House / Home: Introduction

Issue

 

I am sitting here now with my father’s eyes

and with my mother’s graying hair on my head

in a house that belonged to an Arab

who bought it from an Englishman

who took it from a German

who hewed it from the stones

of Jerusalem, my city

Yehuda Amichai[1]

the private house and the national home

Home is one of the most emotionally charged words and one of the most fundamental concepts of our thinking. English phrases such as “our home is our castle” and “there is no place like home” place the word along concepts such as security, safety, and warmth. Home is a place to calm down, to rest, and feel quiet and at ease. Home is love, as in Yehuda Halevi’s poem “מעון אהבתי (Dwelling of my love).” In an introduction to a lecture series in the Van Leer Institute devoted to “The Home of Philosophy: Home as a Metaphor in Thought,” Dr. Raef Zreik summarized some of the common uses of the concept: home is associated with belonging, a place where you do not need any introductions, translation, or mediation. Culturally (even if not for each of us individually), home is also the place that defies time — a place of longing and return — as if time is cyclical rather than linear and you can go back. Home has the illusion of being a static place, unlike the dynamic journey. Home, traditionally, was often connected to the feminine — the mother or wife who “creates a home feeling” and is there to wait for the male to come back, like Penelope, or, in another way, like the shchina, the Jewish female dwelling that derives from the root of Mishkan. These associations with the home also include the home’s failure or absence, the un-homely, the broken home, or — homelessness. It includes moments when the home stops being a metaphor for thinking or a vehicle for feeling and becomes a harsh reality.[2]

The list of ways we talk about home is long and overwhelming even if, as in this issue, we focus on a specific language or location. For this reason, we narrowed the volume to works in Hebrew that focus on Israeli houses and Israel/the land of Israel as home. We look at the ways cinematography, literature, and art think about the physical house and the national home. This is a politically charged topic, and the papers in this volume will touch on some of the challenges, including the Palestinian home/homeland and the controversies within Israel on the nature of the home. Two aspects of the use of the home that are important to explain ahead of reading the papers in this issue are that the Hebrew word Bayit means both house and home and that the first and second temples are called “first home” and “second home.” Once a year, Jews fast to mourn the “destruction of home” (Hurban Ha’bayit), alluding to the loss of the temples and the life around them. These are crucial for grasping the depth of the linguistic and cultural connection between physical buildings (houses) and abstract concepts (home) on both the individual and the communal level. It continued to modern times and intensified with the use of the word “home,” especially since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to refer to the land of Israel as a “national home for the Jewish people.”

It is almost impossible to speak today about home in Israeli cultural productions without implicitly or explicitly referring to the duality between the private home and the national home. Political parties name themselves “the Jewish home” or “Israel our home”; the national airline, El Al, has the word home in its slogan; and even the national cheese — cottage — has a home on its container, just to name a few examples.

The trope of the physical house as a crossroads between personal and national histories is quite common in Hebrew and Palestinian literatures. A short list of examples includes Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa, in which a Palestinian couple return to the home they left during the Nakba, and “An Apartment to Remember” by Ayman Sikseck in the reading of Barbara Mann.[3] Avot Yeshurun’s series of poems on renovating a house in Tel Aviv, which has been read as referring on some level to the Zionist project,[4] is a well-known example from Hebrew poetry. In prose, Eshkol Nevo’s novel Homesick looks at the inhabitants of a building, including those who left it. Another example is his later book Neuland, which questions the national project and describes the creation of a “new land,” a new Israeli community in South America. Buildings, apartments, and the physical space of the home substantiate the ties — both real and imagined, possible and impossible — between Israel and Europe. The 2023 book A House to Call Home: A Traveler Finds a Haven in North Portugal’s Lost Paradise by Igal Sarna describes the renovation of a house while he reflects on the shift from being in the “homeland” to returning to Europe. Rutu Modan, whose work Tunnels is unpacked so lovingly in this issue, earlier used restitution and the legality of the lost home as a means of uncovering a pre-Holocaust life in The Property (2013). Perhaps, in a different vein, we can also consider architect Jakub Szczesny’s Keret House in Warsaw, completed in 2012. This building, unofficially dubbed the world’s skinniest house, was assembled in a narrow crevice between existing buildings “on the spot where a bridge had linked the small ghetto to the larger one.” Legally too small to serve as a building, the structure is officially an art installation, with reality-skewing author Etgar Keret serving as its namesake and first resident. Everywhere one looks in the landscape of Hebrew literature, one can find examples of descriptions of building, dwelling, renovating, renting, and losing houses as a metonymy to the state of the national home.

While House/Home has seemingly been a less central theme in Israeli cinema, the work of Amos Gitai serves as a major exception. Filmed over almost three decades, Gitai’s House Trilogy is a series of documentaries about the Palestinians and Israelis who lived, owned, built, designed, and redesigned a residential house in Jerusalem — and also the archaeologists who explore the land surrounding the house and the people who live nearby or who walk in sight of Gitai’s camera. The films look at a history that spreads from before the establishment of Israel to 2005. The physical house grounds the exploration of the price of war and social and political upheavals, and it allows Gitai to include the voices of Palestinians from Israel, Palestinians from outside of Israel, Ashkenazi Jews, North African Jews, and others. The house is a junction point where the stories meet even if they don’t exactly “cross” or “converse.” Indeed, Gitai’s trilogy — and especially its first two films — inspired this issue. True to Bauhaus principles of centering on the materials, Gitai’s trilogy opens with the stones used to rebuild the house. The stone itself, as the audience learns, carries some of the complexities of the place. It is carved from the land by Palestinians whose families were displaced during the Nakba. The stones are delivered to Jerusalem to be placed by Palestinian workers in the house owned by an Israeli and a British citizen. The stone is placed next to stones used to rebuild a house that belonged to Palestinians before 1948. Where Bauhaus teachings focused on the materials themselves and understanding the capacity and substance of each literal building block, we understand, from the very first moments of the trilogy, that House is concerned also with the social history of those materials, and that the film is a story of “people,” not just of individuals, and a story of movements and not just of stability. In this trilogy, stones move, people move, and houses change.

We learn from the trilogy that to tell the story of the place is to dig into its layers. But this digging does not necessarily lead to peace of mind, nor does it move us forward. Amos Gitai ends his House trilogy with a general sense of fatigue from the story of the Middle East. “The documentaries have been like ongoing human archaeological sites,” he says, “you dig, you excavate, until you find a fragment of the bone or a story, or you discover a kind of an exposition in houses that are now covered by dust.” Gitai, much like Yehuda Amicahi, helps us “declare” what we have from others and to what extent a home, a city, or a land can ever be fully owned by its occupant. The movie stays away from questions such as, “What do we do after the declaration? How long and how deep do you continue to dig?” and “What is the role of art in all of this? How does it contribute to understanding the state of the house/home, and how does it help our emotional and intellectual understanding of what was, what is, and what needs to be done?”

The articles and essays in this volume reflect on or relate to issues raised in the trilogy. They don’t suggest solutions — rather, they expand and deepen the scope of the conversation. Before turning to other Israeli texts, the issue closely examines Gitai’s work and cinematography. The volume opens with a discussion of Gitai’s House, the first film in the trilogy. Karla Oeler, in her article “House, Montage, and Architecture,” looks at the film in the context of the relations between architecture and film in previous cinematography. Oeler suggests an eye-opening reading of House. In her concluding paragraph, she writes that “Gitai’s ‘architectural’ filmmaking associates itself with the mason checking the soundness of the stones that bear the weight of the structure. The documentary House is renovating the country cinematically by excavating and documenting its cracks.”

Oeler’s paper is followed by a study by two other film scholars, Rémy Besson and Claudia Polledri. Their paper, “House Trilogy (1978–2005): Staging Co-existence and its Failures: an Intermedial Approach,’’ presents the movies as questioning, through their form, the concept of “coexistence” when it comes to inhabiting the same “home/land.” Instead of coexistence, they argue, Gitai’s movies show “distinct modes of existence that are linked together only by the fact of living at the same time and sharing the same temporality.” The movies tell us that “people may live next to each other while their social relationships are practically nonexistent.”

The issue continues with two studies that examine the connections between cinematography and literature. The paper “The Testimonies of the Land: Amos Oz’s and Amos Gitai’s Journeys in the Land of Israel” by Adia Mendelson-Maoz looks at works that listen to and observe different ethnic, political, and socioeconomic groups. The article “highlights their similarities as authors, as well as their differences in perspectives on the Israeli space and nationality, the notions of house, home, and homeland.” Barbara Mann’s paper, “Excavating Memory: The Archaeological Imagination in Amos Gitai’s A House in Jerusalem (1998) and Rutu Modan’s Tunnels (2020),” also creates a comparison between Gitai’s cinematography and a literary book. Israeli memory culture, Mann argues, has shifted in recent decades from being openly critical and revealing untold truths to new perspectives that view history as something that “may always remain flawed and partial at best.” Mann looks at Gitai and Modan’s works as examples of how Israeli cultural expression has been shaped by this evolving sense of collective and personal memory. She is interested in how the “House” and the “Tunnel” represent “the archaeological imagination,” a mode of artistic exploration in which the tensions between surface and depth, between the present and the past, affect formal structures of the creative work. Her article reminds us of Gitai’s comment, quoted above, regarding the fatigue from digging into the past. Perhaps this fatigue eventually led to using an architecture of “dementia.” “There is something fundamentally awry in the Israeli management of space,” Mann writes. “Dementia, of course, affects one’s memory, and it is not something to be idealized as anything other than the ravaging disease that it is. However, both books seem to imply that a little less memory might actually be a good idea.” If Gitai’s trilogy was set to explore the archaeological and maybe even geological layers of the house/home, Mann’s paper, especially with her reference to A. B. Yehoshua’s book The Tunnel, carves out a new space/memory esthetics that does not dig into the past of the space but rather creates “tunnels” or pathways through it.

