When Honi the Circle Maker meets Icarus

Periphery and Center in Y.H. Brenner’s In Winter and Shimon Adaf’s novel The Buried Heart

Abstract

Shimon Adaf, one of Israel’s most outstanding and prominent young artists, has established in his writing a fascinating poetic strategy that I call “self-creation of the center from within the periphery”. The essence of this strategy, which is shared by other artists from the geo-socio-cultural periphery of Israel, is a seemingly voluntary gathering at the cultural margins into which they were forced in a move of demonstrative cultural insularity and out of which they break into the “cultural center,” the most highly regarded cultural scene, from which they had been excluded. This poetic approach is reminiscent, in its aims and its literary strategies, of the poetic approach of Y.H. Brenner, especially in the openness of his novellas and novels. However, there is also a noticeable difference between the two concerning their different attitudes towards the “ghosts” of the holy Hebrew tongue, which is supposedly dead. Brenner expelled, or at least attempted to expel, the ghosts from the Hebrew language. Adaf, by contrast, tries to bring them back.