Where The Jackals Howl

15/02/2025

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 It might be a truth universally acknowledged that a small nation in a situation of conflict will expect from its writers a stance. The country might be deemed oppressed or oppressor but while most British or American writers may have a political perspective, writers from Israel, Nigeria, Lebanon and Indonesia are more inclined to feel obliged to have one. Amos Oz does. Speaking of the Palestinians he says, “we don't need to improve the way we rule over them, we need to stop ruling over them. So in some ways my attitude has been more radical than that of the human rights people. They have regarded the issue as a clash between two communities, or two social classes, while I have always considered it an international dispute between two different nations.” (Paris Review) He also reckons, “the two peoples do not have to agree on the narrative, only on how to live next door to each other in the future.” (Arab Studies Journal)

   Not only is a writer from a small nation in conflict expected to have an opinion, but their work is often read through the prism of the political, as though while in literature from the West the private and the public, the political and the personal, are more clearly inclined to be ignored unless the writer actively invokes them, in certain parts of the world the writing is read through the conflict.  ‘You know, if you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically,” Oz says. “If I wrote a story about a mother, a father and their daughter, a critic would say that the father represents the government, the mother, the old values, and the daughter the shattered economy!” (Paris Review) This needn’t be a problem only for smaller or ostensibly developed nations, of course, and Israel is far from undeveloped, while a writer in the 30s in Germany who proclaimed neutrality would be more inclined to appear complicit. The question is chiefly one of the pressing. If a British writer were to ignore the Suez crisis, or an American writer even so monumental an event as 9/11, it wouldn’t be deemed remiss. But for a contemporary Israeli writer to ignore completely the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, or for a Nigerian writer to pretend there is no question of exploitation in the country, would be deemed complicit too. 

    So there is the problem: the danger of the explicit where one’s work becomes all about the political; or the complicit, where one denies the political a place in one’s work. There is also however the implicit and the ambiguous: the sense a writer has of events that he might acknowledge without feeling obliged to make direct reference. To understand how Oz deals with this awareness, without assuming it as a literary responsibility, we can usefully look at some remarks Oz makes in the Paris Review. First, he says: “I get invitations from well-meaning institutions in America to go and spend a wonderful weekend with a number of Palestinians in order that we may get to know and like each other, and whissht, the conflict will go away! Like group therapy or marriage counseling.” Oz adds, “as if the Arab-Israeli conflict were just a misunderstanding. I have news for them: there is no misunderstanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We both want the same piece of land because we both regard it as ours. This provides for a perfect understanding.” (Paris Review) Later, he tells an old Hasidic story about a goat: a rabbi passing a verdict on the ownership of a goat listens to the claimants and concludes they are both right. The rabbi’s wife says only one of them can be right because you can’t divide the goat - it must belong to one or the other - but it doesn’t. It belongs to both claimants. After, Oz says, “This idea makes me realize that many conflicts in the world can be conceived in family terms: a perpetual rotation of love and hatred, jealousy and solidarity, happiness and misery. This rotation is in almost every one of my novels. It is a family in which everybody is in conflict with everybody else and everybody is right, just as in the story of the rabbi…” Oz insists on making his fiction microcosmic as opposed to allegorical. It may reflect the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict but it doesn’t allegorise it. Oz makes a point of saying the Rabbi story is one from the Middle Ages. It too can be used to represent the contemporary conflict but it serves a need much greater than one geo-political crisis. 

