<fnref n="39" /> While the mother compares cow-calf and mother-child relations as an absurd idea, this comparison is not only valid, but also anchored in Jewish thought, as quoted before from Maimonides' *Guide for the Perplexed*. While reading his mother's letter, the protagonist faints, but cannot share his pain with his friends:

> How could I tell them I was miserable over a calf? How could I say I had fainted out of my feeling for a cow, an animal with whom I had been fated to spend my happiest hours, looking at and enjoying the pleasure of God's word. And how to say my blood rushed with pity for the mother whose child had been slaughtered.<fnref n="40" />

Consequently, the troubled *yeshivah* boy begins to hallucinate:

> It was fearful. The young calf tore itself out of the butcher's hands, and ran crying, with the butcher after it. Knowing she was about to be slaughtered, and so struggling for life, the calf went wild with fright, then hid under someone's skirts, gasping and crying, as if pleading 'Help!'<fnref n="41" />

His mother's account of the cow and her calf is interwoven here with the Talmudic story of Yehudah ha-Nasi and the calf. He seems to experience a mental breakdown, and the story concludes on the day he is taken to the hospital, and a new letter from his mother informs that she lost her financial backing as the cow is dead. This tragic closure, which analogizes the dismal fate of humans and animals, echoes the words of Ecclesiastes, "For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same" (3:19).

## Sholem Aleichem's Calf

Compassion for animals is a leitmotif in the writing of Sholem Aleichem, the pen name of Sholem Rabinovich (1859-1916), who is the most well-known writer of Yiddish

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid., 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Ibid.</footnote>
literature. His short piece “Pity for Living Creatures” (“Tsa’er ba’ele khayim,” 1903) focuses entirely on this theme. It specifies many cases of cruelty to animals, narrated by a compassionate Jewish boy, who vainly tries to protect these victimized animals. Here, too, the young protagonist draws his humane values from the Jewish tradition and his Jewish education, yet ironically his Jewish community is utterly indifferent to animal suffering. Viewing a poor little carp that is about to be killed and served for Shabbat, as if begging for his life, he tells his mother:

“It’s a pity,” I said to my mother, “a pity for this living creature.”

“A pity for which living creature?”

“For this little fish.”

“Who put this idea in your head?”

“The rebbe.”

“You’re a fool and your rebbe is an even bigger one!”<fnref n="42" />

Later, after watching his friend’s father, who is a Jewish ritual slaughterer, he tells his friend:

“your father’s a *goy*!”

“Why is he a *goy*?”

“Because he doesn’t have pity for living creatures.”

“I never knew you were such a sage,” his friend replied, giving him the finger right under his nose.<fnref n="43" />

Finally, when the protagonist realizes that he is the only one in his community that cares for animals, he wonders about the gap between the compassionate treatment of animal in Judaism and the cruel treatment of animals within the actual Jewish world:

Didn’t the rebbe himself tell me God loves all His creatures? One shouldn’t even annoy a fly on the wall, he declared, because of the precept of pity for living creatures. One Shouldn’t kill even a harmful spider. For when the hour of death comes, the rebbe explained, God Himself will take its life. Well and good. But the problem remained. Why were oxen, calves, sheep and fowl killed every day?<fnref n="44" />

<footnote n="42">⁴² Sholem Aleichem, *Some Laughter, Some Tears: Tales from the Old World and the New*, trans. Curt Leviant (New York: Putnam, 1968), 101.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Ibid., 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Ibid., 104-105.</footnote>
Whereas in “Pity for Living Creatures” the young protagonist is attached to various kinds of animals, in Sholem Aleichem’s last novel, *Motl the Cantor’s Son* (*Motl Peysi dem hazns*, 1907), the young protagonist—like the young protagonists in the calves’ stories of Feierberg and Mendele—builds bonds and affection with a calf. The novel deals with the world of a poor Jewish boy, first in Eastern Europe and then in America, through his own eyes. The novel opens with the following monologue:

> I'll bet you whatever you want that no one on earth is as happy with the warm sunny days after Passover as I, Peysi the cantor's son Motl, and the neighbor's calf Meni. Both of us feel the first rays of the warm sun on the first day after Passover, both of us breathe in the fragrance of the first green blades of grass sprouting up from the newly thawed earth, and both of us crawl out of our dark, cramped corners to welcome the first sweet light of the warm spring morning. I, Peysi the cantor's son Motl, emerge from a cold, damp cellar that reeks of sour-dough and medicines; and Meni, the neighbor's calf, is let out of a worse-smelling spot—a tiny, dark, revolting, mud-covered stall with crooked, peeling walls through which the snow blows in wintertime and the rain whips in summertime. Escaping into God's bright, open world, Meni and I are filled with joy and gratitude to Nature.<fnref n="45" />

While his father is dying, and his mother and older brothers neglect him, Motl finds comfort in playing with Meni, the neighbors' calf, whose name is a nickname for Menahem, which means “comforting.” One day Motl is looking for Meni, and Pessi, the neighbor, says she sold it to the butcher, since she had no other choice. “It’s enough that we have to feed one dumb animal—we can’t manage two!”<fnref n="46" /> Motl’s reaction to this news is: “Now the calf has become a dumb animal to her? A strange woman, this Pessi [...] And Pessi the neighbor talks a long time to my mother while my heart aches for the logs, the little calf—oh, the little calf! If I weren’t embarrassed, I’d burst out crying.”<fnref n="47" /> Alongside the emotional loss that Motl experiences, the loss of Meni also brings the young boy into existential thoughts:

> It's just too bad that Meni our neighbor's calf isn't here! He's no longer a calf, but now a dumb animal, as our neighbor Pessi says. What does that mean? And

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Sholem Aleichem, *Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son*, trans. Aliza Shevrin (New York: Penguin, 2009), 171.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Ibid., 179.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Ibid., 179-180.</footnote>
why did they sell him to the butcher? Could it be to slaughter him? Was he born
only to be slaughtered? Anyway, why is a calf born, and why is a person born?<sup>48</sup>

This series of questions, that are not to be answered, is interrupted by the cry of Motl's
mother, as it turns out that his father has just passed away. Meni is not, however,
equivalent to Motl's father; as Dan Miron notes in his introduction to the novel, the
analogy is clearly between Motl himself and his only friend, Meni the calf. Like the poor
little animal, the little Jewish orphan also cannot be supported by his impoverished
family.<fnref n="49" /> As in Feierberg and Mendele’s calves tales, here too, the shared vulnerability of
Jewish boy and the calf connects them in the fictional world, as well as in the interpretative
accounts thereof, inasmuch as the calves are perceived as the Jewish boys’ literary
doppelgangers.

**Naama Harel** is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the co-chair of Columbia University Seminar of Human-Animal Studies. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Comparative Literature from the University of Haifa, and her scholarly interests center on human-animal relations in Modern Jewish literature. She has published widely on related themes, including her book *Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier* with University of Michigan Press, 2020.

**Keywords:** Animal Studies, Slaughter in Judaism, Compassion, Children and Animals Bond, Hebrew Literature, Yiddish Literature

**How to quote this article:**

Naama Harel, “Kids for Calves: Children Against Slaughter in Fin-de-siècle Jewish Literature,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13904](https://10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13904)

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Ibid., 182.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Ibid., 31-32.</footnote>
Troubling the Boundaries: Human and Animal Spaces
in Yitzhak Orpaz's *Nemalim (Ants)* and
Italo Calvino's *La formica argentina (The Argentine Ant)*

by Anna Lissa

Abstract

*The essay explores the portrayal of insects in literature, focusing specifically on the representation of ants in Yitzhak Orpaz's Nemalim (Ants) and Italo Calvino's La formica argentina (The Argentine Ant). Both stories delve into the dynamics of species interaction, specifically into the response of two married couples whose homes or apartments are invaded by ants. Despite the humans' efforts, particularly those of the husbands', to regain control of their territory, they are unsuccessful. Throughout the narratives, the ants, functioning as a superorganism, exhibit a greater degree of agency compared to the human characters. The house or flat transforms into an anthill, effectively reverting the anthropized space into a natural environment. Consequently, the two species intertwine, mingle, and hybridize.*

*This analysis will be conducted through the lens of animal studies, highlighting the themes of animal agency and Otherness, which are particularly significant when considering insects. Additionally, the essay will draw upon the concept of consilience between the humanities and sciences.*

Introduction

What Lies beyond Reality?—Approaches to *The Argentine Ant* and *Ants*

Defining and Circumscribing the Territory

...And Then Come the Ants

The Reversal of Perspectives: Between Symbiosis and Hybridity

Conclusion: Looking at the Sea
Introduction

In the field of animal studies, insects have relatively recently begun to receive the attention and the consideration they deserve.<fnref n="1" /> On the one hand, they are the Other—communication and empathy in their regards are admittedly difficult and for some people impossible. They are monsters or object of wonder,<fnref n="2" /> although one must always keep in mind that the Latin word *monstrum* is connected to the verb *monstrare* that means “to point out, to show,”<fnref n="3" /> implying that a *monstrum*/monster is, first of all, something that deserves to be shown, but not necessarily a monstrosity.

To demonstrate the otherness of insects it suffices to compare two scenes. The first and most well-known is described by Jacques Derrida in *L'animal que donc je suis* and recalls the accidental encounter and exchange of gazes between the naked

<footnote n="1">¹ Cristopher Hollingsworth, *Poetics of the Hive The Insect Metaphor in Literature* (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Oddone Longo and Alessandro Minelli, *Entomata. Gli insetti nella scienza e nella cultura dall'antichità ai giorni nostri* (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ad Arti, 2002); Eric C. Brown, *Insect Poetics* (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Simon King, *Insect Nations: Visions of the Ant World from Kropotkin to Bergson* (Ashby-de-la-Zouch: InkerMan Press, 2006); Charlotte Sleigh, *Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology* (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Catherine Parry, *Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), with a chapter dedicated to “Ants, Myrmecology and Metaphor,” 63-110; Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame, Sophie Houdart, and Christine Jungen, eds., “Techniques et cultures,” in *Mondes infimes* 68 (2017); Daniela Bombara, Stefania La Vaccara, and Ellen Patat, eds., “Epifanie entomologiche nella cultura italiana,” *Revue de Philologie* 46, no. 1 (2019); Wilt L. Idema, *Insects in Chinese Literature: A Study and Anthology* (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2019); Aude Volpilhac, “Micrographies. Les insectes littéraires au XVIIe siècle: Le cas de ‘Divers insectes’ de Pierre Perrin,” in “Créatures ‘parlantes’ et ‘truchement’ du conteur. Éthique et esthétique du discours animal,” ed. Aude Volpilhac, *Animots, carnet de zoopoétique* (January 2020): 1-17; Anne Simon, *Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique* (Marseille: Wildproject, 2021), with a chapter dedicated to insects “La vermine dans les plis de nos villes,” 313-336; Dror Burshtein, *‘Olam Qatan: Diyoqan’ot shel heraqim* (Small World: Portraits of Insects) (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2021); Yvan Daniel and Alain Montandon, eds., *Observer et Décrire Des insectes et des hommes* (Paris: Garnier, 2022). In the remarkable series Reaktion Books has dedicated to animals several insects are covered: Charlotte Sleigh, *Ant* (2003); Marion Copeland, *Cockroach* (2003); Claire Preston, *Bee* (2005); Steven Connor, *Fly* (2006); Richard Jones, *Mosquito* (2012); Adam Dodd, *Beetle* (2015); Matthew Gandy, *Moth* (2016); Klaus Reinhardt, *Bedbug* (2018); Richard Jones, *Wasp* (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Simon, *Une bête entre les lignes*, 314.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ See P. G. W. Glare, *Oxford Latin Dictionary*, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), s.v.</footnote>
philosopher coming out of his shower and his she-cat.<fnref n="4" /> In a more ironical approach, the anthropologist Hugh Raffles describes two casual encounters with the big water bug, the American cockroach. Both encounters end up tragically for the bug in question:

> One night, distracted and without thinking, I swiveled around. A healthy-looking water bug was sitting on a pile of books behind my shoulder. We locked eyes. Its head extended like a turtle's. Its face was angular and inquisitive. [...], it had “the lofty brow of the philosopher.” Our eyes met as in an animal movie. An understanding beyond words. But I must have moved too suddenly, and it took off and I took off after it, grabbing a broom...<fnref n="5" />

And the morning after:

> I was in the shower, daydreaming as usual under the soothing warm water, thoughts rambling around the chapter of this book I'm trying to finish [...] when out of nowhere, a three-inch water bug dropped from the bathroom ceiling and landed at my feet.

> I admit it: I screamed: Wouldn't you? I shut off the water. It took a moment to get over the surprise. And then there we were, the water bug and I, trapped and defenseless and covered in soapsuds. And we both stayed very still until that very big little animal, a female animal, I noticed, climbed swiftly up onto the towel rack and stopped there at eye level a few inches away, her handsome and intelligent face cocked at a philosophical angle, giving me a funny quizzical look up and down as if amused by this unexpected situation and intrigued to see what would happen next. One of us was very calm. One of us—it was the bathroom after all—began

<footnote n="4">⁴ Anna Lissa, “Introduction,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), viii-ix.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Hugh Raffles, *Insectopedia* (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 299.</footnote>
carefully to groom her antennae. I won't go into the details of what
happened next.<fnref n="6" />

Consciously or not, the second scene echoes, one may be tempted to say re-enacts, Derrida's encounter—the she-water bug, the exchange of gazes—and although it ends up in a fast scene reminiscent of Sergio Leone final duels, it prompts the protagonist to a detailed observation of the bug and to the exercise of a “regard aiguisé”<fnref n="7" />—a sharpened look. Not unlike the exchange of gazes *à la Derrida*, this sharp look brings this insect a little closer to the human, by turning it into a being that deserves attention and observation, bestowing it depth, significance and allowing it to emerge as a potential literary subject.<fnref n="8" /> This sharp look is indeed a feature of writers passionate about entomology as it is the case in this essay with Yitzhak Orpaz.<fnref n="9" />

In the following pages, I shall be dealing with insects, more specifically with ants, whose literary career is long and worthy of respect. Yet, the ants I shall be dealing with have less to do with classical literature, myth and folklore and much more to do with the practice of accurate observation, almost bordering on the field of scholarly entomological observation. These ants will not speak a human language, nor will they make an exhibition of their wisdom and prudence. Yet, the images of their pervasive swarming will resurface in the texts I shall discuss, not as the epiphany of a divine power, which has a reason and an explanation from the perspective of mythical imagination, but as the manifestation of a natural power that borders on a metaphysical dimension, while leaving the characters who observe it and have to cope with it puzzled, utterly powerless and in dismay.

<footnote n="6">⁶ Ibid., 300.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Volpilhac, “Micrographies,” 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Concerning Orpaz's detailed descriptions as a feature of his writing see Gabriel Moked, “Be-Tzid ha-tzviyah rav ha-merumaz min ha-ne'emar” (“In *The Hunting of the Doe* There are More Hints than Clear Words”) in *Bi-zeman ha-amiti* (*In Real Time*), Moked (Tel Aviv: Ktav, 2011), 79-80, 79.</footnote>
What Lies beyond Reality?—Approaches to *The Argentine Ant* and *Ants*

In the following pages, I will propose a comparative analysis of two stories: *La formica argentina* (*The Argentine Ant*, 1952) by the Italian writer Italo Calvino<fnref n="10" /> and *Nemalim* (*Ants*, 1968) by the Israeli writer Yitzhak Awerbuch Orpaz. <fnref n="11" /> Although no direct influence exists, since Orpaz read Calvino’s story much later,<fnref n="12" /> the stories share several elements: they are both narrated in the first person, from the point of view of the male characters, and both deal with an interaction between species—a human couple trying to cope with an invasion of ants; both plots revolve around the control of the house, a space conceived and molded by humans for their own habitation.

Calvino's *The Argentine Ant* has been written between August 1949 and April 1952 and published for the first time in 1952, and it is the first story in which the author has set aside subjects related to the Italian Resistance Movement during the Second World War.<fnref n="13" /> The plot is simple: a couple with a baby moves into a new house in a new neighborhood on the Riviera ligure, in search of a new life and a

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Italo Calvino, *La formica argentina*, in *Botteghe Oscure* 10 (1952): 406-441; the story has been republished in several collections, among them in *I racconti* (Torino: Einaudi, 1958), 407-440; *La nuvola di smog* (Torino: Einaudi, 1965), 85-127; *Gli amori difficili* (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), 113-141; finally included in the edition of novels and stories *Romanzi e racconti*, 3 vols. 1991-1993, I vol. (Milano: Mondadori, 1991), 445-442, the reference text for the current essay. For a detailed editorial history and for the differences between the first and the following editions see Mario Barenghi et al., "Note e notizie sui testi," in Ibid., 1312-1315. English translation *The Argentine Ant* in Italo Calvino, *The Watcher and Other Stories*, trans. Archibald Colquhoun and William Weaver (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1971), 138-181, the English quotes will be taken from this edition.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Yitzhak Orpaz, *Nemalim* (*Ants*) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968). The story has been republished in two different collections: Orpaz, *Shalosh Novellot* (*Three Novellas*) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1972) and Yitzhak Awerbuch Orpaz, *Laylah be-Santa Paulinah: sippurim hadashim ve-novellah Nemalim* (*A Night in Santa Paulina: New Stories and the Novella Ants*) (Tel Aviv: Gvanim, 1997), 83-159, the reference text for the current essay. English translation *Ants*, translated by David Zaraf and published in *The Iowa Review* 2, no.1 (Winter 1980): 10-57 followed by an interview Frederick Woodard, "An Interview with Yitzhak Orpaz," 57-66. In this article I shall quote the translation recently republished in Yitzhak Orpaz, *The Death of Lysanda: Two Novellas*, trans. Richard Flint and David Zaraf (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2013), 101-192. The English version of the names of the characters is also based on this translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Gaio Sciloni, “Le formiche e... la questione ebraica,” introduction to *Formiche*, by Yitzhak Orpaz (Viterbo: Edizioni Stampa Alternativa Nuovi Equilibri, 1995), 5-8, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Barenghi, “Note e notizie sui testi,” 1312.</footnote>
new beginning. They rent a house and try to take possession of it only to discover
that the house is completely infested by ants, actually by a very strong species of
ants that goes under the name of Argentine ant. The wife is absolutely
disheartened; the baby suffers too because some ants manage to enter the cradle he
is sleeping in; the husband spends the following days visiting the neighbors to try
and figure out a solution to the problem. Every neighbor suggests some
insecticides or traps, but nobody has an effective solution at hand, not even the
agent of the society for the fight against the Argentine ant, whose remedy appears
to be a failure too. Apparently, the husband discovers, the ants infest all the houses
in the zone, nobody knows where they come from, nor how to get rid of them.
His landlady points out that he and his family decided to rent the house at the very
last minute, thus they did not give her the time to do the disinfestation. After two
days, at sunset, husband and wife, faced with the impossibility to find a solution,
decide to go out for a walk. Their desperation attenuates when they stop in front
of the sea to admire the landscape.

