'Opera Seria'? Grandiosity and Masculinity in David Shütz's Stories / 'אופרה סריה'? גרנדיוזיות וגבריות בסיפוריו של דוד שיץ

David Schütz is a forgotten writer. Adult lovers of literature remember him, but few young bibliophiles have ever heard his name. This is a seemingly strange and surprising phenomenon, since he is a contemporary writer who was well known not very long ago. His last book was published in 1997, and was preceded by seven others, some of which won critical acclaim, and three of which became bestsellers. How, then, can we explain his nearly complete disappearance from the visual field of contemporary literature? The answer to this question, which this article attempts to establish, is that Schütz was never really accepted into the center of the Israeli literary system. Indeed, he earned a faithful audience of readers, mainly thanks to the fascinating plots of his stories and also because of the confessional, revealing position of his narrators, and perhaps even for ex-literary reasons — his bizarre biography and the fact that he was a handsome man — but, in fact, he was and remained all his life an 'outside child' in Hebrew literature, because the thematic and aesthetic codes of his work did not fit those of the center of the contemporary Israeli literary system. Yigal Schwartz attempts to support this claim at two complementary levels: the level of the world of emotion and consciousness that Schütz creates and the level of the author's style which both, separately and together, significantly deviate from the normative Israeli 'horizon of expectations'.