           In ‘Where the Jackals Howl’, the story is about family and can be read microcosmically. It takes place on a Kibbutz where the head of the Kibbutz is assumed to be the father of Galila, yet one of the other members, Damkov, a man originally from Bulgaria, seems fond of this girl and insinuates that he is her father. She accepts his fatherly affection in return for paints and brushes that he receives from his cousin in Latin America. But when he says to Galila “I have something to tell you when the moment’s right, something that I’m positive you don’t know about your mother’s wickedness” and that he is her father, she becomes wary. Later, she tells him that she doesn’t anymore want his paints, but he insists that he can tell her about her mother and how Galila should hate her rather than him. Before the end of the story, Galila says that he is a fool thinking he is her father: “…look at me. I’m blond, look….I’m not yours, I’m sure of it because I’m blond and it’s all right.” But for all her resistance, she finds herself saying “Father”. The work remains ambiguous but if we recall the goat story (assuming the rival parties don't accept its slaughter and divide the meat), a mother can have many lovers but her child can only have one father, and this is what is in dispute. Is the mother wicked because she had numerous lovers, left one man for another, lied to them both, or all, or claimed Sashka as the father, aware that it was Damkov?

      Early, as Galila showers, the omniscient narration refers to her as Sashka and Tanya’s daughter, but the story goes on to explore competing claims for fatherhood, just as in the Rabbi tale there are competing claims over the goat, just as in the Middle East there are competing claims for land that both Palestinians and Israelis claim as their own. We might then be left wondering over the difference between symbolic interpretations that see in a work a given meaning and one that resists such singular assertive explanation. As David Lodge says, “allegory is a specialised form of symbolic narrative, which does not merely suggest something beyond its literal meaning, but insists on being decoded in terms of another meaning.” (The Art of Fiction) The encoding can be a bit like an anagram and the decoding what the word actually means, and we might think of Erewhon, which will be decoded as Nowhere. An allegory allows for encoding and decoding as an extended metaphor, or a symbolically suggestive work, does not. As Lodge says, “as an extended fictional device allegory is used mainly in didactic, satirical fables, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm and Erewhon”. Usually, the writers have a point to make and the reader accepts in the literal description a need for allegorical extraction, no matter if one chooses to read such a text literally and feel for a dying horse even if the decoded meaning is of the proletariat’s lost hopes.  

        Yet Oz’s story seems suggestive rather than allegorical, that instead of encoding and decoding, he is drawn to a first principle that allows him to allude to the situation of his country without assuming the reader will understand the predicament to which it can appear to refer. Damkov may be fighting for his claims over Galila but to turn Galila into the land is potentially both simplistic and misogynistic: she would become not a character with agency but a sort of daughterland, someone who isn’t there to feel the complexities of her status but to function as a representative of those fighting over her. It also doesn’t appear to be much of a fight, and if there was it took place in the inevitable past as Sashka remains solidly her father. Oz appears often to want ambiguity over allegory, so that events in the present may reflect the past but don’t quite illuminate it. When Galila’s mother Tanya gets into a heated conversation early in the story with Damkov, we might wonder what past they share if there is any truth to Damkov’s claims he is Galila’s father. Is she shouting at him as his superior when she asks him to weld a lock or as an ex with underlying tensions? He tells her the lock has been “welded for days now, and you haven’t come to collect it. Come tomorrow. Come whenever you like…” he says. Or has he had nothing with Tanya but still desires her?  She is no longer so young — “her face is wrinkled, her eyes harassed and weary…her hair is grey.” But maybe he wishes to be part of the inner circle of the kibbutz, one that includes established early settlers like Sashka and Tanya, while Damkov came later, and has lower status. “Matityahu Damkov, and the latter day fugitives like him, know nothing of the longing that burns and the dedication that draws blood from the lips. That is why they seek to break into the inner circle. They make advances to the women.”