The plot of Orpaz’s *Ants*, written between 1964-65¹⁴ and first published in 1968 starts with a sketch of everyday life: Jacob and Rachel have been married for some time and they live in a small flat. The smallness of the space makes them bump into each other ceaselessly, causing awkward feelings for both of them and especially for the husband. Actually, the couple is falling apart: Jacob admits that his wife avoids every contact with him. Finally, they agree to divorce. They go to see a Rabbi in order to start the procedure, but the Rabbi advises them to take some more time to reflect. In the meanwhile, they can start looking for a new house—change of place change of fortune, as the Rabbi puts it. Jacob is a construction worker and decides to build a new house and Rachel seems happy with this idea. Suddenly, he spots the first explorer ant. From then on, the invasion unfolds relentlessly. Jacob looks at the ants with mixed feelings, he admires them but at the same time he wants to fight them off. Rachel on the other side is the silent partner, almost a fifth column, in league with the ants. While the invasion is completed and the house is destroyed, Jacob and Rachel succeed in reviving their intimacy, which becomes complete precisely at the moment the house crumbles down.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ The dates are given by the author, see Woodard, "An Interview with Yitzhak Orpaz," 60.</footnote>
The critical approaches to both *The Argentine Ant* and *Ants* in Italy and in Israel, share one point: they display a tendency to overlook the ants as such and their interaction with the human characters, and they do so precisely by stating that the descriptions of their behavior are realistic but they have a non-realistic significance that turns them into symbols or metaphors of the social, political and cultural context and problems of the time. Both stories are indeed suspended between realistic descriptions, and a more general abstract dimension involving human situations and relationships: this is the case with the misery of the family in *The Argentine Ant*, the estrangement and the distance between husband and wife in both novels, possibly a consequence of a difficult life in *The Argentine Ant*, while in *Ants* the falling apart of the couple is at the origin of the story and underlies the whole plot. Both stories lack a precise time and space framework: all the reader knows about *The Argentine Ant* is that the couple moved to a new place near the sea, the year or the period are left unsaid. As for *Ants*, there is no reference to any aspect of reality to be found outside of Jacob and Rachel's apartment. The name of the city they live in is never mentioned, the reader can imply that it is Tel Aviv; some scanty references to Jewish tradition—the Rabbi that is supposed to deal with the divorce procedure, the names of the characters and some inter-textual references to the *Bible*—reveal the Jewish identity of the protagonists.
Calvino very soon replied to his interpreters by pointing out the realistic background of the story:

> Whoever has been in the Riviera knows that there is no exaggeration in my story: the events, characters, systems for fighting against it, different attitudes toward ants, your life dominated by the ants, form part of the regular experience of my childhood. [...] So it is a realistic story, then.<fnref n="15" />

Indeed, the Argentine ant, whose scientific name is Linepithema humile, is a real invasive species and is listed among the household pests. It stems from the region

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Calvino’s answer to Cesare Cases’ interpretation of *The Argentine Ant* as an allegory of capitalism that pervades the life of individuals and to some British critics who “talk about Kafka.” Calvino’s letter to Cesare Cases is dated December 20, 1958, in Italo Calvino, *Letters 1941-1985*, selected with an introduction by Michael Wood, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 170-171.</footnote>
of the Paranà River basin, but human travels have spread it all over the world: in Europe, in a colony that extends from Liguria to Portugal, in California and in Japan. Recent research has shown that these three ant colonies are interrelated in such a way as they can be apprehended as a single super-colony.<fnref n="16" /> These scientific findings give further substance to the argument Calvino reiterated about the story thirty years later:

> *The Argentine Ant* is not a Kafkian-oneiric story, as all the critics have always said. It is the most realistic story I have written in my life; it describes with absolute exactness the situation that came about because of the invasion of the Argentine ants into the cultivated areas of San Remo and a large swathe of the Western Riviera during my childhood, in the twenties and thirties.<fnref n="17" />

A real fact is, therefore, at the origin of the plot and realism is the principle that governs the narration.

However, since the novel has been published immediately after the Six Days War, it has been first ascribed political and ideological implications. The ants, specifically, have been considered a hint at the author's involvement in Israeli life after the war,<fnref n="18" /> and a symbol or even the embodiment of the nightmare of the war and of the feeling of being under siege.<fnref n="19" /> Afterwards, the novel has been

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Alexander Wild, “Taxonomy and Distribution of the Argentine Ant, Linepithema humile,” in *Annals of the Entomological Society of America* 97, no. 6 (November 2004): 1204-1215; Sunamura et al., “Intercontinental Union of Argentine Ants: Behavioral Relationships among Introduced Populations in Europe,” *Insectes Sociaux* 2 (July 2009): 143-147.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Italo Calvino, *Letters 1941-1985*, 529. See also Mario Barenghi, “Italo Calvino e i sentieri che s’interrompono,” *Quaderni Piacentini* 15 (1984): 127-150, 131: “*La formica argentina* è il resoconto, fra scherzoso e tragico, di un’avventura onirica di sapore kafkiano.”</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Hayyim Nagid, “The Destroyers Ants,” *Masa*, May 24, 1968.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Ehud Ben Ezer, “A Narrow Step,” *’Al ha-Mishmar*, April 28, 1972. Yet, Orpaz rejected the interpretation of the story as a political allegory *tout court*, although he did not deny that when he wrote it there was a strong feeling of siege in Israel, see Woodard, “An Interview with Yitzhak Orpaz,” 60. For further and more recent political interpretations of the story see Shimrit Peled, “‘Mastery Regained’: Israeli Jewish Sovereignty and Space in three Israeli Novels 1967-1973,” *Journal of Modern Jewish Studies* 10, no. 2 (July 2011): 263-284, 273-274; Ariel Pridan, “Beyond Conflict: The Non-adversarial Aspect of Yitzhak Averbuch Orpaz’s Prose Fiction,” *Hebrew Studies* 62 (2021): 265-289, 270-278.</footnote>
interpreted as surrealistic, with the ants considered as a trivial part of reality
penetrated with a symbolic demonic force aiming at destroying the protagonist's
bourgeois life<fnref n="20" />; it has been apprehended as a meta-realistic work, like Orpaz's
fiction in general, and therefore featured by the cracking and breaking of the
borders of the connections and relationships that order reality and especially by
“the abolition of the usual borders separating man from animal”<fnref n="21" />; as a piece of
experimental writing in search of new possibilities of expression with realistic
descriptions of trivial matters and tiny things, ants included, that only hint at the
tension between the world of sorrow and regret of the modern protagonist of a
story and the careful description of meaningless things<fnref n="22" />; as an existentialist work
with a dialectical tendency toward the fantastic as well as a tension between the
realistic, detailed descriptions of reality and the search for the deep inner meaning
of the same reality<fnref n="23" />; as an allegory of the way of a man with a virgin and at the
same time of the existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.<fnref n="24" /> Finally, the ants
have also lent themselves to a psychoanalytic interpretation apprehending them as

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Gershon Shaked, *Ha-sipporet ha-’ivrit 1880-1980* (*Hebrew Narrative Fiction 1880-1980*), 5 vols. Vol. V, *Be-harbeh ashnavim be-kenisot tzdadiyot* (*Through Many Rear Doors through the Side Entrances*) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Keter Publishing House 1988), 152, where the author comes back to this interpretation. For the bibliography of the previous interpretations underscoring this issue see Ibid., 513 n. 19. For a general evaluation of surrealism in Orpaz’s works see Shaked, *Hebrew Narrative Fiction*, V, 45-53; Giulia Miller, *Reconfiguring Surrealism in Modern Hebrew Literature: Menashe Levin, Yitzhak Oren and Yitzhak Orpaz* (London-Portland: Vallentine Mitchell 2013), 1-19. Concerning surrealism and *Ants* see Giora Leshem, “Surrealism heraqi anoshi” (“Human-Insect Surrealism”), *Moznayim* 6 (May 1982): 45-46. See also Ran Yagil, *Sefer le-’adam ehad: Monographiyah hufshit* (Orpaz: A One Man Book – Free Monograph) (Tel Aviv-Yafo: Emdah, 2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Hillel Barzel, *Sipporet ’Ivrit Metarealiztit* (*Metarealistic Hebrew Fiction*) (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1974), 100. Barzel also writes that in *Ants* Orpaz inclined toward allegory (p. 99).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Gabriel Moked, “Mi-nemalim ’ad garger ha-hol” (“From the Ants up to a Grain of Sand”) in *In Real Time*, Moked, 165-166.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Ortzion Bartana, *Ha-fantasiah ba-sipporet dor ha-medinah* (*Fantasy in Israeli Literature in the Last Thirty Years*) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 49, for an in-depth analysis of *Ants* see 162-171. See also Giora Leshem, “Lihiyot hereq lihiyot ’adam” (“To be an Insect to be a Man”), *Makor Rishon*, April 26, 2011. Accessed June 4, 2023, https://www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/app/index.php?do=blog&encr_id=7b71ofc4596b25648b44472262adco13&id=1166.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Yedidiah Yitzhaky, “Yizhaq Orpaz rishon le-sofre ‘Dor ha-Medinah’ - heleq rishon mi-tokh massah ha-maqifah ’et qol ha-sipporet shel Yitzhak Orpaz” (“Yitzhak Orpaz the First Writer of the Generation of the State: First Part of an Essay about all the Narrative Works of Yitzhak Orpaz”) *Gag* 42 (2017): 50-64, 59.</footnote>
an erotic symbol, because they rebuild the mutual erotic attraction between the
Jacob and Rachel.<fnref n="25" />

A reading of both stories from the perspective of animal studies, integrated by Edward O. Wilson's idea of consilience between science and humanities,<fnref n="26" /> can open the way to interpretations that will look at the (lack of definite) boundaries between human and animal, where species meet and even mix. with the awareness that these are also stories of the Anthropocene. Taking this consilient approach, I shall focus on the interaction between the two species, humans and ants, concerning the issue of territory or space. They are both in competition for the defense of the territory. In fact, according to basic evolutionary theories, all living organisms compete in order to survive. Survival includes mating, reproduction in the specific case of the ants, access to the resources and defense of the territory. Competition may also include conflict. Culture intervenes in the way human groups or individuals live and choose to come to terms with competition, turning it into a moderate or extreme conflict, and solving it with a mediation or with the destruction of the competitor.

The resort to the interactionist, consilient approach complements the animal
studies perspective, because this Other under the form of ants is “eusocial.”<fnref n="27" />
Furthermore, from a biological point of view eusociality has proved itself a very
successful survival strategy because it has given life to what has been labeled
superorganisms.<fnref n="28" /> This eusociality comes to discard the assumption that man is

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Nitza Abarbanell, *Hawah we-Lilit (Eve and Lilith)* (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University 1994), 135-150.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Lissa, “Introduction,” xxi-xxii.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Eusociality implies that “(1) individuals of the same species cooperate in caring for the young; (2) there is a reproductive division of labor, with more or less sterile individuals working on behalf of fecund nestmates; (3) and there is an overlap of at least two generations in life stages capable of contributing to colony labor, so that offspring assist parents during some period of their life.” Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 398.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Among the most detailed works concerning the superorganism there is Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, *The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies* (New York-London: W. W. Norton-Company, 2009), whose many learned and in-depth arguments may appear a little impervious to some Humanities scholars. Thus, concerning eusociality and its success see also the more enjoyable Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, *Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration* (Cambridge-Massachusetts-London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994).</footnote>
*the* social animal,<fnref n="29" /> and makes it so that characters of *The Argentine Ant* and *Ants* are not simply confronted with tiny, fragile individual ants but with a superorganism thoroughly organized and painstakingly efficient:

> The ants organize their colonies with many chemical systems like those used to transmit alarm. Their bodies, [...], are walking batteries of glands filled with semiotic compounds. When ants dispense their pheromones, singly or in combination and in varying amounts, they say to other ants, in effect: *danger, come quickly; or danger, disperse; or food, follow me; or there is a better nest site, follow me; or I am a nestmate, not an alien; or I am a larva;* and through a repertory of ten twenty messages, with the number differing according to caste (such as soldier or minor worker) and species. So pervasive and powerful are these codes of taste and smell that all together they bind ant colonies into a single operational unit. As a result each colony can be viewed as a superorganism, a congeries of conventional organisms acting like a single and much larger organism. The colony is a primitive semiotic web that crudely resembles a nerve net, a hundred mouthed hydra writ large.<fnref n="30" />

As a superorganism, the ants are endowed with an agency that allows them to destabilize and transgress “human orderings, including spatial ones.”<fnref n="31" /> As I will show below, the ants are endowed with even more agency than the human characters. As such, they can confront human beings *vis à vis* and as equals, if not as superiors in might, determination and organization.

Finally, *The Argentine Ant* and *Ants* are stories of the Anthropocene, understood as a “human-dominated, geological epoch.”<fnref n="32" /> Both plots are based on the ants invading a human-shaped space not only to (re)turn it into a natural space but also and especially to shed doubt on the real nature of this space, and in so doing they

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Paul Waldau, *Animal Studies: An Introduction* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 194-196.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Wilson, *Consilience*, 76.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places An Introduction,” in *Animal Spaces Beastly Places New Geographies of Human-animal Relations*, eds. Philo and Wilbert (London-New York: Routledge 2005 [1st edition 2000]), 1-35, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” *Nature* 415 (January 2002): 23.</footnote>
come to discard precisely the extent if not the very idea of human dominion. As for *The Argentine Ant*, it is eminently an Anthropocene story, since, as Serenella Iovino puts it, “species such as the Argentine ant are very good ambassadors for the biosphere of the Anthropocene.”<fnref n="33" /> In fact, the Argentine ants’ invasion is the result of human travels and commerce.<fnref n="34" /> Thus, Iovino reads the story as an anticipatory critique of human contamination and pollution of the environment<fnref n="35" /> affecting the biosphere’s balance, while the ants’ sophisticated organization and behavior “prompts us to rethink the borders of nature and culture (and the scale of these very borders) in unprecedented ways.”<fnref n="36" />

## Defining and Circumscribing the Territory

Biology usually defines territory as “an area occupied more or less exclusively by an animal or a group of animals by means of repulsion through overt defense or advertisement.”<fnref n="37" /> Accordingly, the diagnostic feature of territory is defense of its boundaries and not its usage.<fnref n="38" /> Territory can coincide with the home-range, “the area that an animal learns thoroughly and habitually patrols.”<fnref n="39" /> Within the home-range there can be the core-area that is the area “of heaviest regular usage.”<fnref n="40" /> In the stories I am going to discuss, the territory includes the home-range, with the kitchen and the bedroom as a core-area. In *The Argentine Ant* territory also includes a small garden annexed to the house; in *Ants* territory also includes the roof where Rachel uses to have her suntan hours.

In both stories, the issue of territory/space/house is related to the hope of a new beginning in life. The protagonist couple of *The Argentine Ant* moves to the

<footnote n="33">³³ Serenella Iovino, *Italo Calvino’s Animals: Anthropocene Stories* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 8. For a general approach to the issue see Jody Frawley and Iain McCalman, *Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities* (New York: Routledge, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Ibid., 10-11.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Ibid., 13 and 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ibid., 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 256.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Ibid., 261.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid., 256.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ibid.</footnote>
Riviera ligure and to a new house after their baby has recovered from an unspecified illness. The husband must look for a job, but first of all the family must take possession of the house they have just rented:

When Signora Mauro had gone, I carried the mattresses inside. My wife wasn't able to move the cupboard by herself and called me to help. Then she wanted to begin cleaning out the little kitchen at once and got down on her knees to start, but I said: "What's the point, at this hour? We'll see to that tomorrow; let's just arrange things as best we can for tonight." The baby was whimpering and very sleepy, and the first thing to do was get his basket ready and put him to bed. At home we use a long basket for babies, and had brought one with us here; we emptied out the linen with which we'd filled it, and found a good place on a shelf, where it wasn't damp or too far off the ground should it fall.

Our son went to sleep, and my wife and I began looking over our new
home (one room divided in two by a partition—four walls and a roof),
which was already showing signs of our occupation.<fnref n="41" />

The process of the appropriation of the territory has started. The lady's decision to start cleaning the kitchen and the search for a proper place for the baby are signs that the core-area of the territory has been defined. Order is imposed upon this territory to turn it into an anthropized space, namely into a proper home fit for human living. The process continues with the garden:

I wanted to take a turn over the surrounding plot; for *our house* [emphasis mine] stood on a piece of land consisting of two large flower, o rather rough seed beds, with a path down the middle covered with an iron trellis, [...]. Signora Mauro had said she would let me have this plot to cultivate as a kitchen garden, [...].

My intention now, by this first evening's walk of ours around the plot,
was to acquire a sense of familiarity with the place, even of ownership in a

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 83. In the Italian text there is no mention of a “window ledge,” I have thus replaced it with shelf.</footnote>
way [emphasis mine]; for the first time in our lives the idea of continuity seemed possible, of walking evening after evening among beds of seed as *our circumstances gradually improved* [emphasis mine].<fnref n="42" />

For the first time, the husband calls the house “our house.” The process of taking possession of the territory continues and the stroll in the garden can be paralleled with the patrolling of the territory.

In Orpaz’s novel, the house is already fit for human living. The home-range, the apartment, the core-area, kitchen and bedroom, and the roof as the rest of the territory are already defined:

> Our apartment was small, on the top floor of an old house, with a small living room and a hall. The hall led into the main room, the main room lead into a tiny kitchen, the tiny kitchen into a very small washroom, where the shower—there is no bathtub—and the toilet stand close together. All the doors run in a straight line from the door to the roof.<fnref n="43" />

Apartments under the roof are usual in Orpaz’s literary production, stressing the search for a detachment from everyday reality and the will to keep moderately in touch with this very same reality.<fnref n="44" /> Jacob and Rachel must live together in this small space although the enterprise is proving itself difficult:

> We can’t help bumping into each other again and again. It’s embarrassing. When we were first married Rachel would giggle and then escape. Now she scratches, not ungracefully, under her arm, between her breasts, or just above her belly.<fnref n="45" />

Jacob and Rachel try to keep what the biologists call individual distance “the compromise struck by animals that are both attracted to other members of their

<footnote n="42">⁴² Ibid., 144.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Orpaz, *Ants*, 105.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Moked, “Triptiqon hadshani shel Yitzhaq Orpaz” (“An Innovative Tripticon of Yitzhak Orpaz”), in *Moked, In Real Time*, 127-130, 127.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Orpaz, *Ants*, 105.</footnote>
own species and repelled by them at short distance.”<fnref n="46" /> The concept can be applied
to humans too and it is culturally defined, for example Mediterranean people can
stand shorter individual distances than northern-European peoples.<fnref n="47" /> Rachel,
anyway, seems to be an exception for she cannot stand being too near to her
husband in their own apartment. The smallness of the flat and the short distances
are among the reasons that have brought Jacob and Rachel on the verge of divorce.
The stability of the couple is somehow connected to the flat. Thus, they both
accept the Rabbi’s suggestion to build a new house.

In both novels, the couples seem to be at the start of a pathway that should bring
them into a new life. All of a sudden, the programs are subverted.

...And Then Come the Ants

The ants are mentioned in the very first lines of *The Argentine Ant*. Nonetheless,
the husband and the wife do not pay attention to their mention, nor do they worry
when the first evening by having their first stroll in their garden they notice that
one of their neighbors is pouring insecticide out in his garden. In *Ants*, the ants
are a disembodied presage materializing on Rachel's body from the very first pages
of the novel:

> While she was answering the rabbi, she rubbed under her breast, with her long, beautiful fingers, as though she had an itch. After we left the rabbi's office, I asked her why she had made such a rude gesture in his presence. She had felt, she said, as though ants were crawling over her body.<fnref n="48" />

In both stories, the husbands act in order to protect the wives and in fact their
whole family: Jacob wants to rebuild his connection to the estranged Rachel and
the husband wants to protect his wife and baby from the ants. This is not an
unusual behavior because in the animal kingdom there exist "close connections

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 257.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Ibid., 259.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Orpaz, *Ants*, 104.</footnote>
[...] between territorial aggressive display and courtship.”<fnref n="49" /> In *Ants*, Rachel, the flat and the ants form a triangle: she first feels them on her body, then she says that “the house is crawling,”<fnref n="50" /> later on Jacob himself states that he has “eradicated the enemy from inside it [the flat].”<fnref n="51" /> To confirm the connection between the flat and his wife, he ultimately admits: “Any foreign body between my wife and myself was hateful to me. Inside me, in my mind, I always spilled their blood out of jealousy. Surely it was this that had made me rise to wage war so uncompromisingly against the black ant?”<fnref n="52" />

In both stories, the ants appear at night. In *The Argentine Ant*, they reveal themselves in the core area of the house, when the wife goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water and she first sees them in the kitchen sink:

> My wife went to the washbasin for a glass of water. “Bring me one too,” I called, [...].

> “Oh!” she screamed. “Come here!” She had seen ants on the faucet and a stream of them coming up the wall.”

> We put on the light, a single bulb for the two rooms. The stream of ants on the wall was very thick; they were coming from the top of the door, and might originate anywhere.<fnref n="53" />

Immediately after having seen the ants, the husband tries to calm his wife down and to protect their baby, who had been attacked that very night:

> But in the middle of the night the baby cried; [...] we began asking ourselves: “What can be the matter? What’s wrong with him?” [...].

> “He’s covered with ants!” cried my wife, who had gone and taken him in her arms. [...]. We turned the whole basket upside down and undressed the baby completely. To get enough light for picking the ants off. [...]. It

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 261.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Orpaz, *Ants*, 105.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Orpaz, *Nemalim*, 102 (my own translation from Hebrew).</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Orpaz, *Ants*, 144.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 146.</footnote>
was pitiable looking for ants on that skin which reddened as soon as it was
rubbed.<fnref n="54" />

In *Ants*, the grey ants also appear at night for the first time and, consistent with the first presage, on Rachel's body:

> Behind me, from the bed, there came noises of rustling and creaking. I turned my head and what did I see? My wife Rachel, with her eyes closed, throwing her head from side to side, her nostrils trembling, her thighs twitching, and her feet kicking. What has shaken her body so, what has taken it out of its glorious iciness?

> A little ant, it seems, but full of energy; it had emerged from a fold in the sheet and onto the lower end of the curve of my wife Rachel's thigh. It climbed fast along the delicate curve and stopped there for a moment to raise its head and rub its antennae one against the other. I looked at the uncovered, sleeping bit of thigh where the ant had crossed, and an evil feeling welled up in my eyes and heart. For thirteen years I have constructed houses, hundreds of floors, thousands of tons of building material, and I have never succeeded in exciting my wife the way a little ant can.<fnref n="55" />

Both passages deserve to be read in parallel, because they show how the attack is
immediately and tactically brought against the most precious and defenseless
beings especially in the case of the baby. Furthermore, the attack is not directed to
the (re)conquest of the space but it is first and foremost brought on the bodies of
the characters, immediately blurring the basic boundaries between human and
animal: “Our hands were now covered with them, and we held them out open in
front of our eyes, trying to see exactly what they were like, these ants, moving our
wrists all the time to prevent them from crawling up our arms.”<fnref n="56" />

In both stories. the protagonists are puzzled about where the ants come from. The
very night he has discovered the tiny ant on Rachel’s body, Jacob notices a trail of

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Ibid., 147-148.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Orpaz, *Ants*, 107-108.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 146.</footnote>
grey ants on the roof of his flat “marching in slow procession to the front door.”<fnref n="57" />
In *The Argentine Ant*, they are already everywhere, and the husband reflects *en passant* on a substantial fact: “*They were there before*, too, and *we didn’t see them!*
[emphasis mine]”—as if things would have been very different if we had seen them
before.”<fnref n="58" />

This statement expresses a natural fact entomologists are familiar with, since the
first fossils of ur-ants date back between 112 to 90 millions of years ago, that is the
middle Cretaceous.<fnref n="59" /> In this sense, it also makes an essential point clear: however
anthropized the house, or the flat, they will never fully belong to humans as much
as they belonged, belong and will belong to nature and therefore the ants. Finally,
the fact of existing in the past and in the future also reminds Derrida’s meditation
about the animals were with the humans.<fnref n="60" /> Having been there long before, the
ants in *The Argentine Ant* the ants destroy the hope in a better future: “We hadn’t
the pleasure now of feeling we were starting a new life, only a sense of dragging on
into a future full of new troubles.”<fnref n="61" /> In *Ants*, the ants *are* the future, as Rachel
implies, after Jacob announces his tactical victory:

In light of my achievement there was, to say the least, something odd
about my wife’s reaction, she who had been dozing in the sun most of the
day:

“Are you absolutely sure there aren’t any left?” [...].

After all, it was obvious that they would seek new burrows after I had
uprooted them from their old homes. That, at any rate, was something I
could count as a success. A definite tactical victory.

I told Rachel so; she only nodded.<fnref n="62" />

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Ibid., 108.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Ibid., 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ In chapter 6 of Hölldobler and Wilson, *Journey to the Ants*, “The Ur-Ants,” 75-84, 77, 79 and 205; “Ants have lived on Earth for more than ten million of their generations; we have existed for no more than a hundred thousand human generations.”</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Lissa, “Introduction,” viii.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Orpaz, *Ants*, 118.</footnote>
In *The Argentine Ant*, the struggle in the name of the defense of the territory starts in the morning after their discovery: “We were very soon up, nagged by the thought of [...] having to start an immediate battle against the persistent imperceptible enemy which had taken over our home.”<fnref n="63" /> In *Ants*, the phases of the battle go on in a kind of crescendo: the day after the sighting of the first ant remains uneventful. The night after, however, Jacob wakes up because of a strange noise coming from inside the walls: “A kind of growling or dripping from deep down, but drier, like stones rolling, but duller.”<fnref n="64" /> He gets up, goes to the bathroom, and spots the grey ants dismembering a half-dead cockroach, and yet the ants “are careful about cleaning up the battlefield. By tomorrow, nothing will be left of them nor of that glorious creature they have dismembered.”<fnref n="65" /> The day after, coming back from work Jacob finds Rachel crying in the kitchen:

> A long, dense stream of ants stretched from the cup to the tiled part of the wall—with barely an opening in the wall to be seen. They marched in multi-lane processions, an army of stippled lines, and they filled the bottom of the cup.<fnref n="66" />

The morning after, Jacob does not go to work and begins the fight by trying to exterminate the ants with boiling water. During this first battle he cannot help but admiring the power, the organization and the extreme sense of duty of the single parts of the superorganism: “I cannot help but confess that here and there my higher order of intelligence was impressed by their lower.”<fnref n="67" /> He spends also the next two days in battling the ants with poisons and by filling gaps and cracks so that any access to their nest would be blocked. The day after, the fight begins once again and since the ants seem to like the honey Rachel has a sweet tooth for, Jacob prepares traps with honey jars encircled by water, so that “the formic launching pad [would be] thus confined to the ceiling only.” Furthermore “the indirect route was daring (a jump into space) and clever (circumventing an obstacle), which—

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 149.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Orpaz, *Ants*, 111.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Ibid., 115.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Ibid., 116.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Ibid., 117.</footnote>
probably—only the strong would attempt, so that the elite of the race would be annihilated.”<fnref n="68" /> The battle against the tiny, grey ants is won, they all lie dead in the honey jars, but a few minutes afterwards:

> My wife’s laughter turned to silence. She withdrew her feet from me, withdrew them and enfolded them within her gown, and her pure white gown danced where her feet had been kicking in excitement. What had excited her feet?

> “Ants.” I heard my own frightened answer, and I looked around.
> The honey jars were again crawling with life. Bridges of live ants spanned the moats, a raft of live ants holding each other by means of their mandibles. And black, very quick ants, the likes of which I had not yet seen in our house, were galloping across.<fnref n="69" />

This is a new race of very powerful ants—Jacob labels them “the bronze ant”<fnref n="70" />— that will prove to be unstoppable. Nonetheless, Jacob will find a connection to these ants, while for the gray ants he felt nothing but disgust. While the plot unfolds, the flat is progressively turned into a sort of anthill with a lot of cracks in the walls and Rachel starts decorating them:

> What decorating means in a building where the walls are cracked and crumbling and fine dust sifts from them all over the place is hard to say. Perhaps we had better call it *rearranging* of the house [in the original *siddur ha-bayit*]—an attempt to make it look suitable for its new state of being, the reality of the ants.<fnref n="71" />

At this almost final stage, the flat is not a flat anymore nor is it simply an anthill. The change the black ants bring about in Orpaz’s novel is more radical than in *The Argentine Ant*, because they change the ontological reality of the flat, while Rachel

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Ibid., 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Ibid., 127.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Ibid., 128.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Orpaz, *Ants*, 133.</footnote>
and Jacob plunge progressively in a kind of liminal dimension that stands between
dream and wakefulness outside of time, where human and animal mix and mingle.
In *The Argentine Ant*, it becomes progressively clear that the territory does not
really belong to its legal human tenant or landlady, nor will it be easily turned into
a human space fit to live in. In fact, later, in broad daylight the house and the
garden reveal their real nature:

The more I looked, the more new ways I discovered by which the ants
came and went. Our new home, although it looked so smooth and solid
on the surface, was in fact porous and honeycombed with cracks and
holes.<fnref n="72" />

As a matter of fact, the house has the appearance of an anthill. While examining
the garden in full daylight, the husband discovers that in the whole “piece of
ground, which had seemed so small yesterday but now appeared enormous in
relation to the ants, the insects formed an uninterrupted veil, issuing from what
must be thousands of underground nests and feeding on the thick sticky soil and
the low vegetation”<sup>73</sup> The ants are part and parcel of the territory that resists every
human attempt of transformation. Furthermore, the husband perceives them as
different from the other sorts of ants:

> If he had mentioned ants, as perhaps he had [...] we would have imagined
> ourselves up against a concrete enemy that could be numbered, weighed,
> crushed. Actually, now I think about the ants in our own parts, I
> remember them as reasonable little creatures, which could be touched and
> moved like cats or rabbits. Here we were face to face with an enemy like
> fog or sand, against which force was useless.<fnref n="74" />

The Argentine ant is thus a peculiar species through which all the potentiality of
the superorganism materialize themselves. There can be no communication
whatsoever, no exchange of gazes, between the human characters and this

<footnote n="72">⁷² Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 149-150.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Ibid., 150.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Ibid., 151.</footnote>
disembodied enemy. The otherness of the ants is transmitted to the territory they inhabit, which is apparently a human space with houses and gardens but as a matter of fact, human presence is only superficial because the whole territory, houses included, is an enormous anthill. From then on, the whole perspective of the novel is turned upside down, legitimating the reader to think that the humans are in the process of being turned into the actual invaders.

The husband describes the various strategies his neighbors are adopting against the ants, not without an ironic tone. Ostensibly, poisons and traps are useless.<fnref n="75" /> In the evening, however, he observes his neighbors having their dinner or enjoying a cup of coffee after dinner while placidly ignoring, or feigning to ignore, the ants. The husband appears very dispirited by this attitude, that stands somewhere halfway between some sort of ancestral Mediterranean fatalism and adaptation.

## The Reversal of Perspectives: Between Symbiosis and Hybridity

Faced with the perspective of living in an anthill, or in a flat whose ontological reality has been altered, the protagonists are confronted with different possibilities of getting along with their lives. In *The Argentine Ant*, Signora Mauro and Signor Baudino embody two different alternatives: feigning to ignore the ants while living in some kind of symbiosis with them or becoming an ant, that is hybridity. While dealing with Signora Mauro, the husband catches a glimpse of a life in symbiosis with the ants and gets an idea of the surrealistic implications. Biology defines symbiosis “as the prolonged and intimate relationship of organisms belonging to different species,”<fnref n="76" /> a relationship that can involve even two societies and that has not necessarily only negative outcomes, in fact it may even result in mutual advantages, although this is not the case in *The Argentine Ant*.

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Very acutely Serenella Iovino point out that the names of the poisons “sound like a blend of mythology and hexing rituals.” Iovino, *Italo Calvino’s Animals*, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ For the complete definition see Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 353: “Symbiosis, [...], is conventionally illustrated in the biological literature by interactions of pair of organisms. But many other cases are known of individuals that enter symbiosis with societies, and even symbiosis between entire societies.” There are several kinds of symbiosis, the relevant one in the context of this article is “social parasitism: one species benefits, the other suffers. [...]. *Xenobiosis*: one species nests close or within the nests of another and begs food from it.” Ibid., 354</footnote>
Signora Mauro is the rich landlady who has rented the house to the family, she lives in a villa nearby high on a hill, from which one could look at the infested houses from above and from far away, at least apparently:

> And standing up there we could forget that all those places were black with ants; now we could see how they might have been without that menace which none of us could get away from even an instant. At this distance it looked almost like a paradise, but the more we gazed down the more we pitied our life there, as if living in that wretched narrow valley we could never get away from our wretched narrow problems.<fnref n="77" />

There is clearly no hope to get away from the ants that become the materialization of nature's overwhelming and blind power, whose origins remain unaccounted for. Accordingly, Signora Mauro appears as the embodiment of a superior power whose logic remains mysterious and standing on the edge of absurd—one would be tempted to use the word Kafkaesque if Calvino himself had not dismissed this approach.<fnref n="78" /> In this capacity, she answers to the wretched couple: “Keep the house clean and dig away the ground. There is no other remedy. Work, just work.”<fnref n="79" /> If related to the situation in point, the advice is practical and sensible, if interpreted metaphorically it indicates that man's confrontation with nature is ceaseless and Sisyphean. The only viable solution is to try and struggle to survive day by day. Furthermore, the distance gives only an illusion of immunity to the invasion and accordingly Signora Mauro is only apparently immune to ants:

> “Don’t they breed up here too?” asked my wife, almost smiling.

> “No, not here!” said Signora Mauro, going pale, then, still holding her right arm against the side of the chair, she began making a little rotating movement of the shoulder and rubbing her elbow against her ribs.

> It occurred to me that the darkness, the ornaments, the size of the room, and her proud spirit were this woman's defenses against the ants, the reason why she was stronger than we were in face of them; but that

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 172.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ See above, 68.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 175.</footnote>
everything we saw around us, beginning with her sitting there, was covered with ants even more pitiless than ours; some kind of African termite, perhaps, which destroyed everything and left only the husks, so that all that remained of this house were tapestries and curtains almost in powder, all on the point of crumbling before her eyes.<fnref n="80" />

Denial offers a possibility of survival that is, anyway, embedded with the fact of living in symbiosis with the ants, having them on the body, and while this happens, they are even turned into the more dangerous and invasive African termite. From this perspective, Signora Mauro loses the aura of a superior being to find herself projected in the same restless and endless struggle as the other characters. On the other side, through her denial of living in symbiosis with the ants, Signora Mauro shifts the balance of the story from realism to surrealism, the kind that gives an uncanny feeling to the reader.

