294 Yael S. Feldman
her 1962 book Wo m a n’s Ve r s e, its bold critique confl ates Cain, Abraham,
and a contemporary Sarah, thus anticipating by some three decades Castel-
Bloom’s excessive Dolly, as well as a host of other challenges penned by
male authors since the late 1960s:
No ram was caught in the thicket
for me.
I bound
and slaughtered.
God had no respect unto me —
He laughed. 42My second example is Michal Govrin’s 1995 novel Th e Name .43 In this
intriguing novel, the author’s fi rst, it is a daughter, rather than a mother,
who challenges the traditionally cherished trope of religious and national
sacrifi ce/victim. She does this through a long odyssey in which she barely
overcomes her obsession with the family secret, the memory of the Shoah,
only to be allured by a no-less-obsessive, erotically charged orthodox ritual
of self-sacrifi ce. Govrin leads her protagonist, however, toward the ability
of saying no, of refusing the sanctifi ed giving up of life expected of her,
both as a Jew and as a woman.
Finally, I close with a fi ctional mother, recently imagined by a male au-
thor, David Grossman. In his haunting novel To the End of the Land,44 it is
the mother who both brings her son to the altar, so to speak (the army as-
sembly point before a military campaign), and runs away to the end of the
land in protest and in refusal to fulfi ll the Israeli maternal role of waiting
and mourning. She not only rejects biblical tropes of sacrifi ce in general,
mocking “parents and brothers and girlfriends, even grandparents, bring-
ing their loved ones to the seasonal operation, she thinks, a fi nal sale, a
young lad in every car, fi rst-fruit off ering [bikkurim], a spring carnival cli-
maxing in human sacrifi ce” (98), she also scorns herself, as a contemporary
Sarah, for participating in the aqedah proper: “And how about you, she tells
herself off , look at yourself, how politely and orderly you are bringing here
your almost-only son, the one you love terribly, and Ishmael drives you in
his taxicab” (ibid.; emphases added). Moreover, in my reading, her refusal
is targeted at the Christological Marian proposition as well. By fl eeing from
the (ostensibly good) tidings (borah.at mibesora, as in the Hebrew title),
she plays an anti-Mary role, rejecting the annunciation of the future sac-
rifi cial lamb. I guess it is not by accident that the author suggests, behind