House/Home and national memory/dementia are also at the center of Arie Dubnov’s essay “‘I Am Civil War’: On Haim Gouri’s Poetics of Concealment.” Dubnov looks at the “playful, purposeful use of poiesis as a means to disguise uncomfortable truths and as a mode of ‘aphasia,’ blocking historical knowledge.” The paper investigates the use of the highly charged term milhemet ezrahim (civil war) in Hebrew before Gouri appropriated it, and it “revisits a sensitive episode in Gouri’s early biography,” which “sheds light on the way Gouri metaphorized and internalized the notion of civil war, turning it into an inner struggle and personal dilemmas.”

Iris Milner’s “The Unhomely in the Literature of S. Yizhar” sets out to explore “the representations of the Israeli home in the writings of the prominent Israeli writer S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky, 1916–2006). Although the concept of the new Jewish home as the symbol of the Zionist metamorphosis is a major theme in Hebrew literature, Yizhar’s fiction contains few descriptions of houses and people’s homes, and he remains detached from and skeptical about this rhetoric and ideology. A sense of ‘uncanny strangeness’ (Kristeva), which undermines the very idea of homecoming, imbues his rare yet highly significant images of the home.”

In Israeli art, Larry Abramson is famous, among other things, for his paintings that feature a floating house/home. Abramson’s symbolic and political art calls into question the relationships between house and home, between the physical and symbolic homes, and between the house and the national home. Ella Elbaz, a scholar of art and literature, interviewed Abramson for this issue in a piece entitled “Home, Ruin, Painting: A Conversation between Ella Elbaz and Larry Abramson.” At the center of the conversation is the concept of the “ruin”’ in modernist art, in Israeli experience, and in Abramson’s own work. We added to this issue a PDF file with selected works by Larry Abramson. We are honored to have the opportunity to publish this special selection of House/Home paintings.

This issue is part of a collaboration with Oh!, a literary journal published in Hebrew twice a year. The upcoming issue of Oh! will be devoted to transitions and movements from/to home. Together with Oh! we hope to provide a comprehensive discussion of House/Home in a digital format and printed format, in Hebrew and in English, in scholarship as well as in intellectual and creative productions. The editors of both Oh! and Dibur acknowledge this moment as an interesting and important time to reflect on the meaning of home/house. Working outside of Israel, we (the editors and many of the contributors) expand the current borders of Hebrew literature and culture. Defining the language and the literature as “home,” with this we might mark a return to a de-territorial map of Hebrew literature, but this time with a clear center in Israel. For the expatriates participating in this project, the private house and even the feeling of being at home are often far from the national home and the center of Hebrew culture.

Much like many other places, Israel is struggling now with placing itself between the global and the national. It struggles with an economy that makes it harder for people to own or even rent houses. In addition, it struggles with the growing divide between parts of the population. Brothers in Arms and other resistance groups use language that is taken out of the vocabulary of civil wars or civil unrest. The demographic in Israel is expected to change dramatically in the coming years, adding to the uncertainty regarding the future vision of the place. Some of this is reflected in the poems, essays, films, art, and questions raised by the scholars. One thing that became much clearer to us in working on this project is the extent to which both house and home are dynamic concepts, so much so that it is not clear that one can ever come into the same house twice, or at least cannot see it in the same way twice.

home, house, archive

Amos Gitai, whose work was the inspiration for this issue, lives in Paris. The archive of his House/Home trilogy is housed at Stanford University. The movies were filmed in Israel/Palestine. This by itself serves as an example of the complexity of the concept of “home” when it comes to categorizing and defining the connections between cultural production and national territories.