In a similar move, with Signor Baudino, Calvino takes another step further away from realism. This character embodies the alternative to symbiosis that is some kind of hybridization, becoming an ant, or something that stands between the human and the ant. Biology currently defines the hybrid as the offspring resulting from the mating of parents (animals and plants) belonging to different species. Hybridization contributes to gene flow that is a factor producing microevolution "which is evolution in its slightest, most elemental form."<fnref n="81" /> Although relatively rare, interspecific hybridization can prove itself more effective per generation "because of the larger number of gene differences that normally separate species."<fnref n="82" /> This, however, does not fully apply to Signor Baudino: he is "the ant man," <fnref n="83" />—in the original Italian "l'uomo della formica"<fnref n="84" />—as the neighborhood calls him, with the double interpretation of the label as "the man who deals with ants"—he is the representative of the society for the fight against the Argentine ant—or an uncanny hybrid and eventually a potential accomplice, even a “fifth column” of the ants:

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Ibid., 174-175.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Wilson, *Sociobiology*, 64.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Ibid., 66.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Calvino, *La formica argentina*, 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Ibid., 464.</footnote>
If I describe Signor Baudino in such detail, it's to try to define the strange impression that he made on us; [...]. Watching him like that, I realized why he had made such a strange impression on me at first sight: he looked like an ant. It's difficult to tell exactly why, but he certainly did; perhaps it was because of the dull black of his clothes and hair, perhaps because of the proportions of that squat body of his, or the trembling corners of his mouth corresponding to the continuous quiver of antennae and claws. There was however, one characteristic of the ant which he did not have. And that was their continuous busy movement. Signor Baudino moved slowly and awkwardly.<fnref n="85" />

Like Signora Mauro's symbiosis, Signor Baudino as a hybrid gives the story a turn toward the fantastic, especially if we understand the fantastic as a genre in Tzvetan Todorov's definition: as the hesitation, the doubt felt by someone who only knows natural laws and finds him/herself faced with a fact that apparently has no natural explanation. Hesitation, always in Todorov's formulation, must involve the reader and the character in a way that turns doubt into one of the subjects of the work and that excludes allegorical interpretation.<fnref n="86" /> In a review published on August 15, 1970 of the Todorov's essay above mentioned, Calvino made two remarks about the fantastic that are relevant for my analysis. I shall here focus on the first one, and I will discuss the second one below.<fnref n="87" /> Calvino pointed out that the fantastic in the twentieth century becomes an intellectual engagement, as a game, irony, hint or even a meditation about the deepest human desires, without seeking an emotional reaction from the reader as nineteenth century fantastic literature used to.<fnref n="88" />

Indeed, in *The Argentine Ant* Signor Baudino's hybridization remains a hint, perhaps only an impression of the husband or a neighborhood's slander. In fact,

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 169-170.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Tzvetan Todorov, *The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre*, translated from the French by Richard Howard (Cleveland-London: The Press of Case Western University, 1973 [1st ed. 1970]), 25 and 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ See below, 92-93.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Italo Calvino, “Definizione di territori: il fantastico,” in *Saggi 1945-1985*, Calvino, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1995) 2 vols., I vol., 266-268, 267.</footnote>
only for a tiny moment the reader has the impression that Signor Baudino’s
description complies with the definition of fantastic literary hybrids as beings
whose bodies are composed of different anatomical parts and whose physical
appearance is not normal.<fnref n="89" /> Signor Baudino’s hybridization is as uncanny as the
symbiosis, because it implies a contradiction inherent to his very nature: he shares
some physical features with the ants, but he is not endowed with their main virtue,
industriousness. At the same time, he is human, and he is supposed to work in
order to eradicate the Argentine ant. Actually, the remedy he proposes is the only
one that has a real scientific foundation: feeding the ants with a kind of sweet,
poisoned syrup the workers bring into the anthill and give to the queen so that the
queen herself will die bringing about the extinction of the whole anthill.
Nonetheless, the neighborhood accuses him of feeding them in order to keep them
healthy and alive.

The tension and the suspects reach their zenith when an ant enters the ear of the
baby of the couple, right after the visit of Signor Baudino:

Even before we reached the house we heard him crying. [...]. An ant had
got into his ear; [...]. My wife has said at once: “It must be an ant!” but I
could not understand why he went on crying so, as we could find no ants
on him or any signs of bites or irritation, and we’d undressed and carefully
inspected him. We found some in the basket, however; I’d done my very
best to isolate it properly, but we had overlooked the ant man’s molasses—
one of the clumsy streaks made by Signor Baudino seemed to have been
put down on purpose to attract the insects up from the floor to the child’s
cot.<fnref n="90" />

Signor Baudino's clumsiness reassures the reader with a rational explanation for
the cot's invasion being only an accident, but on the other side it also leaves a tiny
place to a shadow of doubt. Signora Mauro and Signor Baudino do not fully
belong to reality, they are ambiguous characters, useless at best but possibly even

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Claude-Claire Kappler, *Monstres, démons et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Âge* (Paris: Payot, 1999 [1er ed. 1980]), 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Ibid., 175. For an interpretation of the scene in relation to the Anthropocene see Iovino, *Italo Calvino's Animals*, 12.</footnote>
malevolent, unexplained and inexplicable, beyond logical understanding just as
the ants' invasion is. There is no escape from the scourge, only a temporary relief
on the seashore.

In *Ants*, Jacob manages to find a connection with the “bronze ants” and through them with his wife. These bronze ants stand halfway between the realistic description of their behavior in the destruction of the flat and the Biblical intertextual references through which their features and might are described. What’s more, Jacob admires them and is impressed by them.

The Biblical text is implied and even embroidered in the whole plot of the novel, starting from the names of Jacob and Rachel, husband and wife, and Bilha, the neighbor, friend and servant of Rachel.<fnref n="91" /> This intertextual relation, crossed with a metaphoric interpretation of the flat as a national metaphor converges toward a political interpretation of the whole text. However, coming back to Orpaz’s words the perspective changes:

> All my childhood and youth, I was fascinated with ants ... I remember at least a couple of passages in the Bible: first in a parable in the Old Testament. It says go to the ants, learn her ways and be wise. Now I read the Bible very early—at four, five or six—and those things had a great effect on me. And then I began to see the ants and I began to look at how they live how they work. Then another place in the Bible, I came across the description by one of the prophets of a plague that will come. He describes not the ants but ... [...]. Locusts ... I didn’t see the locusts but I saw the ants. And as I worked on the piece when I described the ants, I felt the ants were a kind of locusts, the same tribe.<fnref n="92" />

Through Orpaz’s words, the ants themselves appear as a hybrid, they are virtuous and industrious as ants are supposed to be (Proverbs 6:6) on the one side, and like locusts plaguing the Land on the other side on the basis of *Joel* 1: 4 and 6,<fnref n="93" /> that

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ *Genesis* 29-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² Woodard, “An Interview with Yitzhak Orpaz,” 57.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ “4. That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten. [...]. 6. For a people is come up upon my land, mighty, and without number; his teeth are</footnote>
parallels locusts and other insects plague to the Assyrian invasion of the Land of Israel. In fact, every Shabbat evening Jacob reads passages from the Book of Books, that is the *Bible*, and the passages Rachel loves the most are taken from *Joel*, especially 1: 6, that expresses the premonition of the ants' invasion. Moreover, the black ants have, in Rachel's phrasing, “dragon's teeth,”<sup>94</sup> a reference to *Proverbs* 30: 14.<sup>95</sup> To this must be added one further parallel, at the peak of the invasion the ants resemble some divine horses:

> Let me try to describe in all its beauty the head of the bronze ant. Its shape is oval. It rises and swells from the place where it is joined to the dorsal segment, in a smooth, strong line, gleaming like hammered, beaten steel, graceful in its broad curve, storing strength in silence, resting in its energy, and suddenly, out of the stillness of the restrained strength, a free flow of slanting lines, convex, severe, bursts forth powerful, and encloses the mandibles. It is a head that stretches in battle like a horse's neck, gleaming in the light like a mane. [...].

> Hell! I meant to describe an ant and have instead described a kind of divine horse.<sup>96</sup>

The horses raging through the land in all their might and fury, are described in *Joel* 2: 4-10, quoted at the end of chapter XIII of the novel.<sup>97</sup> These hybrid ants/locusts/horses appear as the epiphany of a divine power in their unstoppable swarming, a divine power that has his roots in the Biblical text understood in the context of the novel not as the source of the word of the unique God, but as a text delving more deeply in the past, when polytheism was dominant in the Ancient Middle East.

The association between hybridity and polytheism also allows us to understand Rachel's character who, as many other Orpaz's female characters, appears as a

<footnote>the teeth of a lion, and he hath the jaw-teeth of a lioness.” English translation: accessed June 4, 2023, https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1401.htm.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Orpaz, *Ants*, 120.</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ “There is a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their great teeth as knives.” English translation: accessed June 4, 2023, https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2830.htm.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Orpaz, *Ants*, 181.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Ibid., 186.</footnote>
distant polytheist goddess, more precisely as a goddess of the ants. In fact, she has
been in connection with them from the very beginning of the story: her body, the
flat with its walls and the black ants make but one thing. The tiny grey ants Jacob
destroys in the first part of the novel are but a game to Rachel and a harbinger of
the black ants. While the plot unfolds, she transforms herself: she eats honey, and
she also feeds the ants with it. She starts wearing a dress made by a black net
creating the illusion that her body is ceaselessly covered by swarming ants:

The white of her skin peeped innocent and pure through the little squares
of the black netting that covered her body. [...].

Even the netting in her skin, which she had pulled on like a stocking from
the soles of her feet up to her shoulders, had become a manifesto of insult
and treason. Ants by dozen scurried between the threads of the net that
barred her so painfully desired body from me, her husband.<fnref n="98" />

The intermingling between Rachel and the ants goes even beyond hybridization:
she is the superorganism and the superorganism is her and she feels the changes it
makes to the walls of the flat:

As the walls began to swell, her half-asleep, devout-dreamy mood changed
into a kind of strange nightmarish vitality; [...]. Her flesh seemed to awake
to life, but not to me. She would bolt without warning, as if she was having
a fit, as if she was being stung or tickled by those ants who were strolling
through the thousands of gateways of her black netting with a familiarity
that made me jealous.<fnref n="99" />

When Jacob joins Rachel in the religious worship of the wooden figure, he has
been carving for her—a man at first, then a horse but finally an ant—their
intimacy is renewed and cemented:

"It is an ant," my wife said. And I saw it was truly an ant.

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Ibid., 172.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Ibid., 173.</footnote>
Her eyes glowed and deepened. The slits of pupils widened and exuded the honey of mercy as she went down on her knees and placed my broad, rough hand, the hand that had worked the wood onto her forehead. Her eyes were on the dark wooden sculpture and she intoned: “Pray!” I murmured something. Rachel slowly rose from her knees, pulled a thread out of the netting she wore, and used it to tie the ant sculpture to the cord of the unlit lamp above her headboard of our bed, so that the proud, magnificent face of the ant would never stop looking aslant the place where we were to celebrate our ultimate union.<fnref n="100" />

It is not only that Rachel is one with the black ants. In fact, the black ants become the connection between Rachel and Jacob. This ultimate union, celebrated in the presence of the ant-idol brings them back to a primeval, Edenic condition—“We were both naked and without any shame”<fnref n="101" />—a prelude to the final scene where Jacob and Rachel are wrapped together while the house breaks down and in a sort of *cupio dissolvi* they find themselves finally happy.

This going back to the Edenic condition deserves a few final remarks, since it also implies going out of history and of anthropized space in order to be projected in a primeval scene to be partaken with plants and animals in equal measure. Indeed, the animals have been with the couple all along because, beyond the invasion of the ants, in the novel each and every character has his/her own animal double or some animal features: Bilha in Jacob's eyes is but a beetle,<fnref n="102" /> Rachel and Bilha “would drag out their wailing laughter like cats,”<fnref n="103" /> Rachel is “like a tigress that is weaned and suddenly feels the strength of her teeth,”<fnref n="104" /> Jacob's contractor is a Mister Kerzenbaum,<fnref n="105" /> with a mix of Hebrew *kartzit*, tick, and German *Baum*, tree, that is the tree of ticks. Jacob and Rachel's flat has always been filled with animals, the ants only helped to reveal its authentic nature.

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 185.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Ibid., 186. For the Biblical intertextual reference see *Genesis* 2:25.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Ibid., 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Ibid., 131. I have emended the English translation “like cars,” undoubtedly a misprint, with “like cats,” to respect the original Hebrew “*ke-hatulot*,” Orpaz, *Nemalim*, 107.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 173.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 154.</footnote>
Finally, like in *The Argentine Ant*, outside of the flat, a little far away, there is the sea Jacob and Rachel look at from their windows.

Conclusion: Looking at the Sea

The parallel reading of these two novels, conceived by different authors, who, I repeat, did not know of each other's work, is highly significant. There is no arguing with Gaio Sciloni's remark that Orpaz's ants are so very Jewish,<fnref n="106" /> but at the same time approaching both texts from the point of view of animal studies and biology, myrmecology in this specific case, allows a reading that keeps together cultural specificity and a general discussion about what it means to be human, to be Other, to be animal, enhancing the connections between them, stressing the fact that, as the ecologists put it so often, everything is connected. Which brings about a reflection about the idea of nature.

Apparently, Jacob and Rachel can only be happy after, with the help of the ants, they left behind their former selves to go back, or perhaps to move forward—and here Derrida's insight about the animals being there before and after resurfaces again—to a new Edenic condition outside of history but in connection with the animals that therefore they also are, waiting for a disembodied voice, whose origin and sound remain unknown. Orpaz's idea of nature reveals on the one side a disenchanted approach to and description of a natural fact such as a case of ants' invasion and on the other side a narration of the invasion mediated by mixing Biblical intertextuality and the references to polytheism. There remains, however, an in-depth hard core of reality that cannot be explained and at the same time a striving for an undefinable metaphysical dimension. Hence the mysterious disembodied voice, while the other possible escape is the far away sea Jacob and Rachel can see from the windows of their flat. Yet, there is no possibility to get out of the flat and go to the sea.

In a similar way, and yet with deeper implications, the sea appears at the end of
*The Argentine Ant*.

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Sciloni, “Le formiche e… la questione ebraica,” 6.</footnote>
The sea rose and fell against the rocks of the mole, making the fishing boats
sway, [...]. The water was calm, with just a slight continual change of color,
blue and black, darker and farthest away. I thought of the expanses of
water like this, of the infinite grains of soft and sand down there at the
bottom of the sea where the currents leave white shells washed clean by
the waves.<fnref n="107" />

The sea is a possible and yet only temporary escape, just like in Eugenio Montale’s
poem “Meriggiare pallido e assorto” (1916-1922), “sea scales” “scaglie di mare”
throbbing between the branches far-off in a pale and arid afternoon suggest a
possible relief from an otherwise unexplained “male di vivere.” In the same poem
the “male di vivere” is embodied by red ants: “In the cracked earth or in the vetch,
/ watch the red ants’ files/ now breaking up, now meeting/ on top of little piles.”<fnref n="108" />
While in Orpaz’s works there is a striving for a metaphysical dimension that may
lay beyond reality and nature, in *The Argentine Ant* Calvino formulates his idea
of nature that excludes every metaphysical dimension and is focused on its blind
cruelty:

[*The Argentine Ant*] proposes a definition of *nature* and man’s attitude
toward it. . . . I am interested above all in how we consider nature, which is
much more important than any capitalism or other passing
epiphenomena; but to our eyes nature presents herself as a mirror of
history, in it we find the same cruel, monstrous reality that we find in the
times in which we live (capitalism, imperialism, Nazism, the Cold War).<fnref n="109" />

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Calvino, *The Argentine Ant*, 180-181.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ English translation: Eugenio Montale, *Collected Poems 1920-1954*, Bilingual edition translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1998), 41. See also the original Italian: Eugenio Montale, *Tutte le poesie*, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), 30: “Nelle crepe del suolo o su la vecchia/ spiar le file di rosse formiche/ ch’ora si rompono ed ora s’intrecciano/ a sommo di minuscole biche.” For the composition years of the poem see “Nota ai testi,” in Ibid., 1061-1062.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Calvino, *Letters 1941-1985*, 171. See also Serenella Iovino’s discussion about this passage in quoted in Iovino, *Italo Calvino’s Animals*, 9-10.</footnote>
Calvino considers himself as someone who believes “in a relation of man-to-reality (reality understood in its complete sense, **nature** plus history.”<fnref n="110" /> Both quotes clarify why he considered *The Argentine Ant* a realistic story, since for him realism is a way to reflect about nature and history, whose main feature is cruelty. This brings about Calvino’s second remark about the fantastic in his own works<fnref n="111" /> and the passage deserves to be quoted in full:

> For me at the centre of narration there is not the explanation of an extraordinary fact, instead there is the *order* that stems from this extraordinary fact in itself and around it, the pattern, the symmetry, the network of images settling around it as it happens in the process of crystal formation.<fnref n="112" />

The ants’ invasion and human suffering it brings about cannot be explained in full, but they establish an order, because in the end the whole neighborhood is absorbed in the fight against the ants with different approaches and methodology. Yet, this order remains the result of nature’s blind cruelty. Calvino’s appraisal of nature and its cruelty cannot but remind the reader of the “Dialogo della natura e di un islandese” from the *Operette morali* of Giacomo Leopardi, and especially Nature’s answer to the Icelander’s complaint:

> Did you ever think then that the world was made for you? It is time for you to know that in my designs, operations, and decrees, with very few exceptions, I never paid attention to the happiness or unhappiness of man. If in any possible way I make you suffer, I am unaware of the fact, with very few exceptions; in the same way, normally, I do not know whether I give you pleasure or prosperity. Furthermore, I did not do any such things nor actions, as you incline to believe, to please you or to help you. *Finally,*

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Ibid., 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ See above, 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Calvino, “Definizione di territori: il fantastico,” 267 (my own translation).</footnote>
*should I ever by any chance happen to cause the extinction of your species,
I would not even notice* [emphasis mine].<fnref n="113" />

A philosophical idea of nature that is indebted to Lucretius *De rerum natura*, but
also, nowadays, a warning we should all keep in mind.

**Anna Lissa** is associate professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature at the Université Paris 8. She has published two books and several articles about Israeli writers (A.B. Yehoshua, David Shahar, Shulamit Hareven, Aharon Appelfed, Yehudah Amichai). She has also worked on Early Modern Jewish literature, namely on Simone Luzzatto focusing also on the human/animal difference in his political and philosophical works.

**Keywords:** Modern Hebrew Literature, Animal Studies, Otherness, Hybridity

**How to quote this article:**

Anna Lissa, “Troubling the Boundaries: Human and Animal Spaces in Yitzhak Orpaz’s *Nemalim* (Ants) and Italo Calvino’s *La formica argentina* (*The Argentine Ant*),” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13906

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo della natura e di un islandese,” in *Poesie e prose*, ed. Rolando Damiani, vol. 2 (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1988), 76-83, 81 (my own translation): “Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie, trattone pochissime, sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro, che alla felicità degli uomini o all’infelicità. Quando io v’offendo in qualunque modo e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo, se non rarissime volte: come, ordinariamente, se io vi diletto o vi benefico, io non lo so; e non ho fatto, come credete voi, quelle tali cose, o non fo tali azioni, per dilettarvi o giovarvi. *E finalmente anche se mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me ne avvedrei.*” [emphasis mine].</footnote>
# The Expression of Israeli Southern Periphery's Voices Through the Symbolism of Domestic versus Wild Animal

by Ilanit Ben-Dor Derimian

## Abstract

This article focuses on the animal symbolism used for representing the local identity of the southern periphery in Israel. From an ecocritical point of view, the domestic and the wild animal images will be analyzed as expressions of different shades (domestication and wildness) in the category of Nature, on the Nature-Culture dichotomy. The anthropological research method of discourse analysis has been adapted here to review the domestic donkey's image in Sami Berdugo's novel, Donkey (2019), and the discourse on the wild ass's image in the media and especially by activists from the Negev. While the representation of the two types of animals raises awareness of the existential problems of southern periphery's inhabitants, it also exposures nuances in their social status and the local identity reconstruction process.

