288 Yael S. Feldman
Lamdan identifi ed, then, not with the biblical aqedah but rather with the
Jewish postbiblical portrayals of his namesake. Volunteering for his own
immolation, his Isaac is ready for the possibility that the biblical “rescue”
is not applicable in the here and now. We should not be surprised, then,
that the midrashic intertext soon fully materializes: in the poem “On the
Altar,” for example, a martyric postbiblical gesture is replicated in the self-
sacrifi ce of contemporary Isaacs:
Here we are all bound, bringing the wood with our own hands
Without inquiring whether our off ering [qorban olah] is accepted!....................................
Let us then silently stretch our neck on the altar. 21
Similar aqedah dialectics later animated the ironic representation of
the Second Aliya pioneers (those who came to Palestine before World War
I) in the work of S. Y. Agnon, Israel’s Nobel Laureate. One source of the
ironic treatment of Yitzhak Kumer, the hard-to-pin-down protagonist of
Agnon’s monumental 1946 novel Only Yesterday, may have been the gaping
distance between the two opposing senses (and two dichotomous “econo-
mies”) of the aqedah that claimed the author’s attention at the time: the he-
roic willing self-sacrifi ce (qorban) of the pioneers of his youth in the “Land
of Isaac,” as I call it, and the tragic victims (qorbanot) of the Holocaust,
the victimization of European Jewry that was taking place when he was
completing this novel.22 It should be noted, however, that this dialectics is
in evidence already in his 1939 novel A Guest for the Night, oft en mistak-
enly read as a “Holocaust” novel. Here the issue comes up in a dispute be-
tween the pious Rabbi Shlomo and his heretical son Daniel Bach: the latter
is willing to accept the martyrdom practiced by Jews throughout history
(qiddush hashem) but not his own generation’s victimization during World
War I and its aft ermath, described by him as “daily, even hourly binding
[aqedot] on seven altars.”23
Agnon’s “Isaacs,” both exilic and “in the land,” were soon followed, how-
ever, by a diff erent brand of literary willing Isaacs. Populating Israeli lit-
erature of the 1940s and 1950s, these new Isaacs naturally represented the
sacrifi ces made by the young in the War of Independence. By then, how-
ever, the contemporary writers qua Isaacs were not orphaned anymore.
Th eir “Abrahams” were right there, available to be typecast in the unsa-
vory role of the one commanding the sacrifi ce. Beginning with Yigal Mos-
sinsohn’s emblematic 1949 play In the Negev Plains, Isaac was still a willing