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In the Name of the Mother:Women's Discourse—Women's Prayer in Michal Govrin's The Name Nitza Keren (bio) After all, the name was tattooed on her flesh. Michal Govrin, The Name1 This essay examines the articulation of a spiritually and religiously framed discourse expressive of a culture unique to women, closely allied with the myth of the (lost) mother and her heritage, as expressed in Michal Govrin's novel, The Name (Hashem).2 Govrin poses a series of challenges to the dominant hegemonic order in the name of a subversive women's culture. On a philosophical level, the masculine Jewish halakhic text, which postulates unity as its basic principle and sees the one God as its unquestioned doctrine, is challenged by a feminine culture whose essential assumption (as described in the writings of Luce Irigaray) is multiplicity.3 On a cultural level, Govrin evokes an ancient archetypal women's culture whose religio-cultic expression was the Canaanite goddess worship that predated the monotheistic conception.4 On a psychological level, she evokes the writings of feminist scholars who, based on the writings of Nancy Chodorow,5 describe a symbiotic, fluid feminine identity with porous boundaries,6 as well as the work of post-structuralist scholars like Julia Kristeva, who, based on the writings of Jacques Lacan,7 tend to describe fragmented and multiple identities of the subject in general and of the female subject in particular.8 These different aspects are intertwined like the warp and woof of fabric on a loom, the object that stands at the center of the novel and acquires a symbolic role in it. They sustain each other and contribute to the complex and convoluted nature of the book. [End Page 126] Religious Repair—Spiritual Repair—Artistic Repair The novel's plot is set in Jerusalem. Amalia, the main character, returns from New York, where she had led a rather riotous life, and seeks refuge in an ultra-Orthodox seminary, trying, in accord with the laws of repentance, to escape her past and become a "different" person. But the past—her own memories, her parents' nightmares, as well as the nation's history—keeps haunting her, giving her soul no rest. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she is named after her father's first wife, Mala, who committed suicide in a concentration camp, loading her with a heavy burden that she finds hard to bear. In the course of the forty-nine (7 × 7) days of the Counting of the Omer, between Passover and Shavuot, Amalia (amal-ya—one who toils for the sake of God) weaves a Torah curtain that is described as a model of the heavens above, in keeping with the kabbalistic principle that the terrestrial world is a reflection of the heavenly spheres.9 At the same time, she writes her confession. She toils over the course of many long days and nights, tying together what was and what shall be into a single knot, in order to hasten the end-time and, in the spirit of the Lurianic Kabbalah, to bring about tikkun, the divine Repair of the world.10 By taking upon herself the role of the scapegoat cast out into the desert, which symbolically carries the sins of the nation (Lev 16:10), she intends, in a defiant, dramatic act of atonement, to return to the dawn of being and repair the "shattered vessels." Govrin employs the kabbalistic term tikkun in three ways, referring to its deep philosophical meanings, its accompanying psychic significations, and its complex artistic levels: On the cultural/artistic level, she relies on a large corpus of mythical literature in constructing the image of the weaving woman—or, as Amalia calls herself, "the weaving spider" (The Name, p. 339)11 —the main and (almost) the only character in the book. On the halakhic/philosophical level, she confronts Maimonides' Laws of Repentance, defying its author in his status as an authoritative spiritual father figure. On the psychic level, she focuses on a ghostly mother figure, whose stranglehold she attempts to escape.12 Between the Countings—Between the Authorities The days of counting the Omer provide the novel's temporal and material context, expressing...
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