## Introduction

### Categorical Perception of Man and Animal in the Dichotomy of Nature versus Culture

### Relationships between Man and Donkey in Sami Berdugo's Novel

#### *The Donkey's Figure and the Israeli Society*

#### *The Focus on Marginality and Social Critique in Sami Berdugo's Literary Work*

#### *Description of the Plot and Ruslan's Connection to the Donkey*

#### *A Search for Authenticity and a Sense of Belonging through the Relationship between Human and Animal Description*
# Representation in Public Discourse of the Wild Ass Rewilding in the Southern Open Spaces

*The Project of Rewilding Animals in Israel - Ecology and Nationalism*

*The Onager/Asiatic Wild Ass - Myth and Public Discourse*

*Local Identity Reconstruction through Public Discourse on the Wild Ass Presence in the Area of Mitzpe Ramon*

## Conclusion: Links between the Domestic Donkey's and the Wild Ass' Representations

## Introduction

The entire southern part of the State of Israel, which extends over 60 percent of its territory, can be perceived as a peripheral area, whose inhabitants are often considered more transparent and neglected by state institutions, compared to the hegemonic privileged center.<fnref n="1" /> Recently, however, groups and agents from the south have raised their voices and been heard. These voices manage to create fluctuations in the prevailing attitudes towards the south. Although the desert continues to represent the oriental wild Other in comparison to the occidental cultivated Self on the categorical dichotomy between nature and culture,<fnref n="2" /> it

<footnote n="1">¹ For a full overview of the development of the Negev's image and its representation in the context of center-periphery relations, see Ilanit Ben-Dor Derimian, *From the Conquest of the Desert to Sustainable Development: The Representation of the Negev in Public Discourse in Israel* (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² According to the structuralist anthropological approach, binary thinking is at the base of human thought, and it is through this form of thinking that man defines his world in binary categories, see Claude Levi-Strauss, *Structural Anthropology* (New-York: Basic Books, 2008 [1963]). The contrast to which the study refers, between “Culture” and “Nature,” is part of the hierarchical dichotomies revealed by the postcolonial approach, as an expression of one primary dichotomy: The Occidental-Western “Self” versus the Oriental “Other,” see Edward W. Said, *Orientalism* (London: Penguin, 2003 [1978]).</footnote>
gained an appreciated authentic Hebrew-ecological-image. That image competes
with the forsaken image from the past of development towns and unrecognized
Bedouin settlements. This shift in image is to be found mainly in southern areas
of desert tourism that are remote and far from urban centers: for instance, around
the town of Mitzpe Ramon, on the edge of the Ramon crater.<fnref n="3" /> Yet it has also
affected other southern localities’ images, through the rise of cultural activity and
the search for an authentic voice.<fnref n="4" /> The question is how are these shifts in images
expressed in the current public and literary discourse? How does the use of animal
symbolism represent these shifted images? In previous studies, from an ecocritical
approach, we followed the changes in the representation of the desert as the Other
due to political changes and the penetration of ecological ideas. In this study, we
will examine the representation of the nuances in the current perception of this
otherness between different regions in the south, which cannot be generalized to
include all its communities under one definition. Loyal to the ecocritical point of
view, we chose to discuss, through anthropological discourse analysis, the
domestic donkey and the wild ass representations in Israeli literature and media
from the south. The reference to literature as an arena of social discourse stems
from the perception of literary texts as influenced by the construction of social
reality and at the same time as a source of influence on social construction.<fnref n="5" />
The animal figures will be analyzed in the context of the sub-division, through
social construction, into human and animal categories, within the dichotomy of
Nature versus Culture.

<footnote n="3">³ For further details, see chapter 7 on Mitzpe Ramon in Ben-Dor Derimian, *From the Conquest of the Desert*, 160-190.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ For example, in Beer Sheva, Sderot, Dimona, and Yeruham (Ibid., 128-159).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ In accordance with the principles of sociocriticism which emphasizes the social context in which the text was written. Claude Duchet, ed., *Sociocritique* (Paris: Nathan, 1979); Ruth Amossy, “Sociocritique et argumentation: L’exemple du discours sur le ‘déracinement culturel’ dans la nouvelle droite,” in *La politique du texte: enjeux sociocritiques. Pour Claude Duchet*, eds. Jacques Neefs and Marie-Claire Ropars (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1992), 29-50.</footnote>
Categorical Perception of Man and Animal in the Dichotomy of Nature versus Culture

Various scholars have already referred to the dichotomy between nature and culture, which began with the development of Western culture in Ancient Greece, when “nature has been defined by way of contrast with or opposition to an antonym.”<fnref n="6" /> A paradoxical duality in this categorical division is perceived.<fnref n="7" /> Although everything that is man-made is unnatural, man himself is a product of nature. That is, the category of Nature, on the one hand, contains man and on the other hand places man outside it, as one who observes nature and makes use of it.<fnref n="8" /> The animal, too, for all its being a real physical entity, is a categorical construction of human ideas and concepts. It is perceived by man in his mind. Man is the one who defines and represents it, and in such a representation it constitutes a mirror image of himself.<fnref n="9" /> In the same context, the art critic, John Berger,<fnref n="10" /> traces the meaning of the fascination and nostalgia that underlies the relationship between modern man and the animal world. He observes the modern process of drifting away from nature: a cultural and physical process in which once ago “animals interceded between man and their origin because they were both like and unlike man,”<fnref n="11" /> but have since then been completely pushed to the existential fringes of modern man and are disappearing from his life. Despite all this, however, Berger claims that it is not so easy to erase animals from the human imagination: “Sayings, dreams, games, stories, superstitions, the language itself, recall them [...]. The images are of animals *receding* into a wildness that existed only in the

<footnote n="6">⁶ Stanley Rosen, “Remarks on Human Nature in Plato,” in *Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension*, eds. Robert S. Cohen and Alfred I. Tauber (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 151-162, 151.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ This paradoxical duality in the Man-Animal's categorical division was also mentioned by Noam Gal, “A Note on the Fictional Non-Human in Haviva Pedaya’s *The Eye of the Cat*,” *Mikan* 14 (2014): 395-417, 400-402.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Tim Ingold, “Introduction,” in *What is an Animal?*, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 1-16.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Bob Marvin and Garry Mullan, *Zoo Cultures* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). See also: Donna J. Haraway, *Simians, Cyborgs and Women* (New York: Routledge, 1991) who claims that the animal serves as a mirror to the human structure, to maintain social norms.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ John Berger, *About Looking* (New York: Vintage International, 1980), 3-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Ibid., 6.</footnote>
imagination.”<sup>12</sup> Within the space of imagination, in particular, man allows himself to play with the boundaries of this categorical division between culture and nature.

Beyond the fact that the categories at both ends of the dichotomy are not so distinct, in each category there are sub-categories. Mainly, we would like to address and analyze the sub-categories in animal representation, of the wild animal and the domesticated animal. The adjective “wild,” which originated in Ancient Greece, expresses everything outside the city, the Polis, the embodiment of the civilized world, the expression of man’s control over nature.<sup>13</sup> The “natural,” in this classical conception, is “wild” and therefore unpredictable and irregular, while man acts to regulate nature and adapt it to his needs. In the case of the animal, the adjustment is made through training and domestication. The perception of the “wild” as “more natural” gives the “wild” a higher degree of authenticity, since it is not subject to social norms, compared to the domesticated animal. At the same time, the wild Other evokes ambivalent feelings of desire and fear, such as the ones that have been awoken towards the Bedouins who were perceived as part of the Other, the wild nature of the desert. We suggest a possible interpretation of the choice to present different socially constructed sub-categories of animals, the “wild” ass and the “domesticated” donkey, in the social discourse from the south. Let us first look at Sami Berdugo’s literary work and his focus on the relationship between a man and a donkey.

<footnote n="12"><sup>12</sup> Ibid., 15-17.</footnote>

<footnote n="13"><sup>13</sup> Stephen Scully, “The Nature of the Gods and Early Greek Poetic Thought,” in *Philosophies of Nature*, eds. Robert S. Cohen and Alfred I. Tauber (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 163-176.</footnote>
# Relationships between Man and Donkey in Sami Berdugo's Novel<fnref n="14" />

## *The Donkey's Figure and the Israeli Society*

The donkey figure appears in numerous literary works in world literature. Shavit and Reinharz<fnref n="15" /> explain in the introduction of their book their choice to dedicate a whole volume to the donkey's character in culture. They claim that unlike other personified animals in writings throughout history, the donkey's representation is not one-dimensional, but has several traits and represents the antinomies and strata in human existence. Among these antinomies the cultural researchers include, on the one hand, characters as sublime, revered, wise, strong, and good-hearted; and on the other hand, vicious, wicked, stupid, humble, and harmful.

The pursuit of the history of the donkey representation in Jewish sources and Hebrew literature reveals changes in Hebrew-Israeli society. The donkey appears numerous times in the Bible, mainly as a beast carrying a burden (Genesis 45: 23), but it has also been used by women to ride on (Joshua 15:18). It symbolizes wealth and honor, as in the case of Abraham (Genesis 12:16). Even the name “donkey” (*hamor* [חֲמֹר]) in Hebrew stems from the same root (ח.מ.ר) as the word “matter” (*homer* [הוֹמֵר]) and symbolizes materiality. But riding a donkey is also considered a sign of humility, which is why the Messiah is also described as poor and riding a donkey (Zechariah 9: 9).

With the beginning of the Zionist enterprise in *Eretz Isra'el*, the Jewish pioneers adopted the native Bedouin's agricultural heritage, as well as the use of the donkey within it. The donkey figure had turned into an iconic animal of the Jewish agricultural settlement, rooted in the land of Israel. Thus, it is not surprising that the donkey appears in many literary works for children since the beginning of the twentieth century. The ideology behind this symbolic act is expressed in a later children's story (from 1966) by Leah Goldberg (1911-1970), *The Desert*

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Sami Berdugo, *Hamor* (*Donkey*) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Yaacov Shavit and Jehuda Reinharz, *Hamoriyut – Massa' be-'iqvot ha-hamor – mitologiyah, 'allegoriyah, mitos we-cliché* (*The Donkey: A Cultural History: A Journey Through Myth, Allegory, Symbol and Cliché*) (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2014).</footnote>
*Adventure*.<fnref n="16" /> In this story, some children of Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev join their father, the archaeologist, on a tour to the Nabataean city of Shivta. On the way, they see Bedouins with a white donkey. The children admire the donkey and ask their father to buy it for the kibbutz's petting zoo, and the father immediately agrees and buys the donkey. Symbolically, there is a link between the donkey and the native Bedouin, from whom the Jewish settlers want to learn how to become the lords of the desert, by appropriating the animals that connect him to nature, whether it is the donkey or the camel. The Bedouin, in accordance with Zionist ideology, collaborates with these terms of trade and the power and dependency relations that follow. Other children's literary works formed an integral part of the cultural landscape of the pre-statehood period and were perceived as one of the characteristics of the new Zionist space. For example, in the story "The incarnations of Miri," by S. Yizhar (the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, 1916-2006) published in the newspaper *Davar* for children in 1947, the description of the connection between Miri, the female donkey, and the society surrounding it, is used to point out the social changes in Eretz Isra'el society as a result of modernization and distancing from nature. These changes include the perception of Israeli society as being torn apart between East and West; tradition and modernity; and nativity and exile, in association with ideological tenets about agricultural work and the relations with the neighboring Arab society.<fnref n="17" />

The representation of the donkey figure allows us also to learn about hierarchical relations in society. A particularly representative case appears in the book *People in the Desert*.<fnref n="18" /> Bedouin society is presented as a stereotypical and patriarchal one where the man rides the camel “as befits a strong man,” while the woman, in an inferior position, rides the donkey “as befits a modest woman.” The hierarchical division also appears in Nathan Alterman’s poem from 1947, “*Miryam Bat Nissim*,” which describes a large Yemeni family. This poem also points out the gender division and power relations between humans and animals, in situations

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Leah Goldberg, *Harpatqah ba-midbar (The Desert Adventure)* (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1966). This book was published first in Sweden in 1964 under the name “Eli lives in Israel,” with photographs by Anna Rivkin, who visited Kibbutz Revivim in 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ See this story on the Ben-Yehuda Project website, accessed June 21, 2023, https://benyehuda.org/read/23842.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Jonathan Ben Israel, *Anashim ba-midbar (People in the Desert)*, photographs by Ervin Farkash (Tel Aviv: Amihai, 1962).</footnote>
where the family moves from place to place, and they leave in a hierarchical order. The daughter Miriam, who is the speaker in the poem, is the last to march after the rest of the family. The caravan is sealed by the little donkey Bil'am. Once more, the connection is revealed between the low status of women in the gender context and the donkey, as it represents the animal category at the margin of the hierarchical order.<fnref n="19" />

*The Focus on Marginality and Social Critique in Sami Berdugo’s Literary Work*

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency to focus on animal figures in Hebrew literature, particularly in literature written from the periphery or about the periphery in the context of the marginality and transparency of life there.<fnref n="20" /> The historical representations of the donkey in the Eretz Israeli social hierarchy can explain Sami Berdugo’s choice to give this animal a central place in his novel, *Donkey* (2019), in the context of representing the periphery. The author presents the donkey as a submissive, sickly, and miserable animal, without any affinity with the ethos attributed to it, connected to wealth or the appearance of the Messiah. The donkey in the novel apparently suffers from the trauma of his past abuse and is in the process of dying. The human protagonist himself lives his life in neglect and in a marginalized existence in the periphery and is desperate after his unsuccessful empathetic attempts to save the donkey.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ For further reading on the analysis of the donkey figure in Hebrew literary children’s works, see: Uri Rozenberg, “Ha-hamor shel Leah Goldberg” (“Leah Goldberg’s Donkey”), *Noshanot*, last modified December 1, 2021, https://prrozza.com/tag/אריה-נבו/.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ See, for example, the first prose book of Haviva Pedaya (born in 1957), *Be-ʻeyn ha-hatul (The Eye of the Cat)* (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 2008). We have referred to this literary work in other writings (see: Ben-Dor Derimian, *From the Conquest of the Desert*, 244-246) and it has received widespread attention from other researchers regarding raising awareness of the relationship between man and the environment in general and the southern and marginal periphery in particular. See Noam Gal, “A Note on the Fictional Non-Human in Haviva Pedaya’s *The Eye of the Cat*,” *Mikan* 14 (2014): 395-417. In Pedaya’s book, stray cats serve as a metaphor for marginalized people in the south of the country.</footnote>
Berdugo explains in an interview with the literary critic Yoni Livne<fnref n="21" /> that his writing stems from the need to tell the story of people like him, because until he started writing he felt he had not found a character or voice in Israeli literature somewhat similar to his own: “I have not encountered stories that tell anything about my world, which can be called a peripheral world, or an Oriental world, or a world of immigrants.”<fnref n="22" />

Berdugo is defined as a demanding writer, who asks his readers to strive and delve deeper into the layers of his literary work. The author has won the Brenner Prize and the Sapir Prize for Hebrew Literature of 2020 for writing this novel. The Sapir Prize Judging Committee stated some of its motivations:

> In a virtuosic and resolutely original language, with wisdom and courage, Sami Berdugo's *Donkey* sheds light on corners of abandonment and neglect in a way that has not been done before. [...] yet its characters remain in their foreignness and thus also maintain their independence. Writing that is pure being – moment by moment, alive and sharp.<fnref n="23" />

Indeed, Berdugo is known for inventing a unique writing style that also touches the margins while producing expressions and using sub-standard language that is consciously and intentionally mixed with high-standard language.

On the back cover of the novel, Berdugo’s writing is compared to that of renowned Israeli writers, including S. Yizhar. Surely, it is impossible not to find a resemblance between Yizhar’s literary works about the south<fnref n="24" /> and this novel, both of which are influenced by *the Stream of Consciousness* writing style, while describing in great detail both the thoughts of their protagonists and the southern desert

<footnote n="21">²¹ Yoni Livne, “Re’ayon ’im Sami Berdugo, Hamor” (“An interview with Sami Berdugo, *Donkey*”), *Mitat Sdom*, accessed June 22, 2023, https://bedofsodom.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/ראין-עם-סמ-ברדוגו-המור/.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Berdugo was born in 1970 to Moroccan parents. He grew up with his three brothers in Mazkeret Batya. He lost his father at the age of 13. He has so far published 9 literary works, between the years 1999 - 2019, for which he has won prestigious awards, such as the Levy Eshkol Literary Work Prize for the year 2006.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ “Sapir Prize for Literature,” News, *la fleur’s*, last modified February 4, 2021, https://lafleurs.com/news/2021/02/04/mifal-hapais-celebrates-20th-anniversary-of-the-sapir-prize-for-literature/.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ For example: S. Yizhar, *Yeme Tziqlag (Days of Ziklag)* (Tel-Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1989 [1958]).</footnote>
landscape. In a second interview with Yoni Livne, Berdugo explains the choice to use this unique style:

> The introverted stories I tell, the use of the stream of consciousness and their wallowing language — are the product of my critical position as a writer. [...]. In the last decade, I have realized that I want to say my opinion concerning place and time, questions of identity, and cultural-linguistic aspects. Probably my way of demonstrating criticism is to create protagonists who have something distorted about them, as though they are the product of a defective place. They carry in their bodies the wounds of this space.<fnref n="25" />

In another interview on the occasion of the publication of his book with the poet Sarai Shavit, on the literary TV program *Shovrim Shurah*, of November 14, 2019, Berdugo refers to the social criticism of Israeli society that emerges from the novel. He claims that the protagonist decides to retire from all Israeli systems of life—social, political, economic, human, cultural, and historical, because he, as a writer, may be tired of them. Berdugo explains that one of the tragic characteristics of Ruslan, the book's protagonist, is that he seeks to shake off any category and at the same time also strives to be defined. Berdugo testifies that “in Ruslan's relationship with the donkey, there is an attempt to reach some state of correction or peace, to find the good in the very basic aspects of life.”<fnref n="26" /> We will follow the description of the relationship's evolution alongside Ruslan's developing ambition to express an authentic correct voice.

## Description of the Plot and Ruslan's Connection to the Donkey

Ruslan Isakov, around 50 years old, born in Azerbaijan, has recently resigned from his job as a building engineer at the local planning and construction committee in

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Yoni Livne, “Re’ayon ’im Sami Berdugo be’-iqvot ha-zkhiyah ba-pras” (“An Interview with Sami Berdugo after Winning the Prize”), *Mitat Sdom*, accessed June 22, 2023, https://bedofsodom.wordpress.com/2021/03/05/־האיון־עם־סמ־ברדוגו־בעקבות־הזכייה־/־בפרס</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ The quotation is taken from the recording of the interview with Sarai Shavit, on the literary TV program *Shovrim Shurah*, of November 14, 2019.</footnote>
Ashkelon and lives in isolation in a peripheral small locality, Bat-Hadar, near Ashkelon. There, in the neglected backyard of the modest housing unit he rents, he hides a donkey, which has been entrusted to him by the police, apparently after being abused by a delinquent teenager from the neighborhood, and it is not clear to whom it belongs. The book's plot unfolds over eight days in June 2018, a few weeks from the moment of Ruslan's encounter with the donkey, as a result of which Ruslan devotes himself to its care until it dies.

