Gay Voice: Embodiment, Sexuality and Voice in Yonatan Sagiv and Omri Horesh’s prose

• In Event: Queering Jewish and Israeli Identities

Abstract

In the past few years, there has been an emergence of new queer, and in particular, gay Hebrew writing across all genres: prose, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction. These new voices add, on the one hand, to the small-scale and yet significant literary tradition of Hebrew LGBTQ+ writing, demonstrating a growing willingness and openness among Hebrew readers to engage with queer and non-heteronormative themes, stories, and poetics. On the other hand, these new, young writers – their work, style, and thematic interests – mark a new moment in Hebrew writing, one that expands the horizons of Hebrew queer writing and breaks away, at least in part, from the Zionist master-narrative of Israeli writing writ large, against which it can and should be considered.
My lecture seeks to examine the works of two young Hebrew prose writers, Yonatan Sagiv and Omri Horesh, and offer a few observations on their recent works: Sagiv’s "Yesh Anashim Sh’medabrim Kakah" (There Are People Who Talk Like This) and Horesh’s "Yeled" (Boy). Both Horesh and Sagiv employ a common figurative trope – writing as a form of birth in Horesh's work and writing as a form of voice in Sagiv's – injecting them with new meaning and expanding their thematic, linguistic, and figurative potential by setting them within the context of the gay experience.
Horesh’s novella focuses on the dynamics between a gay father and his unnamed son, whose existence stands in the liminal, murky space between the real and the imaginary, the concrete and the figurative. Sagiv’s lyric prose-essay explores the challenges of losing and regaining one’s own voice, the meaning of speech, and the significance of silence within the familial and national context. In both cases, the protagonist’s journey – as a gay man – uncovers the meaning of having a body, a voice, a life that is distinctively gay, juxtaposing it against the norms and expectations of Israeli culture, allowing us as readers to grapple with questions of parenthood, belonging, violence, and healing.

Author

• Nadav Linial, Case Western Reserve University