Emblems of Diasporic (Re)turns: Introduction

In the thick corm of causal, contingent, and incidental memories that animate Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous (םירבד ןורכז), one finds his older characters reverting to their previous, diasporic spaces. Regina, who lost her husband (“one of the happiest days of her life,” the all-knowing narrator comments), reverts to her Polish name, Stefana, and turns “her back on forty-five years of living in Eretz Yisrael.” She recedes to the days of her youth in “a Poland which she re-created in her imagination.” “Proudly and punctiliously observing certain airs and graces, dressed in splendid clothes,” she begins to speak “Polish almost exclusively and reading only Polish books and newspapers and behaving as if she lived in Poland.” Having detached herself from the “stream of time” Stefana sinks into a “wintry silence and an obscure happiness,” uttering only a few necessary sentences, and usually in Polish. And when alone, she would “sing to herself one of the Polish songs she used to sing to Naomi and Goldman when they were children.” Stefana’s mother-in-law, too, we are told in another stream of recollections, was always “ready to pack up and return to Poland.” But she had nevertheless succeeded in “scrupulously observing the laws of God, and even in imposing certain customs on her sons...and she went on praying in a secret language whose words, which were printed in very black letters in the old prayer book, she tore to shreds and mutilated with an easy heart, in complete indifference, to the sorrow of her husband.” In another torrent of memories, Klara, Caesar’s grandmother, becomes disillusioned with her love of Zion: