Israeli Literature

This is the most ambitious and representative anthology yet published of modern Hebrew novellas, a book that will provide any reader with a fine overview of the best fiction that small but vibrant country has to offer.

Included here are novellas by six of Israel's most important and honored contemporary writers. Aharon Appelfeld's "In the Isles of St. George" tells of a fugitive black marketeer hiding on a desolate Italian island, who finds his past, his Jewishness, and his very sense of identity resolved. In "Yani on the Mountain, " David Grossman explores the psychological impact of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on a young generation of Israelis living in a Mount Sinai army base in its final days before demolition. Ruth Almog's "Shrinking" lyrically portrays the loneliness and frustrations of a middle-aged heroine whose longing for human contact is thwarted by her stifling bond to her father.

Also included are Yaakov Shabtai's "Uncle Peretz Takes Flight, " a grotesque portrait of one man's cowardice, in the,vein of Shalom Aleichem; Yehudit Hendel's "Small Change, " about the interaction between the paranoid experience of an Israeli woman abroad and a complex father-daughter relationship; and Benjamin Tammuz's "My Brother, " in which one brother's selfish conquests are contrasted to the other's passive, but ultimately more sinister, altruism.

In the words of editor Gershon Shaked, these novellas "show modern Israeli fiction at its richest and most diversified, with a character all its own."

This outstanding volume of 26 essays represents a cross-section of the writings of Arnold J. Band on Jewish literature. Band, a renowned Jewish studies and humanities scholar, writes on such topics as literature in historic context, interpretations of Hasidic tales and other traditional texts, Zionism, S. Y. Agnon and other important Israeli writers, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Jewish studies, and the Jewish community. Scholars and students of literature--particularly Jewish literature--and Jewish studies won't want to miss this remarkable collection.

This comprehensive critique explores the relevancy of old discourses for contemporary narratives in ten Israeli novels. How the theory of deconstruction affects the future of a nation as presented in aspects of these literary texts is the focus of this book. The texts represent the meeting of ancient lore and modern narrative, as well as the conflict between a demanding past and the threat implied in an open future. The fragmentary quality of Israeli fiction denies the guarantee of unity and contravenes a fixed interpretative contextual discourse. The major tensions that call for a repositioning of critical standpoints underlie the textual contradictions that pose existential crises for their protagonists and an exciting challenge for the reader.

In this book, Shoshan asserts that in contemporary Middle Eastern countries the "field of struggle" that cultures constitute provides the ground for contesting and transforming the hegemonic patriarchal discourse and recently began to give voice, especially in women's literature, to feminist critique. Examining the gender issue as reflected in a variety of discourses that take place in contemporary Middle Eastern cultures, the contributors explore how feminine images are constructed in tradition-bound societies and in the context of nationalist projects. Both Islamic societies in Middle Eastern countries and the Jewish society in Israel are addressed in the discussion of the role of women's writing and other means of expression in challenging traditional-patriarchal concepts, including nationalism. While the conclusion about the manipulation that patriarchal discourse performs on women's images supports the available scholarship, the emphasis in this volume on the specific expressions of femininediscourse will be a welcome addition to the existing literature.