290 Yael S. Feldman
of that group of budding writers of the 1960s, and their penchant for
Freudianism is well known by now. Much attention has been lavished in
particular on Yehoshua’s special blending of the aqedah with the oedipal
confl ict, which peaked in his 1990 masterful novel Mr. Mani.28 Rather than
repeating here my analysis of his lifelong oedipalization of the aqedah,29 I
will briefl y demonstrate the new turn of the 1960s by two less-known prose
narratives of the time. In Th e Battle, a 1966 fi rst novel by the kibbutz na-
tive Yariv Ben-Aharon, the reader is invited to enter, through long interior
monologues (cf. Yizhar), the “mad ideas” of the young protagonist, Moshe.
Th ese ideas turn Moshe’s feelings of fi lial inadequacy into manifest wishes
for violence and patricide. Yet through historical contextualization — the
son’s fi rst baptism by fi re in the Sinai Campaign — the novel turns this psy-
chological complex into a psycho-political argument that falls back on the
familiar trope we are following here: “Isn’t the way of the world that a son
buries his father? . . . Don’t then the fathers bind and sacrifi ce their sons on
the altar of war as if they attempt to escape their own sentence? Shouldn’t
the father die for his own ideas? Is it my duty to bury him before he buries
me? Namely, before his ideas are materialized?”
Needless to say, Moshe does not murder his father.30 Possibly following
Gideon, Oz’s young kibbutz protagonist from his popular story “Th e Way
of the Wind,”31 he ultimately directs his aggression against himself. Was
the kibbutz environment too oppressive, rendering its young authors un-
able to imagine any way out for Oedipus/Isaac except through suicide/self-
immolation? Is this why Yehoshua was alone in managing to orchestrate,
in Th ree Daysand a Child and beyond, a last-minute rescue for his nov-
elistic sons?32 And is this why he was the one to openly lead a “vendetta”
against the aqedah, illustrating in his masterful 1990 novel Mr. Mani how
one should paradoxically “undo the aqedah by acting it out ”? Was this the
reason for his insistence that we must try to extinguish the mesmerizing
magic of this story, because one can never be sure that “the knife will con-
tinue hovering in midair and not strike home instead”?33
A diff erent weaving together of Freudian and biblical motifs took place
in Amos Oz’s tale “Wild Man,” also published in 1966. Since I have ana-
lyzed this story extensively elsewhere,34 I only use it here as a transition
to my second focus in this chapter: the representation of women and their
participation in the aqedah debate. Indeed, this little-remembered story is
unique on several counts. It off ers a glimpse into an unfamiliar chapter of
ecumenical, intercultural, cross-millennial transmission of cultural tropes,
exposing the universal implications of the Jewish-Israeli story unraveled