    We might question Damkov's paternal claims not just because the omniscient narration tells us that Galila is Tanya and Sashka’s daughter but that Damkov tells us this as well. “She’s as wary as her father and as clever as her mother”, he says, and near the end of the story, when he has persuaded Galila to visit his room and pick up the paints, he makes a pass at her. "The man leaped at her, panting, groaning, groping his way blindly. In his rush he overturned the coffee table, he shuddered violently and the girl shuddered with him.” Yet it is shortly after this that she utters the word father. Oz seems drawn to the complexity of emotions over the clarity of meaning, and we might assume the same over the land. Some could read the jackals of the title as those excluded from the community; that the Kibbutz has been built to the detriment of the Palestinian people, and the Israelis are doing what they can to protect themselves from hostile outside forces. But that would be to read more into the story than has been put there: an imposition rather than an extraction. To see in the story a first principle of indivisible ownership is different from claiming jackals are Palestinians. To suggest the Palestinians as jackals is more than just a symbolic interpretation, it is a narrow and politically one-sided way of reading the story through contemporaneous geopolitical concerns: the sort of concerns that Oz comprehends but resists in his comment about the father representing the government and so on. But by searching instead for a first principle, we may muse over the zero-sum game of situations that cannot be resolved easily because they are predicated on an assumption of singular ownership. The dividing of a goat, a child or a land all function off the same principle. This doesn’t mean a situation cannot be resolved (Oz always believed in the Two-State solution), but this is why Oz insists it isn’t enough to invite opposing groups around for tea with conviviality resolving all. 

      In 'Where the Jackals Howl', we never find out if Damkov is Galila’s father; all we know is that she calls him by this name at the moment when he acts least like one; as he looks as though he will violate the incest taboo when he gropes at what he claims is his daughter; or proves that he isn’t in the gesture he offers. Yet the ambiguity of the conclusion contains an answer to the difficulty of zero-sum realities. Sashka may be her father and Galila might believe that Damkov is. Or vice-versa, just as Palestinians believe the land is theirs and so do the Israelis. We can read ‘Where the Jackals Howls’ and see it as a first principle account of impossible conflict, yet if it works it chiefly has to do so based on the complexity of feelings it invokes. As Oz says, “I can write an article only when I agree with myself 100 per cent, which is not my normal condition —normally I’m in partial disagreement with myself and can identify with three or five different views and different feelings about the same issue. That is when I write a story, where different characters can express different views on the same subject.” (Paris Review) 

 

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Where The Jackals Howl

 It might be a truth universally acknowledged that a small nation in a situation of conflict will expect from its writers a stance. The country might be deemed oppressed or oppressor but while most British or American writers may have a political perspective, writers from Israel, Nigeria, Lebanon and Indonesia are more inclined to feel obliged to have one. Amos Oz does. Speaking of the Palestinians he says, “we don't need to improve the way we rule over them, we need to stop ruling over them. So in some ways my attitude has been more radical than that of the human rights people. They have regarded the issue as a clash between two communities, or two social classes, while I have always considered it an international dispute between two different nations.” (Paris Review) He also reckons, “the two peoples do not have to agree on the narrative, only on how to live next door to each other in the future.” (Arab Studies Journal)

   Not only is a writer from a small nation in conflict expected to have an opinion, but their work is often read through the prism of the political, as though while in literature from the West the private and the public, the political and the personal, are more clearly inclined to be ignored unless the writer actively invokes them, in certain parts of the world the writing is read through the conflict.  ‘You know, if you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically,” Oz says. “If I wrote a story about a mother, a father and their daughter, a critic would say that the father represents the government, the mother, the old values, and the daughter the shattered economy!” (Paris Review) This needn’t be a problem only for smaller or ostensibly developed nations, of course, and Israel is far from undeveloped, while a writer in the 30s in Germany who proclaimed neutrality would be more inclined to appear complicit. The question is chiefly one of the pressing. If a British writer were to ignore the Suez crisis, or an American writer even so monumental an event as 9/11, it wouldn’t be deemed remiss. But for a contemporary Israeli writer to ignore completely the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, or for a Nigerian writer to pretend there is no question of exploitation in the country, would be deemed complicit too. 

