SOURCE: "Feminism under Siege: The Vicarious Selves of Israeli Women Writers," in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 493-514.

In the following essay, Feldman explores feminist themes in Shulamith Hareven's A City of Many Days and Shulamit Lapid's Gei Oni.

I live on the top floors now, she summed it up to herself, where there is a constant commotion, workrooms, children's rooms, the kitchen, the living room, all kinds of things. [Only] the cellar is locked, and I don't even know where the key is [any more]. Perhaps one should not know.

A City of Many Days, Shulamith Hareven, 1972

The imagery underlying this self-examination is age-old, almost a stock metaphor—the house as the image of its tenant and vice versa. Yet what gives this particular metaphor an added twist is its specific psychological edge, one that is implied by the vertical division...