292 Yael S. Feldman
and European-Freudian psychological systems; essayist/author Shulamith
Hareven, who in the 1970s coined the term “Th e Isaac Generation” in her
attempt to talk that very peer group out of their “aqedah fi xation”; and art-
ist Shoshana Heimann, who in 1975 pioneered a diff erent, one could say
“maternal,” mode of aqedah painting, in which the angel was feminized
rather than excluded.35
Since the 1980s, however, the Israeli picture has considerably changed:
women’s voices, previously few and far between, have been slowly enter-
ing the national conversation over sacrifi ce and its biblical tropes. Unsur-
prisingly, their interventions take many shapes. While many undertake the
maternal role placed on them by nature and tradition, as either mourning
or protesting mothers, others imagine stepping in the place of Abraham,
only to critique and challenge him. Few cross the gender lines so that they
can stand “in the place” of Isaac. Still fewer challenge in principle the ne-
cessity for a cross-cultural urtext that apparently has established fi licide
(n.b.: not ritual sacrifi ce) as the cornerstone of all monotheistic traditions
(Freudianism not excluded) or the need for self-sacrifi ce, by either male or
female protagonists.36
It is this range of female voices that is of interest here. Two contempo-
rary variations on the aqedah may illustrate how broad the range of wom-
en’s positions on this issue can be. Th ese variations made their way into two
very diff erent works of fi ction by two quite diverse female authors of the
1990s: the young author Orly Castel-Bloom (1960 – ), then Israel’s new liter-
ary bête noire, and the seasoned author Shulamith Hareven (1930 – 2003),
then at the height of her career as a writer and cultural commentator.
As if answering the 1980s’ poetic chorus of mourning mothers, in Dolly
City,37 a bold postmodernist dystopia, Castel-Bloom used a mother to de-
construct the aqedah alongside other foundational Zionist utopias. In her
rewriting, however, the major Jewish/Israeli paradigm is entrusted to the
hands of a mother who is no less a “compulsive normative ritualist” and no
less a “manic” performer of her share of the ancient rite than were earlier
paternal enactors of sacrifi ce in the work of male writers — such as novelists
A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz and scholar Shlomo Shoham.38 Moreover,
in contrast to feminist expectations, the maternal as fashioned by Castel-
Bloom does not off er any mending of the defi cient paternity exemplifi ed by
both old and modern rewritings of the aqedah and other fi licidal narratives.
On the contrary, in the Kafk aesque parody produced by Castel-Bloom, it is
precisely due to excessive and obsessive maternal care that a male infant
ends up on the operation table, cut to small pieces in a monstrous eff ort to