    So there is the problem: the danger of the explicit where one’s work becomes all about the political; or the complicit, where one denies the political a place in one’s work. There is also however the implicit and the ambiguous: the sense a writer has of events that he might acknowledge without feeling obliged to make direct reference. To understand how Oz deals with this awareness, without assuming it as a literary responsibility, we can usefully look at some remarks Oz makes in the Paris Review. First, he says: “I get invitations from well-meaning institutions in America to go and spend a wonderful weekend with a number of Palestinians in order that we may get to know and like each other, and whissht, the conflict will go away! Like group therapy or marriage counseling.” Oz adds, “as if the Arab-Israeli conflict were just a misunderstanding. I have news for them: there is no misunderstanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We both want the same piece of land because we both regard it as ours. This provides for a perfect understanding.” (Paris Review) Later, he tells an old Hasidic story about a goat: a rabbi passing a verdict on the ownership of a goat listens to the claimants and concludes they are both right. The rabbi’s wife says only one of them can be right because you can’t divide the goat - it must belong to one or the other - but it doesn’t. It belongs to both claimants. After, Oz says, “This idea makes me realize that many conflicts in the world can be conceived in family terms: a perpetual rotation of love and hatred, jealousy and solidarity, happiness and misery. This rotation is in almost every one of my novels. It is a family in which everybody is in conflict with everybody else and everybody is right, just as in the story of the rabbi…” Oz insists on making his fiction microcosmic as opposed to allegorical. It may reflect the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict but it doesn’t allegorise it. Oz makes a point of saying the Rabbi story is one from the Middle Ages. It too can be used to represent the contemporary conflict but it serves a need much greater than one geo-political crisis. 

           In ‘Where the Jackals Howl’, the story is about family and can be read microcosmically. It takes place on a Kibbutz where the head of the Kibbutz is assumed to be the father of Galila, yet one of the other members, Damkov, a man originally from Bulgaria, seems fond of this girl and insinuates that he is her father. She accepts his fatherly affection in return for paints and brushes that he receives from his cousin in Latin America. But when he says to Galila “I have something to tell you when the moment’s right, something that I’m positive you don’t know about your mother’s wickedness” and that he is her father, she becomes wary. Later, she tells him that she doesn’t anymore want his paints, but he insists that he can tell her about her mother and how Galila should hate her rather than him. Before the end of the story, Galila says that he is a fool thinking he is her father: “…look at me. I’m blond, look….I’m not yours, I’m sure of it because I’m blond and it’s all right.” But for all her resistance, she finds herself saying “Father”. The work remains ambiguous but if we recall the goat story (assuming the rival parties don't accept its slaughter and divide the meat), a mother can have many lovers but her child can only have one father, and this is what is in dispute. Is the mother wicked because she had numerous lovers, left one man for another, lied to them both, or all, or claimed Sashka as the father, aware that it was Damkov?

      Early, as Galila showers, the omniscient narration refers to her as Sashka and Tanya’s daughter, but the story goes on to explore competing claims for fatherhood, just as in the Rabbi tale there are competing claims over the goat, just as in the Middle East there are competing claims for land that both Palestinians and Israelis claim as their own. We might then be left wondering over the difference between symbolic interpretations that see in a work a given meaning and one that resists such singular assertive explanation. As David Lodge says, “allegory is a specialised form of symbolic narrative, which does not merely suggest something beyond its literal meaning, but insists on being decoded in terms of another meaning.” (The Art of Fiction) The encoding can be a bit like an anagram and the decoding what the word actually means, and we might think of Erewhon, which will be decoded as Nowhere. An allegory allows for encoding and decoding as an extended metaphor, or a symbolically suggestive work, does not. As Lodge says, “as an extended fictional device allegory is used mainly in didactic, satirical fables, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm and Erewhon”. Usually, the writers have a point to make and the reader accepts in the literal description a need for allegorical extraction, no matter if one chooses to read such a text literally and feel for a dying horse even if the decoded meaning is of the proletariat’s lost hopes.  

