Alexander goldstein’s “tethys or mediterranean mail”: A russian-israeli levantine literary idea reconsidered

Winner of both the prestigious Russian Little Booker and Anti-Booker prizes, Alexander Goldstein’s book Parting from Narcissus (1997) advanced the Levantine idea as a new perspective enabling Russian-Israeli literature to become an integral part of the Mediterranean cultural ecumene. This concept was designed to facilitate both the writer’s literary self-fashioning and his cultural absorption. Having mobilized the notion of the Levantine to valorize his position in a broad Russian literary context, Goldstein, however, failed to embody the main tenets of post-orientalist multiculturalism associated with this notion; rather, he used the Israeli context to uphold Russian imperial views. Circulating in Israel exclusively among immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the Russian-Israeli Levantine literary idea with its ostensible cosmopolitan perspective clashed with the prevailing ethnonational segregationism of this milieu. The lack of acceptance by his Russian-Israeli audience was a major factor impelling Goldstein eventually to abandon his Levantine idea and to embrace the Jewish ethnonationalism that permeates the books he wrote after Parting from Narcissus.