The Amos Gitai Film Archive arrived at Stanford in 2017 as the result of the long, scholarly collaboration between Amos Gitai and Marie-Pierre Ulloa, then a lecturer in French and Francophone literature in Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and a deep partnership with Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Like many archival acquisitions, the Gitai archive began as a discussion of one thing (family papers) and transformed into the acquisition of “six film projects”: Promised Land (2002‒04), Free Zone (2004‒05), Disengagement (2005‒07), One Day You Will Understand (2007‒08), News from Home (2005), and Tsili (2008‒14). Since News from Home is the third in a trilogy, the Gitai Film Archive also contains what records and files remained for the first two films, House (1980), and A House in Jerusalem (1998). House has now been staged as a play in Paris, with future productions planned for New York and elsewhere, and Gitai plans for the archives of this theatrical version to join the House papers at Stanford. Though no longer accurate, it nevertheless seems appropriate to continue to see this as an archive of “Six Film Projects,” in quotations, as six is not six, and film is not film, but file formats with specialized playback requirements.

The term “Archive” carries with it both the weight of modern theory and associations of particular places and experiences, and the Gitai archive at Stanford both conforms to and challenges these expectations. To understand why, we propose thinking about the archive along four simultaneous and intersecting axes: physical, digital, potential, and relational.

Physically, the paper records of the archive amount to seven linear feet, distributed in six boxes, two half boxes, one flat box, and one map folder. Patrons access this material in Stanford’s Special Collections Reading Room, much as they would any other creative or historical archive. It is also, physically, seventeen hard drives. Due to the deterioration of the disks, five hard drives needed to be outsourced to a commercial recovery service before the digital archivists could begin their work. All material was successfully captured. The seventeen hard drives collectively contained 10.5 terabytes of data. Still photographs from across the Gitai productions can be viewed anywhere; however, the majority of the digital files must, for legal reasons, still be accessed in person. By physically coming to the reading room, patrons can watch production videos, listen to audio, and read drafts of scripts and other production files. A temporal quirk further connects the physical and the digital. The Gitai team used Final Cut Pro as the editing software. Older versions of Final Cut Pro have been deprecated, and in order to properly access the old files in an authentic work environment, Stanford’s Media Preservation Lab worked with a vendor to build a custom workstation, essentially a new computer that mimics the performance and capabilities of 2010’s bleeding-edge technology.

The workstation, with access to the Final Cut Pro files, has always been an element of the potential axis of the Gitai archive. Hardware preservation — Stanford’s approach with the Gitai files — is not considered a best practice of software preservation. Ideally, users would access the Final Cut Pro environment through emulation. Stanford’s Digital Library Systems and Services group has participated in emulation as a service project, but, to date, these have not directly impacted the Gitai archive. Stanford researchers also explored artificial intelligence tools, in the hope that different off-the-shelf technologies could speed the processing of digital files. None of the AI video technologies were ready in 2018, but it may now be an appropriate moment to experiment again given rapid AI improvements. There is also the question of how and where users have access to the Gitai materials, and what Gitai materials. For example, Stanford’s Special Collections team has been exploring options for a Virtual Reading Room where restricted materials could be distributed securely. This would also, in theory, better connect Stanford’s Gitai Collection with the other major Gitai Collections, those of the National Library of Israel (NLI) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), along with the many other cultural heritage institutions where Gitai has deposited papers and film.

Indeed, the intentionally distributed nature of Gitai’s archive marks it as unique — and also uniquely challenging. How to connect the holdings of these different institutions — that is, how to manage the relational axis of the Gitai archive — was on display at a conference in Paris sponsored by the BNF and the École Nationale des Chartes. During the opening session, representatives of the BNF, NLI, and Stanford University Libraries presented their approach to the Gitai archive, exposing, in the process, material differences on openness, permeability, and collaboration, the questions that emerge when a donor intentionally chooses to have not one archive but archives.

Each institution is experienced in building digital archives and brings to the Gitai project a set of philosophies and learned practices. Matan Barzilai, head of archives at the National Library of Israel, effectively outlined their vision: a comprehensive portal for the study of Gitai, perhaps along the lines of the Historical Jewish Press project, or KTIV — that is to say, a single destination or entry point, maintained by one institution, that contains the holdings of many other institutions within a single frame. Stanford’s university librarian, Michael Keller, objected that two technologies would obviate the need for anything resembling a single portal — the international image interoperability framework (IIF) and AI. IIIF can be bluntly described as sets of APIs (application programming interfaces) for images that facilitate both easier sharing and the ability to do more with images. “AI” is a buzzword — but also a real set of tools whose applicability and adaptability to academic libraries form the subject of another of Stanford’s major international collaborations, this time between the Stanford Libraries and the National Library of Norway, with the active participation of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.[5] In response, the National Library of Israel reiterated its commitment to IIIF and its interest in AI.

