"Manly Beauty That Could Steal Hearts”: Attributes of the Levant in the Land of Israel in A Man and His House Perished by Asher Barash

The concept of the Levant looks to meanings in geography and sociology, bringing these to hear on images of society in the Mediterranean Basin. The term involves a per-conceived outsider's perspective on the Levant and the different ways in which its social makeup can be represented. A large number of early twentieth-century works of Hebrew literature include story arcs based in the Land of Israel and neighboring countries. The Levant often provides the setting in the writing of Asher Barash (1889-1952), where the ploy seems to serve two main purposes: one is to provide a realistic background in keeping with the historical period. The second aim, which comes to the fore in Barash's Eretz Israel novellas, is to take advantage of the pied human landscapes of the Levant as a counterpart to the complexity of the inner world of his characters. The present study sets out to examine the literary devices and techniques used in portraying the Levant and the Land of Israel in Asher Barash's A Man and His House Perished (Ish u-veto nimhu) (1933). My aim is to examine the manner in which Barash resorts to attributes of the Levant as an expression of the multi-faced character of the protagonist, Boris Keldam, and his relationship with those around him. The hypothesis will be tested by focusing on this and "As a City Besieged" (Ke-'Ir netsurah) (1935), another work by Barash in which Keldam plays a prominent part.