Throughout the book, the beast does not get a name and is called “donkey” (*hamor*) without a definite article. This naming according to the species category strengthens the donkey’s anonymity, similar to that of Ruslan, the transparent protagonist. By avoiding giving the donkey a name with symbolic connotations, the author strives to present the materiality of the donkey’s simple life, “the habit of a donkey. Simply a donkey.”<fnref n="27" /> In the interview with Yoni Livne, Berdugo explains the choice of the donkey, because the donkey, for him, “with all the catastrophes, the diseases, and the persecution, is an expression of the desire to return to matter,<fnref n="28" /> to humanity, in the simplest sense of the word.”<fnref n="29" /> The novel’s protagonist is drawn to this quality: “Perhaps because it is perceived by him as someone who knows nothing about his place and destiny [...], disciplined [...], this whole sight [...] has captured Ruslan.”<fnref n="30" />

The description of Ruslan’s encounter with the police, during the first meeting with the donkey, illustrates his identification with the animal, while Ruslan notices the resemblance between them when he looks “at donkey’s fixes black eyes, that seemed opaque,” and he interoperates in this gaze “that surrender by consent of Donkey, following which he also recognized his own submission in face of the police.”<fnref n="31" />

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 15. All quotes from the novel have been translated by the author of this article (the novel has not yet been translated into other languages).</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ As mentioned above, the name “donkey” in Hebrew stems from the same root as the word “material.”</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Livne, “Re’ayon ’im Sami Berdugo, *Hamor*.”</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Ibid., 10-11.</footnote>
This is a silent and languageless fateful partnership, presented in the exchange of glances between the two characters, between the man and the animal.<fnref n="32" /> In this context, John Berger writes that an animal “does not reserve a special look for man. But [...] man becomes aware of himself returning the look.”<fnref n="33" /> Berger attaches special importance to the gaze of the animal, which is similar to the gaze of man and, at the same time, also completely separate from it. Indeed, in this novel, it appears that several times Ruslan tries to make eye contact with Donkey and fails to do so since Donkey’s gaze is directed towards the ground<fnref n="34" /> or his eyes are opaque.<fnref n="35" /> Ruslan also assumes that Donkey “does not see too much, [...] because how does a donkey see? How does it perceive colors and shapes? Who knows?”<fnref n="36" /> Towards the end of the novel, however, active eye contact is described and even Ruslan felt that Donkey speaks to him through the gaze.<fnref n="37" />

To the process of identifying the animal gaze as familiar, as Berger described it, it is worth adding the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's<fnref n="38" /> distinction between the look and the gaze. According to Lacan, in the moment of looking there is a fixation and pause, for no reason, on any object, and only then does the subject's identification with the thing he sees takes place. The moment of gaze, on the other hand, is the moment when the subject sees his gaze returning to him from the object of his observation. The gaze returns to the observer, or, in other words, the subject is reflected in what he has chosen to observe.<fnref n="39" /> This reflexivity, the return of the gaze, takes place because the subject sees in the object something of himself.

Throughout the novel, Berdugo expresses the human protagonist's identification with the donkey while observing it, at the same time transparent, detached, and indifferent. The protagonist's sense of marginalization is also expressed across the novel. At the beginning of the novel, the reader becomes aware of Ruslan's

<footnote n="32">³² Emphasis on the exchange of glances between Ruslan and Donkey appears several times in the novel. See for example ibid., 15 and 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Berger, *About Looking*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Ibid., 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ibid., 28.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Ibid., 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Jacques Lacan, *The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar 6 of Jacques Lacan, Book XI*, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998 [1965]).</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid.</footnote>
preference for wandering the bypass road of the settlement in which he lives,
walking idly on the marginal road. There he also feels "distant, and moreover -
remote, and especially expelled, an outcast from life."<fnref n="40" /> However, social margins
and existential detachment do not ultimately lead Ruslan to dissipate, following
his sensation of the "evaporation of life from his body,"<fnref n="41" /> described at the
beginning of the novel. On the contrary, as the literary critic, Yosef Oren<fnref n="42" /> claims,
the novel exposes a very present, material, and physical existence, which increases
during the evolution of the relationship between Ruslan and the donkey. Ruslan
is involved in taking care of the donkey's needs and becomes very active as a
result—feeding and watering, cleaning and caring. The bad odors from Donkey's
body did not deter Ruslan from giving him treatment either, because, in the face
of the donkey's pile of fresh dung, Ruslan felt "upright in his life, living literally,
with its proper purpose."<fnref n="43" /> That is, caring for the donkey and its basic needs, also
revives Ruslan's feeling of existence.

When one day, Steve, Ruslan's lover, comes to visit him and finds him in the yard
with the donkey, Steve says to Ruslan: " 'You are here' " and for Ruslan this
statement expresses what Steve thinks, that "this is how he is: marginal." Ruslan
rebels against this perception, though, while thinking that in these words "Steve
presents what is probably so incorrect in the backyard, neither 'you' nor 'here'."
And he replies to Steve: " 'We are here'."<fnref n="44" /> Precisely in the neglected backyard,
the feeling of shame due to the awareness that others probably dislike someone
living in this squalor with a donkey and even having an erotic relationship with it,
is replaced by a sense of pride from the very choice to live life in its simplicity.

Donkey, as if planted in Ruslan's backyard, "so relaxed [...] integrates"<fnref n="45" /> in an
ongoing present, and serves as a model for Ruslan who also strives for a passive
and peaceful present. But Ruslan doubts that he can reach this ideal existence. He
contemplates: "And when will Ruslan be just a fact in his own eyes? For a long

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Yosef Oren. " 'Hamor' – Rom’an retzini u-mefukakh shel Sami Berdugo" ("*Donkey* - A Serious and Sober Novel by Sami Berdugo"), *News1*, last modified September 11, 2021, https://m.newsi.co.il/Archive/0026-D-150332-00.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Ibid., 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Ibid., 7.</footnote>
time, he has been filling the days and leaving them incomplete for himself. And that's not what he wants.”<fnref n="46" />

Ruslan is fascinated by Donkey's indifference to its subordinate existence. He thus finds a resemblance to the state of his life, when he too continues to maintain the routine of life without any purpose, without rebellions. His only rebellion is his choice to shed the rituals of what is considered normative life. He felt that, like Donkey, he had no fear of life, because he had shed from himself every desire and every sense of belonging while trying to live an individual and independent lifestyle. In this context, on the Israeli cultural television program *Sokhen Tarbut*, broadcasted on December 22, 2019, Berdugo describes Ruslan as someone who “decided to exempt himself from all normative lifestyles and laws. He cuts himself from work, from people, from the past, from history, from a place, and tries to maintain some kind of individual, autonomous lifestyle,”<fnref n="47" /> which may give rise to a sense of self-alienation as well as detachment from the environment. But, as Berdugo concludes: “Along with the alienation, hatred or, I would say, the rejection he has towards the spirit of the time and place in the Israeli present, [...] I think he is trying to find some points to hold on to.”<fnref n="48" />

*A Search for Authenticity and a Sense of Belonging through the Relationship between Human and Animal Description*

Seemingly, in the present time of the plot, almost nothing happens in the reality surrounding the protagonist and the writer dwells on detailed descriptions of the protagonist's daily Sisyphean experience and his inner world. On the other hand, the novel also reveals in stages a constitutive trauma from the past, which has led to the experience of the protagonist's current detached existence. Through this oscillation between past and present, the Israeli experience is revealed in all its shades: the landscapes, the identities of individuals and different groups in society (immigrants from the USSR, religious streams and Mizrahi-Ashkenazi divisions), different economic classes and center-periphery positions.

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Ibid., 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ *Sokhen Tarbut*, broadcasted on December 22, 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ From an interview with Berdugo on the Israeli cultural television program *Sokhen Tarbut*, broadcasted on December 22, 2019.</footnote>
Ruslan escapes the hopelessness of the northern periphery, namely Kiryat Yam, the most excluded neighborhood, as the narrator defines it,<fnref n="49" /> where he grew up. Even after settling in the south, though, he still does not feel at home, and wonders “how long does it take for him to know in his feeling that the residential structure, which is now behind him, is permanent for him?”<fnref n="50" />

However, as already mentioned, from the beginning of the novel we are exposed to a metamorphosis that Ruslan experiences following the encounter with Donkey, when its presence for five weeks in Ruslan’s yard evokes a certain optimism and vitality in Ruslan. He feels that “since Donkey entered the wild yard, every time Ruslan sees it, his independent freedom coalesces and becomes justified.”<fnref n="51" /> Ruslan feels more at home in the housing unit precisely because of his attention to the “backyard of the deserted garden,”<fnref n="52" /> where Donkey resides. The wild authenticity of the garden is enhanced by the very attention to it. There, Ruslan recognizes the value of freedom in the wild and quiet nature: “The wind blows silently and there is no disturbance and no hint of overturning, so that liberty also gets to spread further, [...] the yard is sealed on the right and left and also in front thanks to the fleshy bright green colored leaves, joyful leaves.”<fnref n="53" />

Through the connection with the donkey, Ruslan gains a re-connection to nature and authenticity, when he realizes that in his marginal housing unit’s backyard, “what is perceived and seen naturally as backward is for him a forward, a kind of forward.”<fnref n="54" /> That is, the marginal wild backyard, which recalls the perception of the periphery as Israel’s backyard, becomes the center of the stage. It is a symbol of a simple and authentic presence. As a result, Ruslan feels the undermining of the definitions between the periphery and the center in the face of the universal material existence as it is:

> Then the settlement of Bat Hadar [...] will disperse and evaporate from him, and further in the distance, Ashkelon too will disappear, and not out of contempt will these places be erased, but because Ruslan knows, for a

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Ibid., 60.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Ibid., 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Ibid., 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Ibid., 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Ibid.</footnote>
short time, who he is now in the presence of Donkey: he is a man alive,
inside of life. Neither on the side of life nor above it, [...] and in his heart,
it is said: I am therefore not alone in the world.<fnref n="55" />

The connection with Donkey seems to compensate for Ruslan's social loneliness and disgust with Israeli society. Indeed, his connection with the animal has therapeutic consequences. This therapeutic process happens almost against all odds, because the domesticated donkey is imprisoned in a small yard with a barren olive tree, which does not bear fruit. Moreover, the open spaces the protagonist reaches are the arid fields around the settlement, beyond which the presence of industrial civilization predominates. This ambivalent attitude, ranging from connecting to and moving away from authentic nature, gains more presence as the novel continues and the disease of Donkey progresses. Then, Ruslan feels helpless and is not sure whether he understands correctly how to treat the donkey. He feels the lack of communication between them, in their "mutual silence that could never be dispelled."<fnref n="56" /> The feeling of disconnection that exists between him and nature is strengthened inside him. He recognizes his opaque attitude towards nature and of his own authenticity. Nevertheless, later on in the story, Ruslan feels strongly the existence of some communication between him and Donkey:

> The black eyes [...] are now completely open, wide open beyond their capacity, and they are not indifferent, they now lack their usual opaque childlike innocence, and they say something. The staring gaze of Donkey mumbles, speaks, hell yeah speaks.<fnref n="57" />

Ruslan interprets the message he reads in Donkey's gaze. He recognizes "the statement [...], in which the essence is hidden: I live as I should live."<fnref n="58" /> If so, despite the feeling that nature is imprisoned and regulated, Berdugo describes a process of awakening to life in the periphery, through the connection to natural authenticity, represented by human-animal relations.

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Ibid., 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Ibid., 118.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Ibid., 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Ibid., 168.</footnote>
Moreover, the author outlines throughout the novel the concept of southernness, which is not necessarily the same thing as the peripheral south of Israel. Although Ruslan and Donkey live in the peripheral “southern south,”<fnref n="59" /> this space reflects the Israeli existence in general as an “unlighted southern country,”<fnref n="60" /> since:

> After all, the nature that exaggeratedly dominates Ashkelon and its metastases in the southern district is in fact the character of the entire State of Israel and its annexations. Because where in this whole country is there a space where the sun does not reside - and reside there most of the hours of the day? Where is the sun really hidden and concealed so that the area should be called “Northern Israeli” or “Northern Palestinian”? There is no such thing; Here is a land-flooded entity of south. This is actually the place, this is its quality, which is not only geography.<fnref n="61" />

In fact, according to Berdugo’s approach, the peripheral otherness has already permeated all corners of the country and beyond. It is similar to a process of desertification. This approach relates to the Global South theory, which focuses on geopolitical power relations in an era of globalization. The theory is based on the notion of the “South” as an epistemological position, with the aim of undermining the “Northern,” i.e. European-American, hegemonic culture which claims to possess universal knowledge. Scholars in the social sciences have proposed instead the notion of knowledge of the South.<fnref n="62" /> Southern knowledge, they argue, is knowledge created from the struggle of social groups that oppose centers of power and structures of global inequality. The global south approach looks for the particular knowledge of various communities, which are considered southern, not necessarily because of their position on the map—although the majority of these societies live in the Southern Hemisphere—but because of their

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Ibid., 106.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Ibid., 173.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Ibid., 75.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Raewyn Connell, *Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Sciences*, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, *Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa* (New York: Routledge, 2012); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, *Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide* (New York: Routledge, 2014).</footnote>
economic and social dispossession from a position of power and knowledge in a
globalized world.

In this context, this article joins the claims of Israeli social researchers regarding Israel as part of the Global South.<fnref n="63" /> Berdugo, in a way, captured this idea of the possibility to identify Israel at some point as part of the Global South. In fact, Ruslan is described as someone who has recoiled from “a messy and slippery depletion” that “continues to plague the country, especially here, in the southern cities disguised as capitalists with great success.”<fnref n="64" /> This description intensifies the perception of Israeli society as a southern entity, depleted by the processes of Americanization. Likewise, Shaul Setter, in his introduction to a volume of 2021 that connects the south of Israel to the Global South theory, also refers to the perception of the south in Berdugo’s novel: “It is not the ‘second’ (Southern) Israel versus the ‘first’ (Northern) Israel, because there is ‘no such thing’ as the latter. There is only Israel as South. Berdugo’s book poses a nonreactive, non-antagonistic South. Peripheral but expanding.”<fnref n="65" />

Following the Global South approach that undermines the hegemony of
"northern" knowledge and emphasizes the importance of knowledge coming
from the South, we find that Berdugo himself also offers in this novel an
opportunity to think from the South, to listen to the peripheral southern
authentic voices through the description of human-animal relations.

Representation in Public Discourse of the Wild Ass Rewilding in the Southern Open Spaces

***The Project of Rewilding Animals in Israel - Ecology and Nationalism***

Voices from the periphery are expressed differently in the context of public
discourse regarding the efforts made since the 1970s by the Israel Nature and Parks

<footnote n="63">⁶³ See: Haviva Pedaya, “An essay about the South,” *Theory and Criticism* 54 (2021): 115-134; Erez Tzfadia and Oren Yiftachel, “Urban Displaceability: A Southeastern Perspective,” *Theory and Criticism* 54 (2021): 59-86.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Shaul Setter, “Preface: On the Way to Thinking from the South,” *Theory and Criticism* 54 (2021): 5-21, 6-7.</footnote>
Authority (INPA)<fnref n="66" /> to “return biblical animals” to their original natural habitats. It is considered part of a global effort to rewild animals. Indeed, since the 1970s, Israeli society has been influenced by international global processes, with the deterioration of the dominant Socialist Party’s status and the penetration of liberal principles. Since then, the global ecological movement has gained power, and also in Israel, the influence of the environmental discourse has increased. Still, the discourse on the rewilding of biblical animals can also be viewed from a national level, as part of the State of Israel’s efforts to legitimize the Jewish presence in this region of the Middle East, by strengthening the idea of the historical continuity of the Jewish people’s presence in the region from biblical times to the present day. It is clear, though, that for the INPA, the ecological-scientific argument is important, as explained on the Authority’s website, in a page dedicated to describing the international project, posted on March 3, 2022. It is stated that the goal of the project is to bring back to the area animals that have disappeared from the local landscape. As part of the project, several extinct species were brought from abroad and released to nature, including the oryx and the Persian fallow deer. In the present article, we will focus on the release of the *Asiatic wild ass* (*onager*) into the Negev region.

***The Onager/Asiatic Wild Ass - Myth and Public Discourse***

The Asiatic wild ass is also known as the onager (in Hebrew: *Pere’[פּרא]) and its scientific name is *Equus hemionus*.<fnref n="67" /> The onager is indeed described in numerous verses in the Bible. In these descriptions, the image of a wild free animal is already emphasized, galloping in space with its enormous power and speed, unreachable for man and therefore impossible to restrain and tame. It is the complete opposite of the image of the domesticated donkey. In fact, the adjective which represents the notion of “wildness” is also named “*Pere*’.” Accordingly, the image of the onager in the Bible is used to describe situations of complete freedom and power. For example, the prophet Jeremiah describes the sinful people of Israel as the

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ The Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) was established by a government decision in 1964 with the aim of protecting nature and cultivating natural reserves in the country.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ “Asiatic wild ass,” *Britannica*, accessed June 22, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/animal/Asiatic-wild-ass.</footnote>
onager, who obeys no authority and is eternally galloping after the lusts of its heart (Jeremiah 2: 24). This image has permeated Zionist and Israeli cultures. The onager which roams today in the open spaces of the Negev fits perfectly into the image of the wild landscapes of the desert, which are the symbol of complete freedom and biblical authenticity.

The narrative of recovering the biblical land is amplified by informational materials distributed by the INPA, which convey a sense of ‘pride’ because of the project’s success, with about 300 onagers currently roaming in the Negev. For example, in a film produced by the INPA that was released on its website on February 12, 2021, the project is presented solemnly and respectfully. Against the background of western music and photographs of desert animals in the Hai-Bar Yotvata wildlife reserve, the director of the reserve between 1982 and 1990 transmits the history of the project to several young INPA workers standing around him and listening attentively to him. The film reveals photos and historical archival videos of the release of the wild ass and its adaptation to the open space, which highlight the historical importance of the project.