A portal, like the one proposed at the National Library of Israel, contains only what is within its database. It knows what it knows. Tools like IIIF employ the openness of the web. They mediate, they exchange, they circulate. They allow for the entry of other texts. But what does that mean at the level of an individual collection? Gitai’s vision of archives is plural: one archive for each film along with research material connected to the creation of that film. Material housed in the archives at the National Library of Israel inspired Gitai’s filmmaking, so he deposited the archives for those films at the National Library. Would a dedicated Gitai portal make those connections? Would a Gitai portal, for example, include the archives of Else Lasker-Schüler or would the archival inspiration exist outside “the archive”? On the other side, the fantastic archival future envisioned by AI and IIIF is one in which cultural heritage objects can easily be pulled together, manipulated, reassembled — and also computed against, turned into sets of data and the raw material of training algorithms. Something of the sanctity of the individual subject is lost in that process. No final decisions on the shape of the Gitai archive have been made since. There has also been a far more prosaic discussion of building a different kind of hybrid virtual/physical reading room: connecting rooms by IP address. A researcher in Stanford’s Special Collections reading room would have access not only to the materials at Stanford but also to those held in Israel, Paris, Switzerland, and anywhere else Gitai has chosen to deposit materials.

“The Archive” exists in the conceptual imagination as a physical home. As Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever, “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from private to the public.”[6] It is a physical space where materials are sorted, consigned, and later delivered to new eyes. It is an environment that is both open and controlled. The Gitai archive both affirms and denies this conception. What does it mean that no single institution has been made into the one home for the archive?

Gitai has explained that cinema, like architecture, “encompasses industrial and financial aspects and that a filmmaker’s archives must attest to this.”[7] Our argument is that the Gitai archive not only attests to this, he has made his archives embody this. The Gitai archive is more akin to a film, art installation, or work of architecture than it is to a traditional literary archive. It is a creative project, an act of legacy formation, and the meeting point of those two things. The three main collaborators have all been strategically and symbolically chosen: the National Library of Israel roots him in a place and in an intellectual tradition; the BnF is the site of cultural capital, internationalism, the acceptance into a global filmmaking community; Stanford represents the promise of technology and creative possibility. All three sites significantly represent different elements of capital formation: Israel and government grants; France and the financial capital of most of his films; Stanford as a buyer for archives, which in turn generated capital to produce new films. Having multiple sites of memory also enables strategic counterpoint. The BnF can house films that are politically sensitive in Israel; Stanford can house Gitai’s film about French Holocaust memory and a film barred from Israeli television. Yet beyond this schematic framework, the dynamic of the international collaboration serves to compel archival production. Internationalism lends prestige — and also competition. While each institution faces steep archival backlogs, the international element compels active processing and prioritization. At any one moment, the need to collaborate serves as a check on each individual collaborator. The individual partners are tested against the others. But the collaboration is also tested against the individual. What can be accomplished collectively that could not be accomplished individually? The enduring question and challenge of the Gitai archive remains: Is the whole greater than its parts?

Stanford’s Amos Gitai archive, its collection of “Six Film Projects,” is just one of many houses for Gitai’s materials. Like the House films, it is not singular but part of a trilogy (or more). It is a traditional archive, and also one that actively resists that notion. Physical, digital, potential, and relational elements are always intersecting, and only by grappling with all four can it become a true home for scholarship, an archive to come. Image removed.


endnotes

  1. Yehuda Amichai, Travels, trans. Ruth Nevo (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1986). ↩

  2. Raef Zreik, Introduction (lecture series, “The Home of Philosophy: Home as a Metaphor in Thought,” Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, October 19, 2021), https://www.vanleer.org.il/en/events/on-campus-and-online-hegel-and-the-metaphor-of-being-at-home/. ↩

  3. Barbara E. Mann, “’An Apartment to Remember’: Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape,” History & Memory 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015): 84. ↩

  4. Avot Yeshurun, “The House — A Long Poem,” trans. Ariel Resnikoff, Curated: Thinking with Literature, March 4, 2021, https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/house-long-poem. ↩

  5. AI4LAM, Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives & Museums, https://sites.google.com/view/ai4lam. ↩

  6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2. 

  7. “Amos Gitai, Openings,” published in French in Jean-Michel Frodon, Amos Gitai et l’enjeu des archives (Paris: Collège de France, 2021). A draft English translation was shared with the author.