Between Babylon and Zion: The Conception of Home in Eli Amir's The Dove Flyer and Scapegoat Open Access
Faber, Sara Ruth (2013)
Abstract
In the early 1950s, shortly after the creation of the State of Israel, nearly the entire Iraqi Jewish community emigrated from Iraq to Israel. There they were forced to assimilate to the Israeli identity and suppress their original Mizrahi identity. As a teenager, the novelist Eli Amir was a part of this immigration. His first two novels, The Dove Flyer (1992) and Scapegoat (1984), focus on the story of the emigration from Iraq (The Dove Flyer) and subsequent assimilation into Israeli society (Scapegoat). Each narrative is located in a different place--The Dove Flyer primarily in Baghdad, and Scapegoat in Israel--and each negates the view of that place as home. Because the Iraqi Jews are marginalized as a minority in both places, neither place is a true home to the novels' protagonists. The only home left to them is one that is imagined.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Eli Amir and the Youth Aliyah 3
Comparative Scholarship 7
PART ONE: The Historical and Sociological Contextualization of The Dove Flyer and Scapegoat
Chapter 1. The History of Iraqi Jewry 13
The Biblical Period 13
The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud 16
The Islamic Arab Period 17
The Ottoman Period 19
The British Mandate Period 22
The Kingdom of Iraq 24
The Mass Emigration of Iraqi Jewry 28
Chapter 2. Identity Politics of the Mizrahim in Israel 32
The Rise of the Zionist Movement 32
The Myth of the Sabra 34
The Israeli Melting Pot and Its Implications for Mizrahi Immigrants 36
The Discriminatory Attitude towards the Mizrahim 40
The Reclamation of the Mizrahi Identity 43
PART TWO: Literary Analyses
Chapter 3. The Dialectical Conception of Home in The Dove Flyer 47
The Multiperspectival Conception of Home in the Iraqi Jewish Community 50
Um Kabi: The Religious Perspective 52
Salim Effendi: The Communist Perspective 55
Abu Kabi and Hizkel: The Zionist Perspective 58
Kabi's Dialectical Conception of Home 62
Transitioning from Baghdad to the Ma'abarot: The End of Iraqi Jewry 72
Chapter 4. The Dual Conflicts of Identity and Home in Scapegoat 76
The Other Iraqis 79
The Kibbutzniks 87
Nuri's Own Complicated Process of Assimilation 93
Nuri's Confused Identity and Ambiguous Conception of Home 98
Conclusion: The Imaginary Space of Home 103
Works Cited 109
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