        Yet Oz’s story seems suggestive rather than allegorical, that instead of encoding and decoding, he is drawn to a first principle that allows him to allude to the situation of his country without assuming the reader will understand the predicament to which it can appear to refer. Damkov may be fighting for his claims over Galila but to turn Galila into the land is potentially both simplistic and misogynistic: she would become not a character with agency but a sort of daughterland, someone who isn’t there to feel the complexities of her status but to function as a representative of those fighting over her. It also doesn’t appear to be much of a fight, and if there was it took place in the inevitable past as Sashka remains solidly her father. Oz appears often to want ambiguity over allegory, so that events in the present may reflect the past but don’t quite illuminate it. When Galila’s mother Tanya gets into a heated conversation early in the story with Damkov, we might wonder what past they share if there is any truth to Damkov’s claims he is Galila’s father. Is she shouting at him as his superior when she asks him to weld a lock or as an ex with underlying tensions? He tells her the lock has been “welded for days now, and you haven’t come to collect it. Come tomorrow. Come whenever you like…” he says. Or has he had nothing with Tanya but still desires her?  She is no longer so young — “her face is wrinkled, her eyes harassed and weary…her hair is grey.” But maybe he wishes to be part of the inner circle of the kibbutz, one that includes established early settlers like Sashka and Tanya, while Damkov came later, and has lower status. “Matityahu Damkov, and the latter day fugitives like him, know nothing of the longing that burns and the dedication that draws blood from the lips. That is why they seek to break into the inner circle. They make advances to the women.”

    We might question Damkov's paternal claims not just because the omniscient narration tells us that Galila is Tanya and Sashka’s daughter but that Damkov tells us this as well. “She’s as wary as her father and as clever as her mother”, he says, and near the end of the story, when he has persuaded Galila to visit his room and pick up the paints, he makes a pass at her. "The man leaped at her, panting, groaning, groping his way blindly. In his rush he overturned the coffee table, he shuddered violently and the girl shuddered with him.” Yet it is shortly after this that she utters the word father. Oz seems drawn to the complexity of emotions over the clarity of meaning, and we might assume the same over the land. Some could read the jackals of the title as those excluded from the community; that the Kibbutz has been built to the detriment of the Palestinian people, and the Israelis are doing what they can to protect themselves from hostile outside forces. But that would be to read more into the story than has been put there: an imposition rather than an extraction. To see in the story a first principle of indivisible ownership is different from claiming jackals are Palestinians. To suggest the Palestinians as jackals is more than just a symbolic interpretation, it is a narrow and politically one-sided way of reading the story through contemporaneous geopolitical concerns: the sort of concerns that Oz comprehends but resists in his comment about the father representing the government and so on. But by searching instead for a first principle, we may muse over the zero-sum game of situations that cannot be resolved easily because they are predicated on an assumption of singular ownership. The dividing of a goat, a child or a land all function off the same principle. This doesn’t mean a situation cannot be resolved (Oz always believed in the Two-State solution), but this is why Oz insists it isn’t enough to invite opposing groups around for tea with conviviality resolving all. 

      In 'Where the Jackals Howl', we never find out if Damkov is Galila’s father; all we know is that she calls him by this name at the moment when he acts least like one; as he looks as though he will violate the incest taboo when he gropes at what he claims is his daughter; or proves that he isn’t in the gesture he offers. Yet the ambiguity of the conclusion contains an answer to the difficulty of zero-sum realities. Sashka may be her father and Galila might believe that Damkov is. Or vice-versa, just as Palestinians believe the land is theirs and so do the Israelis. We can read ‘Where the Jackals Howls’ and see it as a first principle account of impossible conflict, yet if it works it chiefly has to do so based on the complexity of feelings it invokes. As Oz says, “I can write an article only when I agree with myself 100 per cent, which is not my normal condition —normally I’m in partial disagreement with myself and can identify with three or five different views and different feelings about the same issue. That is when I write a story, where different characters can express different views on the same subject.” (Paris Review) 

 

 


© Tony McKibbin