Limits to the Self: Revisiting the Jewish Wandering Syndrome in Eshkol Nevo’s Neuland
Limits to the Self: Revisiting the Jewish Wandering Syndrome in Eshkol Nevo’s Neuland
The notion of self attends to individual identity in relation with meaningful social interactions. It is a system expanded to multidisciplinary paradigms, often discussed in psychological and sociological perspectives. Man as a social being is entitled to understand and accept the social significance of self which is also an outgrowth of accumulated experiences of the past. However, this process is challenging especially to the members of a community with an unusual record of history. To that end, this paper attempts to examine the case of Israeli Jews for the complexity in their identification of self even after the establishment of Israel as a Nation State. Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo’s most discussed novel Neuland is closely read to engage with the concept of self in the Israeli context and to accentuate its centrality among the new generation Jewish Israelis. Based on the socio-psychological theoretical frameworks, specifically of William James, Neuland is synthesized as a textual journey to subjective and social identifications of the notion of self. The causes and consequences of limits to self and its problematic representation among a particular group of Jewish Israelis as manifested in the text are subjected to textual interpretation.
Key Words: Israeli Jews, self, identity, wanderism, social interaction