In exploring the
life of writer and campaigner Lily Tobias, Donahaye also explores
both Welsh and Israeli identities. To be engrossed in the biography
of a writer whose work I have never read demonstrates the skill of
Donahaye.
The very concept of
being an “Israeli” is something that comes into being during Lily
Tobias' life. When she first leaves Wales she moves to Palestine,
she is a British (Welsh) Jew living in Palestine. When she returns
from wartime exile in South Africa it is to Israel she “returns”
to – although while she never lived permanently in Britain again
she never gave up her British Citizenship, so perhaps at some levels
never become an Israeli.
In her early live,
Lily's experience of being a Welsh Jew Women is one of multi-layered
“minorities” (Women have never been a numerical minority but the
early 20th Century was a society essentially structured as
if they were...).
The violent death of
her husband in Palestine very clearly shaped the whole of the rest of
her life, a reminder of how long violence can have a hold over a
person, and in a land of such violence, how very very long the
process of healing will be even once peace is achieved.
The shift from her
early pacifism to later belief in “just war” in defence of the
Jewish homeland, a transition for which her husband's murder was the
main catalysis if not necessary the only cause, is a sad one. How she
would have responded to intensified conflict between Israeli and
Palestinians in the decades since her death (in 1984) can only ever
be speculation.
Donahaye gives a
sympathetic but not an airbrushed account of Lily's life, and is
willing to point out that not all her views sit that easily in
contemporary contexts, but she was a women of her time, and her views
are understandable if where we might now find them difficult to
defend.
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