״What Has Never Really Been Forgotten״

Language and Ethnicity in Shimon Adaf's Mox Nox

Abstract

In his 2012 novel Mox Nox, Shimon Adaf writes the father figure as a constitutive and ominous embodiment of the act of reading; his language, the holy tongue, is tied with godliness. With time, with the ebbing of his father's speech, and with his own new knowledge of Latin, the writer is able to finally speak of the father. However, deciphering the father necessitates moving through him, through Hebrew, through holiness. The following essay attempts to read the father as a unique lingual key. Yet as in Adaf's other books, reading is performed through a sole interpretive key: the no-key. The role of language in the novel is revealed to be an obstacle, a gate into a wormhole containing only lingual feedbacks.