On the Construction of National Symbol in S. Y. Abramovitsh's Susati

Abstract:This paper focuses on the way national symbol is constructed in the Hebrew novel Susati, which was written as a national allegory at around the turn of the twentieth century. The paper sheds new light on the Jewishness of the chosen aesthetic representation. The paper argues that Abramovitsh's symbolic method accentuates a new understanding of Jewish national existence that is represented through the behavioral constructions that develop between the novel's human protagonist and the animal protagonist—the mare—as well as between these two and the devil. This elaborate and complicated literary representation mirrors the chaotic reality experienced by many Jews in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe.