Dementia Narratives in the Israeli Landscape

• In Event: Narrating Disability: Education and the Power of the Jewish Literary Voice

Abstract

As the population continues to age, age studies increasingly intersects with disability studies. One area that has prominently emerged is narratives of cognitive decline and dementia; yet this literature is understudied in the context of modern Hebrew literary studies. Numerous contemporary Israeli novels address this topic as central to the narrative; examples include: Lihi Lapid’s On Her Own (Zarot, 2021), Shlomi Sasson’s Women in Jerusalem Don’t Have Rollerblades (L’Nashim b’Yerushalayim ayn Galgiliot, 2021), Noga Albalach’s The Old Man (Farewell) (Ha-ish Hazaken Preida, 2018), A.B. Yehoshua’s The Tunnel (Ha-Minhara, 2018), Zeruya Shalev’s Remains of Love (She’erit Ha-Chayim, 2015), Maya Arad’s Suspicion of Dementia ( Chashad Leshitayon, 2011), and Savyon Liebrecht’s A Man and a Woman and a Man (Ish Ve-Isha Ve-Ish, 1998). Whereas in the past, dementia, as a “living death,” has stood for that which is most to be feared and dreaded about aging, these representations of dementia attempt to humanize individuals with the disease. Still, dementia continues to be considered the antithesis of “successful aging” and because of this is imbricated with compulsory youthfulness and compulsory able-bodiedness. In response, dementia narratives have been contextualized in various ways: as social protest literature, revenge fantasy and as linked to trauma and colonization. Dementia has been “feminized” as a “solution” to the problematic behavior of aging women, has been talked about in the context of masculinities or metaphorized as narrative prosthesis. In the context of such theoretical models of parsing dementia narratives, this paper joins with the growing ethical approach to dementia that explores individual narratives and so resists tendencies to marginalize this population. Finally, in the context of the nation, I explore what these narratives at the intersection of aging and disability tell us about relevant themes in Israeli culture, including individual and collective memory and trauma. This paper contributes to the modest but growing interest in age studies and the already robust interest in disability studies in modern Hebrew literary studies.

Author

• Deborah Feingold, Brandeis University