Nevertheless, the onager that was released eventually in the Negev does not match exactly the subspecies described in the Bible, since this species has long since become extinct, mainly due to hunting activity.<fnref n="68" /> Since the extinct Syrian subspecies could not be brought in, two related subspecies were imported to Israel from Iran and Europe in 1968: the Iranian and Turkestan wild asses. Through a process of hybridization, a new subspecies was created in the Hai-Bar wildlife reserve of Yotvata, which is the wild ass that was released into nature between 1982 and 1987. So, even the rewilded onager is not exactly “natural,” but was assembled by man through his scientific and technological capabilities. These onagers are larger than those who lived in the Negev before. Scientists estimate that as a result, they do not have natural predators in the area, as they had in the past, and so they reproduce in an uncontrolled manner.<fnref n="69" /> This fact leads us to discuss the current

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ The Syrian wild ass became extinct in the area in the 1930s. It is the subspecies that fits all the characteristics described in the verses of the Bible. See: Zohar Amar, “Pere’ ve-hamor vu-mah she-beinehem” (“Onager and Donkey – and how to Distinguish between them”), *Leshonenu* 76 (2014): 265-283.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ According to the ecologist Shirley Bar-David, in her lecture at The Negev Highland LTSER platform conference (Mitzpe Ramon, October 28, 2021), where she referred to the issue of the wild ass restoration.</footnote>
public discourse about the wild ass in the Negev, where on the one hand, there is
admiration for the success of the project, and on the other hand fear of the
consequences of the animals' uncontrolled number currently roaming free in the
region.

For scientists and INPA personnel, the onager rewilding operation has been a huge success. After several decades, it is evident that their presence has had a positive effect on the ecosystem in which they live.<fnref n="70" /> The discourse that supports species restoration is also reflected in the press, where articles are praising this phenomenon. For example, in an article written by Erez Erlichman, published in the *y-net* online newspaper on May 30, 2009, the headline already heralds the national ideology: “Returning to the ancient sources” (in Hebrew: “*Hozrim la-meqorot*”).<fnref n="71" />

On the other hand, some articles publish the failed results of these restoration operations. For example, in an article published on December 5, 2007, on the *y-net* website, the same journalist, Erez Erlichman, announces in the title that “In less than a week, 12 rewilded Persian fallow deer died” (in Hebrew: “*Tokh pahot mi-shavua’ metu 12 yahmorim she-shuhreru la-teva’*”) after their return to nature several months earlier. This type of article is consistent with the criticism of the phenomenon by various international bodies, including ecological ones, on the grounds that it is precisely such an intervention in nature that can cause more harm than good. Some scientists warn that there is not enough information about the consequences and fear the possibility of conflicts between humans and animals, especially when it comes to predators released into nature.<fnref n="72" />

Indeed, farmers in the Negev region see the successful results of this project as a serious problem for the region. They do admire the successful way in which the wild ass was absorbed in the open spaces of the Negev and enjoy the authentic sensation it evokes, and that fact that it promotes their desert tourism enterprises.

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ This opinion was expressed by both Zehava Sigal from the INPA and the ecologist Shirley Bar-David at the same conference on the subject (see the footnote above).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ See other articles, such as: Noa Haslovizer, “Teivat Noah ha-modernit: mi-sakanat hakhadah le-hashavah la-teva’ ” (“The modern Noah’s Ark: From endangered to return into nature”), *y-Net*, March 22, 2018. Accessed June 22, 2023, https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5182107,00.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Tzafrir Rinat, “Ha-hayot she-ha-teva‘ lo’ noten la-hen hizdamnut shniyah” (“The animals nature does not give a second chance”), *Haaretz*, March 11, 2016.</footnote>
However, they complain that the onagers are destroying their property and crops, and they fear that the problem will get worse due to the rapid pace of their proliferation. These claims by the farmers are emphasized in the media<sup>73</sup> and are raising public awareness of the issue.

In the public discussion that arose about how to deal with the phenomenon of the onager's proliferation, various factors and bodies in Israeli society are involved, such as the farmers, the Bedouins, the other residents, the scientists, and the state institutions. Through this discussion on the human-animal relationship, which we already started to present in this sub-chapter, it is possible to examine the voices of different social bodies involved in the process of reconstructing the local identity of the area.

*Local Identity Reconstruction through Public Discourse on the Wild Ass Presence in the Area of Mitzpe Ramon*

In our previous studies, we have referred to the concept of a continuously reconstructed “spatial local identity,” a term coined by the Finnish geographer Anssi Passi.<fnref n="74" /> Beyond the identity of a specific territory, which is defined through educational systems and cultural institutions, lies the inhabitants’ regional identity, the “regional consciousness,” which refers to the identities given to the region within civil society, through the regional activism of social agents. It is also possible in the context of environmental struggles to address the issue from an ecological direction through a parallel concept, that of the “socio-environmental imagination,”<fnref n="75" /> which is the attempt by social groups to design a space as a healthy

<footnote n="73">⁷³ See: Roi Chiki Arad, “Ha’im ha-pra’im she-Hu’alu le-Isra’el me-Iran hem tiqvat har ha-Negev o ason eqologi” (“Are the onagers brought to Israel from Iran the hopes of the Negev or an ecological disaster?”), *Haaretz* December 20, 2017; Erez Erlichman, “Pere’ ve-Adam: Ha’im ha-haqla’im ve-ha-pra’im yatzlihu lihyot yahad?” (“Wild and Human: will the farmers and the onagers manage to live together?”), *y-Net*, March 7, 2019. Accessed June 22, 2023, https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5473121,00.html; Shahar Rezkin, “Ha-pra’im ba’im” (“The onagers come”), *Kenes-Media*, April 28, 2021. Accessed June 22, 2023, https://kenes-media.com/קו-lmושב/פרא-חמור-בר/.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Anssi Paasi, “Europe as a Social Process and Discourse: Considerations of Place, Boundaries and Identity,” *European Urban and Regional Studies* 8, no. 1 (2001): 7-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Diana K. Davis, *Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa* (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011).</footnote>
environment with positive and normative values. Thus, the onagers can also be
perceived not only as the subject of scientific research but as part of the political
ecology of the region and the socio-environmental imagination.<fnref n="76" /> Indeed, as
described in our previous studies,<fnref n="77" /> with the establishment of the state, the
construction of local identity relied on the socio-environmental imagination of the
region following the anthropocentric Zionist project of the ‘conquest of the
wilderness.’ In the 1970s, though, with the penetration of environmental ideas, as
was described before, the socio-environmental imagination began to change in the
direction of landscape conservation and the return of animal species to nature.
New migrants came to Mitzpe Ramon from the privileged Center, with an agenda
of seeking to return to nature and establishing ecological ventures, after winning
tenders for the creation of agricultural and tourist farms. They contributed to a
change in the construction of the local identity, to the point that today Mitzpe
Ramon is defined as ‘the desert eco-tourism capital of the Negev.’ In this paper,
we claim that the discourse on the process of rewilding the wild ass is also part of
the power relations to gain legitimacy in the region, which redefine or reinforce
the local identity.

A television reportage by Yigal Mosko, “Onager, man” (in Hebrew: “*Pere*;
*adam*”), on *Channel 12*, which was broadcast on August 30, 2019,<fnref n="78" /> discussed the
project of returning the wild ass to the Negev desert. First, the reporter quoted the
well-known biblical verse in which the onager appears, in the book of Job (39: 5):
“Who hath sent out the wild ass free?”<fnref n="79" /> The rhetorical question conveys God’s
pride in this wild beast he created. Next, farmers told stories of trying to stop the
onager from entering the agricultural lands, but without success, because of their
great strength. One of the farmers told of his first encounter with an onager, how
he tried to send it away using a broomstick, and how the onager simply broke it.
Another farmer explained that he tried installing all possible types of fences,
including an electric one, but no fence could stop the onagers. The farmers also

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ The political ecologist, Miri Lavi-Neeman, referred to these aspects in her lecture at a conference of the Arava Institute, held in Mitzpe Ramon on October 28, 2021.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Ben-Dor Derimian, *From the Conquest of the Desert to Sustainable Development*.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸See the reportage on the *Mako* website, accessed June 22, 2023, https://www.mako.co.il/news-channel2/Friday-Newscast-2019_q3/Article-a3ce72e2253ec61026.htm.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ “Job 39:5, King James Version,” *Bible Gateway*, accessed June 22, 2023, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2039%3A5&version=KJV.</footnote>
pointed out the danger of the encounters with these animals on the roads. In an
article published on April 2021 in the newsletter of the kibbutzim and moshavim
portal,<fnref n="80" /> the reporter quotes one of these farmers, who complains about car
accidents that caused serious damage to both humans and animals. He recounts
his personal experience and emphasizes the helplessness he felt as a result of this
inevitable encounter with this wild and fast beast.

Still, despite the damage this animal has inflicted on farmers, they marvel at its
strength and might. Overall, although it causes economic damage to the farmland,
it encourages tourism to the area through the reinforcement of the authentic
wildlife area's ethos, which brands the area as a unique place for desert tourism.
Yigal Mosko's television's reportage of, "Onager, man," intensifies the image of a
wild area while comparing it to the nature reserves of Africa. The reporter invites
the public to take advantage of the comfortable access to this national 'safari, '
within a driving distance from home, as the title of the reportage states: "This is
not Africa, this is here in the Negev" (in Hebrew: "Zeh lo' Afriqah, zeh ka'n ba-
Negev"). At the same time, the reportage pretty quickly moves to show the
complaints of the farmers and those of the Bedouins. In this respect, human-
animal relations create a possibility of cooperation between different social groups
to establish a local identity that will suit different groups of inhabitants. This is so
because, alongside this frame story of rewilding animals, images and
representations of the region emerge, and with them the attempt to influence its
identity and the perception of who belongs there. Since the region is identified
with the Nature category, within the dichotomy between Nature and Culture, the
debate is ultimately related to human categorical thinking that following
contemporary ideologies establishes what is included in the category of Nature
("wild") in this region and what is excluded ("domestic"). In fact, the discourse
around the rewilding of the wild ass also contributes to the recategorization of
populations perceived as strongly related to nature, such as the farmers who
cultivate the land and the traditional nomadic Bedouins. In the latter's case, their
agricultural activity is considered by the INPA as interfering with the natural
ecosystem's stability. Thus, they are shifted towards the domestic category, while
their legitimacy to influence decisions related to the Nature category is reduced.

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Rezkin, “The Onagers Come.”</footnote>
It is interesting to mention INPA’s position on farmers in the area, as reported by Roi Chiki Arad in his article published in *Haaretz* in December 2017.<fnref n="81" /> This position is presented by Dr. Assaf Tzoar, the ecologist of the Southern District, who claims: “There is very little vegetation in the desert, and on the opposite, agriculture runs lots of water into the area, which becomes very green. Naturally, it will attract wildlife. The availability of food increases the number of animals, so more animals cause more harm.”<fnref n="82" />

By using this discourse, the INPA ecologist seems to place some of the blame for the uncontrolled reproduction of the onagers on the farmers who are violating the natural ecological balance. Nevertheless, he also claims that “we work with the farmers” to find a solution to minimize the damage. At the same time, it is harder to find solutions for Bedouin farmers. The redefinition of the region’s identity based on the onager as the ultimate animal symbol reflects the political struggle between the Bedouins and the institutions of the state. For the state’s institutions, the project of rewilding biblical animals is the perfect expression of the historical continuum of the ongoing Jewish presence in the area from the heroic period of the mythical biblical times. This expansion of the heroic biblical period is enhanced by the wild, powerful, liberated symbolism of the onager, which humans have failed to domesticate and subdue.

The policy of bringing biblical animals back into the landscape changes it, and at the same time connects Jews to their homeland and outlaws the practices of the Bedouins and the animals they own.<fnref n="83" /> Thus, the camel, the animal most identified with Bedouin culture and with wanderings in the desert, is not defined as a local animal by the INPA members. On the contrary, it is tagged as a domestic animal that was artificially imported into the Negev desert by the Arab population and harms the region’s ecosystem.<fnref n="84" /> In this struggle, one can see a symbolic attempt by the authorities to downplay the Bedouin’s share in the local identity and even exclude them from such an identity, by also strengthening the image of

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Arad, “Ha’im ha-pra’im”.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Irus Braverman, “Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel,” *PoLAR* 44, no. 1 (2021): 7-27.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Adalah’s News, “Adalah Demands Israel end its Discrimination against Bedouin and Camel Herders,” *Adalah* (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel) website, last modified June 14, 2020, https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/10034.</footnote>
the Bedouins as law violators. This approach is reflected in the reportage of Yigal Mosko,<fnref n="85" /> that addresses this perception and the fact that the Bedouins were recently fined for keeping camels in the Negev. The Bedouin's representative in the reportage, who owns a tourist campsite in the region, resents this and claims that the Bedouin himself is part of nature and that the authorities have forgotten that. He accuses the authorities of not taking care of the proper balance of nature and not bringing alongside the onagers a predator that could prey on it and dilute its spread. By using this discourse, it seems that he is trying to elevate back the status of the Bedouins to people who are closer to nature and know better how to maintain the ecological balance there. The shared opposition of Jewish and Bedouin farmers to the uncontrolled breeding of the onagers in the area creates a common identity for them, of locals who know their environment better than foreign elements who do not respect the place and do not consider the needs of the local population.

Despite the ambivalent relationship between humans and animals in this debate, conflicting opinions on the subject in the name of different interests, and a sense of hopelessness, it is precisely this debate that generates renewed attention to the area containing such exotic animals. The public discourse on the subject reinforces the perception of the desert as a place where one can still be impressed by wild nature, and where authentic close-to-nature Jewish and Bedouin inhabitants have local knowledge of the region and collaborate to reconstruct their local identity.

## Conclusion: Links between the Domestic Donkey's and the Wild Ass' Representations

In the existing literature on relations between the periphery and the center, the periphery is often referred to as one piece. In this paper, we have shown, through an ecocritical approach, nuances in the characterization of identities and lifestyles in the periphery by reviewing the representation of human-animal relations. We have used different representations of animals and human-animal relations in literature and public discourse. These representations reflect the different

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Mosko, “Onager, Man.”</footnote>
reconstructions of local identity in different peripheral regions, on the continuum
between proximity to nature (“wild animal”) and distance from it (“domestic
animal”). The differences in images between the wild ass and the domestic donkey
represent the two sub-categories of the different identities that are being built in
the periphery.

On the one hand, in the far southern periphery, in the depths of the desert, the locals manage to overcome the transparent marginal image. They are constructing an image of a coveted place, with a powerful wildlife and brave inhabitants fighting for their place against and alongside biblical wild animals. On the other hand, Berdugo’s donkey is presented as a disciplined, non-fighting animal, suitable for life in the urban periphery, closer to the center, whose inhabitants are still struggling to define their identity and find their authentic voice. However, it is possible to recognize in this discourse the perception according to which the authentic and coveted desert image in the style of Mitzpe Ramon, could also permeate the urban periphery in the Ashkelon area and the development towns in the Negev. This tendency is expressed in Berdugo’s novel when the novel’s protagonist, Ruslan, imagines a different end for Donkey. According to this illusion, if he had acted like a wild animal and used his power to fight for his freedom, he would have survived:

> The donkey has power. If only it wished to use it with one of the stiff hooves at the bottom of its thin, athletic leg [...] things would be different. And he wished he could see this all, [...] and also how Donkey goes then, leaves, jumps with a donkey's speed, imitates the skips of an Israeli deer and hurries on the road, vanishes in the field, disappears into his life and ... all of these things Donkey did not do, because he did not kick.<fnref n="86" />

This description fits the message that emerges from the plot of Ruslan’s own search for authenticity and vitality. Throughout the article, we saw how both in the novel and the journalistic texts, the symbolism of the human-animal relations illustrates the social status of the inhabitants and even paves the way for a

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 78.</footnote>
pronunciation of knowledge coming from the south that permits social change
and a solid local identity.

**Ilanit Ben Dor Derimian** is associate professor at the Israel and Jewish Studies Department and a member of the Research Center of Foreign Cultures, Languages and Literatures (CECILLE, ULR 4074), at the University of Lille, France. She specializes in Israeli and Jewish culture and history, particularly in Center-Periphery relations, desert representation, spatial identity reconstruction, ecocriticism, discourse analysis and social activism. Her recently published book deals with the representation of the Negev in the public discourse in Israel (From the Conquest of the Desert to Sustainable Development, Lit-Verlag, 2021). Among her publications: "Les femmes activistes et leur contribution à la reconstruction de l'identité spatiale de la périphérie," in *Femmes engagées au cœur de l'action: Espace euro-méditerranéen: Mise en récit(s), mise en image(s)* (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2021) and "Food activism dans la périphérie au sud d'Israël" (Arabia, janvier 2020).

**Keywords:** Hebrew literature, Ecocriticism, Social change, Center-Periphery, Middle East, Israel

**How to quote this article:**

Ilanit Ben Dor Derimian, “The Expression of Israeli Southern Periphery’s Voices Through the Symbolism of Domestic versus Wild Animal,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13908
# Man, Interrupted: Abjection, Animality and Agency
## in Donkey by Sami Berdugo

by Riki Traum

## Abstract

Donkey's presence is an essential characteristic of the Israeli Palestinian landscape. This essay addresses the donkey as an agent of a subjectivity that has been denied by the Israeli establishment, through a reading of Sami Berdugo's novel, Donkey (2019). The essay examines the political functionality and biopolitical significance of the donkey as a metaphor, companion, and scapegoat. I argue that Berdugo portrays the donkey as the agency that enables a transition from object/other to subject. This subjectivity is built on human/animal continuity and fluidity; in his novel, Berdugo collapses the boundaries between his protagonist and Donkey and renders what in life resists power, domination, and eventually the different forms of death. The essay analyzes the alternative sociopolitical matrix that Berdugo portrays in which animality mobilizes a change; it also examines Berdugo's literary strategy of "interrupting" the hegemonic cultural tyranny that has established, for years, rigid boundaries between humans and animals and by that denies freedom. Berdugo challenges "accepted" categories such as heteronormative sexuality, masculinity, and standard Hebrew through abjection and perversion; he "interrupts" and teases out the tyrannies of sexual and gender normativity by questioning and queering heteronormativity. Challenging the "accepted" and revealing its under-the-surface wounded matrix, is a literary concern that Berdugo has had for a long time; however, in Donkey he criticizes the Israeli tragic biopolitical condition, and he also challenges the narrator's traditional stance. The essay discusses ecological and biopolitical issues that reveal the tragedy of both humans and donkeys in Israel, and particularly in the southern periphery. Reading the Israeli reality through the human-cum-donkey prism renders the neglected peripheries as an alternative Israeli existence, which forms the sociopolitical subtext of Berdugo's novel. It is here, in the periphery of mental and material poverty, that Berdugo insists on the very idea of life.
# Introduction

## Part I

**“Life Doesn't Keep Its Promise”: The Tragic Life and Death of Human-Donkeys**

*Ecological Tensions: The Force of Life*

*Donkey as Agent*

## Part II

**Naked, Limp, and Perverse: The Abject as Interruption**

*Masculinity, Interrupted*

*Hebrew, Interrupted*

*Conclusion: Canon, Interrupted*

# Introduction

> “And if there were not the donkey to keep Abraham company it would be infernal. But there is the donkey. The animal [...] who puts a limit on abandonment.”<fnref n="1" />

Donkeys physically and metaphorically traverse the Israeli Palestinian landscape. In Hebrew and Israeli literature, the donkey is often Othered;<fnref n="2" /> in some cases, the

<footnote n="1">¹ Hélène Cixous, “Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey,” in *Stigmata*, Hélène Cixous (London-New York: Routledge, 1998), 115-125, 118.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Palestinian artists tend to anthropomorphize the donkey. See for example Mahmud Darwish in Simon Bitton and Elias Sanbar, dir., *Mahmud Darwish: As the Land in Language* (France, 1997),</footnote>
donkey is depicted as a contemptible animal, whose inferiority maintains the human/animal distinction and through that the binary oppositions of inferiority/superiority, abuser/abused, mindfulness/mindlessness, as well as binary heteronormative ideals of masculinity/femininity.³ The donkey is a trope that carries sociocultural perceptions, and at the same time, it is a beast that is denied a proper sociocultural space. In these representations, the donkey exemplifies a tragic and ongoing codependency between human and animals, one that has engendered a humanist approach that anthropomorphizes the donkey's suffering, and a non-humanist approach that uses the donkey as a strategy of othering and dehumanizing individuals by likening them to donkeys. Since the prevailing tendency among both humanists (who anthropomorphize the donkey) and non-humanists (who animalize people) is to avoid any critical study of the politicality of the donkey that represents, perhaps more than any other animal, Israel's conflictual sociopolitical matrix, it is this politicality that concerns me the most, and that has given rise to this essay. This is my first objective: to decipher

documentary; Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, “The Good Donkey”, *The Common* 21 (Amherst, MA: Amherst College, 2021), accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.thecommononline.org/the-good-donkey/; Mahmoud Shukair, *Me, My Friend, and the Donkey*, trans. by Anam Zafar (Ramallah: Tamer Institute for Community Education, 2016). An exception case is Emile Habiby, *The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist*, trans. by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2003). I will return to this work in my conclusion where I draw a poetic, aesthetic, and political comparison between Habiby’s book and Berdugo’s *Donkey*.

³ In his letter of October 1, 1906, David Ben-Gurion wrote to his father in Pinsk about the emerging Hebrew culture and its national revival: the Hebrew signs in every shop, the Hebrew speech in the streets [...] Here is a young Hebrew boy galloping a fast horse with confidence, a Hebrew girl is riding a donkey. In Yaacov Shavit and Jehuda Reinharz, *The Donkey; A Cultural History: A Journey through Myth, Allegory, Symbol and Cliché* [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2014), 153. I refer here, however, to writers who used the trope of the donkey to contend with or avoid the political significance of the animal or present it as a kind pet. Examples are Leah Goldberg, “The Donkey,” in *What Do the Does Do* [Hebrew] (Sifriyat Poalim: Ankorim, 1949); Eliezer Steinbarg and Hamor-Hamoratayim *Project Ben-Yehuda* [Yiddish], trans. by Hanania Raichman (1954), accessed June 5, 2023, https://benyehuda.org/read/16314; Gershon Shofman and Braying Donkey, *Project Ben-Yehuda* [Hebrew] (1960), accessed June 5, 2023, https://benyehuda.org/read/35902. Exceptions might be S. Yizhar, Miri’s Metamorphosis, in *Davar for Children*, ed. Yitzhak Yatziv (Tel Aviv: 1947), 26-27; Yosl Birshteyn, *Between the Olive Trees* (1954), trans. Adi Mahalel, accessed June 5, 2023, https://iberzets.org/arttranslation/%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9F%D7%90%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%98%D7%9F/. An interesting critical stance regarding the donkey is presented in a short film by Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret, dir. *And What about Me* (Israel: Israeli Cinematheque, 2012.).
and foreground the political functionality of the donkey through a reading of Sami Berdugo's groundbreaking novel, *Donkey* (2019),<fnref n="4" /> for which he received in 2020 Israel's two most prestigious literary awards: the Sapir Prize and the Brenner Prize. As a point of departure, my essay examines Berdugo's major practices of first reframing the Israeli sociopolitical matrix by shifting the focus onto its environmental issues that narrate the biopolitical tragedy of both humans and donkeys. Second, he portrays the donkey as an agent of a new subjectivity; the donkey turns the status of the protagonist into that of a subject. I read Berdugo's novel as a striking foregrounding of a human-cum-donkey subjectivity that rewrites the Israeli southern periphery. In that sense, *Donkey* both aligns with and deviates from Berdugo voluminous body of work that includes collections of short stories and the seminal novels, *And Say to the Wind* (2002), *That Is to Say* (2010), *Land upon an Ongoing Tale* (2014), *Because Guy* (2017), and *All Five of Us* (2022). While Berdugo is interested in the mental-cum-physical exposure of his characters, one should note the proximity of his often painful and repulsive exposure to carnal and sexual pleasure.<fnref n="5" /> In his work, suggestive sexuality and ill bodily conditions not only correspond to the mental climate of the plot, but they are also anchored in the author's relationships with the troubling contemporality of the state of Israel and its social-peripheral agony. In *Donkey*, however, the animal's presence reveals a biopolitical aspect of Berdugo's tormenting relationship with Israeli society, *one that must be released through animality to counter the inherent binaries that the national ethos (like any other national ethos) aims at perpetually recreating*. This binary system sets ontological boundaries between human/animal, but also (perhaps mainly) between the Self or the individual realm and what happens “outside” of this individual realm, a virtual-cum-palpable zone that Hannah Arendt calls “the world” or “the public space.”<fnref n="6" /> In *Donkey*, Berdugo teases the

<footnote n="4">⁴ Sami Berdugo, *Hamor (Donkey)* (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2019). All (English) translations from Hebrew are by the author, unless stated otherwise.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Hanna Soker-Schwager, “His Breaths in the Flesh of Words: Bodily and Linguistic Spares in *Because Guy* and *And Say to the Wind* by Sami Berdugo,” in *Spare Thoughts: Superfluity in Hebrew Literature 1907-2017* [Hebrew], ed. Soker-Schwager (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press), 342-394, 342.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Miguel Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” *Revista De Ciencia Politica* 26, no. 2 (2006): 137-159, 146. Arendt’s conceptualization of animality both informs and inspires my writing on Berdugo. The preservation of animality in men is a political interest that allows</footnote>
power to deny life to the point of animality; he presents a protagonist whose allegedly (insignificant) life becomes meaningful (or full of life) because of his donkey. The protagonist whose relationship with his donkey evolves around intimate arousal and disgust, condescension and submissiveness, is inevitably doomed to become his donkey, to share his virtual-cum-palpable piece-of-life with the animal. It is also through donkey, however, that Berdugo identifies that what resists this domination in life also resists death. If donkeys' life and thus human-donkeys' life are the target of political power and domination, then these human-donkeys “must be capable of becoming the subject [...] of resistance to domination.”<fnref n="7" /> I rely here on an approach whose “indistinction” is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, and Matthew Calarco,<fnref n="8" /> all of whom question the ways in which the human/animal continuities are portrayed “as running unidirectionally from human to animal—why aren’t continuities sought in the other direction?”<fnref n="9" /> In this regard, I am inspired by Agamben who,

Instead of reinforcing traditional human/animal distinctions or searching for new versions of the anthropological difference, [...] argues that we should aim to stop this machine and try to think more carefully about the *indistinction* of human and animal life [...] What kind of politics might emerge beyond the exclusion of human animality and the biopolitical shaping of “proper” humanity? What practices might correspond to a life

<footnote>domination, according to Arendt. See Hannah Arendt, *The Life of the Mind* (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1978).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Gilles Deleuze, *What is Philosophy?*, trans. Daniel W. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Deleuze, *Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation*, trans. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Donna Haraway, *The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness* (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, *The Open: Man and Animal*, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Rosi Braidotti, *The Posthuman* (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Matthew Calarco, *Thinking Through Animals* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Calarco, *Thinking Through Animals*, 50.</footnote>
in which “human” and “animal” are no longer sharply delimited and
separated?<fnref n="10" />

I suggest reading Berdugo’s literary practice as a set of “interruptions”<fnref n="11" /> to the hegemonic cultural tyranny: Berdugo breaks what he calls, “the as-accepted”<fnref n="12" /> that is also of a biopolitical nature. By interruptions I refer to Berdugo’s authorship, but also to the struggle that his protagonist is situated in, between the desire to overcome normativity (or to “interrupt” it) and at the same time, to engage with it.

How, then, Berdugo does this in *Donkey*? The protagonist and his donkey continuously negotiate with and respond to environmental challenges; environmental precarities and considerations underlie the novel and rewrite the social matrix of the southern periphery. In the first part of my essay, I outline the novel's reframing of the Israeli sociopolitical matrix through an alternative one in which the donkey is the agent of change. Out of the peripheral mental and material poverty and through the donkey, Berdugo extracts life. To better understand the type of social matrix that Berdugo shapes, his plot should be conceived as one that is “interrupted,” through which the passive object of domination (and death) wrestles the active subject of freedom (and life).<fnref n="13" /> In the second part, I analyze the novel’s set of “interruptions”; *Donkey* shows how these “interruptions” in fact constitute the (tragic) Israeli “biopolitical condition.” With Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection as my lens,<fnref n="14" /> I will examine Berdugo’s use of abjection to “interrupt” Israeli identity through its animalization. I then show how Berdugo

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Ibid., 54. Agamben uses the anthropological machine to describe a (political) mechanism that fabricates, reproduces, maintains, and perpetuates the human/animal distinction.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ By interruptions I invoke Bonnie Honig’s critical practice in her alternative reading of *Antigone* by Sophocles. Honig writes, “As a social practice [...] interruption postulates both equality, as when two people interrupt each other to knit together a conversation in tandem, and inequality as one party must yield the floor, as it were, to the other.” Honig presents her reading as posing as an interruption [...] a hybrid that seeks agonistically to engage with prior operations of this powerful text [*Antigone*], and to overcome some of them see Bonnie Honig, *Antigone, Interrupted* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Berdugo, *Donkey*, 125.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Julia Kristeva, *Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection*, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).</footnote>
breaks codes of masculinity and heterosexuality, as extensions of the hegemonic
order. Finally, I explain how in *Donkey*, Berdugo “interrupts” standard speech—
in fact, the very act of speech itself—as part of the eco/biopolitical tensions that
the novel renders. Berdugo’s linguistic performance “interrupts” the linguistic
matrix of the novel, but it also undermines the type of political human-life that
denies this performance. In this context, the paratexts<fnref n="15" /> of the novel, including its
chapter-headings, linguistic registers, the interplay among Hebrew, Arabic, and
English, the epilogue, and even Berdugo’s interviews, are not only part of
Berdugo’s interruptive authorship, but they also support Berdugo’s focus on an
individual whose desire for life is easily dismissed.

Part I

“Life Doesn’t Keep Its Promise”: The Tragic Life and Death of Human-Donkeys

*Donkey* was inspired by the tragic death of a young worker in a construction site accident in Israel, something that is becoming increasingly common. Berdugo's protagonist (or anti-hero) is named after the dead worker, Roslan Isekov, an Azerbaijanian immigrant. Berdugo tells the story of one member of a much larger community whose life and death remain a phantom limb of the Israeli political body that Berdugo resents. What is intriguing in *Donkey* is the non-foundational metonymy of the donkey that constitutes a discursive economy of displacement and invisibility. Alternatively, it is the invisible donkey that “does not count,” who brings into focus invisible Israelis who, like the donkey, “do not count” and are being rapidly and constantly supplanted by the hegemonic force. The novel, set over eight days in 2018, develops around two axes. The main plot opens with the serendipitous encounter between the protagonist, 50-year-old Roslan Isekov and

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ By paratexts, Gerard Genette refers to material that lies on the threshold of the narrative. This includes chapter-headings, pictures, promotional material, interviews given by the author, dust jackets, preface, foreword and even other novels written by the author, which can influence our understanding of the narrative and hence, become part of the narrative. Divya Anand, "Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh's *The Hungry Tide*," *Concentric: Literature and Cultural Studies* 34, no. 1 (2008): 21-44, 22.</footnote>
Donkey. Two police officers ask him to take care of the abused animal
temporarily, but never return to reclaim it. The story follows the evolving
relationship between the two who are now in Roslan's house in Bat-Hadar, a
planned community in southern Israel. This axis follows Roslan's life after
quitting his job as a secretary in a local Committee of Planning and Building on
the shore of Ashkelon. Roslan's position exposes him to bureaucratic and
ecological issues of neglect that he projects on the life of the (peripheral) residents
in these areas: he “heard the voices of both women and men, for worse he heard
them, their anger, their complaints, their despair, the southern *hutzpah*, the
prostitution of their vocality that reached him not because of its loosened, worn,
slaughtered nature, but because of it being simply a prostitute, forced to be
penetrated, used, lacking singularity, dismissive, and oppressed, that doesn't feel
her own pain anymore.”<fnref n="16" /> Roslan meets the donkey at a point in his life when he
has lost his passion to live and his hope in human existence, a hope that even his
affair with his Jewish-American lover, Steve Silberman, cannot not salvage. The
second axis recounts the events of one day in 1994, when 26-year-old Roslan, a
student of practical engineering, the only child of Olga and Arthur from Kiryat
Yam, decides to move away for no apparent reason. This axis focuses on Roslan's
grim childhood in Kiryat Yam, and the existential struggle of his impoverished
immigrant parents to survive. The Azerbaijanian community too exists in poverty,
rage, and neglect that ties it to the southern settlement in which Roslan lives with
his donkey years later. That wintry day of 1994, when Roslan leaves home, ends in
tragedy as his waiting parents fall asleep and the spiral heater in their living room
sets their small apartment on fire. Roslan, by then on his way to the old Central
Station in Tel Aviv, does not know about their deaths, and attempts to live his life-
“in spite of it all,” almost in Y. H. Brenner's spirit. But in a way, the story begins
on that day in 1994—in the past that insists upon remaining the present—when
Roslan simply “continues” to live, until his encounter with the donkey, when he
takes ownership of the animal, conquers the dichotomy between the two of them,
and in so doing takes ownership of himself.

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 89.</footnote>
Ecological Tensions: The Force of Life

Berdugo surgically focuses on what the environmentalist critic, Lawrence Buell defines as “refractions of physical environments and human interactions with those environments.”<fnref n="17" /> Clashes between the characters in the novel and their environment are presented already through the troubled domestic life of Roslan parents in Kiryat Yam. The sub-narrative foregrounds Roslan’s parents in 1994, also appears under the laconic meta-title of “Transition” (to mark the transition to the past), and emphasizes the father’s severe cold and coughing, while failing to keep the cold winds out of their apartment:

> Cooold... very. The wintry weather broke through with no preparation to its beginning, which is usually milder. On Ben-Zvi Boulevard, the first floor of building 29, Entrance C, in Isekov's apartment, they try to ram the coldness. The pane of the big window in the living room is closed almost entirely, not hermetically. Earlier, just before 4p.m., Arthur dragged it in its old track, with the little energy that was left he brought the heavy glass to its possible edge and trapped it with its plastic lock that still left some narrow open space to the outside, where he held his hand for a moment to check the movement of the penetrative wind, a dead movement, and then he pulled the curtain on top of everything—100% of high quality polyester fabric in the color purple—he hoped that the house will get warmer like that, or that the coldness won't increase, and most of all, Arthur wished quietly in his heart to finally recover from the flu that fell on him.<fnref n="18" />

Arthur's struggle to protect his home and family underpins the narrative of these sections, a struggle that highlights the thin-walled apartment and thus the permeable and vulnerable existence of the family in the north. The hardworking family, whose dull routine could easily have been typical of the daily life of many immigrants, suffers from the "invasion" of a bad wind, that takes over the apartment and threatens the father's frail health. Even though the real threat is

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Lawrence Buell, *The Future of Environmental Criticism* (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 30.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 45.</footnote>
preconditioned, a threat that comes “from the house and the family,”<fnref n="19" /> the ecological drama marks the impossible triumph and the parents’ inevitable fate. Immigrant parents are never safe, even “the heart of their home is not caged properly, a conspiring chill invades it silently, trembled mainly the strong and covered arms of Arthur who carries a severe flu.”<fnref n="20" /> The caged apartment is a charged metaphor that underlines not only the apartment’s bad condition but also the status of the (parents) immigrants: put in cages as a human (animal-like?)—threat that menaces the existing “civilized” life that the state has established; it is the ‘everlasting temporality’ shared by many immigrants in Israel. Added to this preconditioned exposure, Arthur’s illness suggests a physical vulnerability that accentuates the family’s alienation (and the father’s alienation as the head of the family): his body struggles with the virus while being defeated by the wind. In the meantime, Olga, the mother, is “passively absorbing the future of the temperature.”<fnref n="21" /> This tension between passivity and struggle characterizes Roslan’s lonely youth that is marked by the lack of agency that makes change possible. Indeed, Olga and Arthur die in their sleep, while their small apartment burns. Berdugo’s choice of fire as their cause of death is ecologically intriguing: the fire is domestic and private, a result of a malfunctioning heater. If the dramatic weather had previously defeated the family from the outside, it is the domestic fire that kills them from the inside. The fire becomes a biopolitical trope that represents the politics of death in the story the inevitable “thanatopolitics.”<fnref n="22" /> The ecological drama, however, accompanies Roslan throughout the novel: during his escape to Tel Aviv, for instance, as he recognizes “a storm on the shoreline and serenity in the middle of the sea, and everything is simultaneous in one unified organism.”<fnref n="23" /> Amazed by this vision, he wonders, “is this nature?” and replies immediately, “no, this is probably life.”<fnref n="24" /> Through the “unified organism,” Berdugo flattens topographic differences and distills a sense of life, a concept that he insists on throughout the novel; Roslan recognizes the inseparability of life and nature and

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Ibid., 53.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Ibid., 94.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid., 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 186.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Ibid.</footnote>