Documentation and Fiction in Hameiri's Accounts of the Great War

Abstract

In her article Documentation and Fiction in Hameiri's Accounts of the Great War Tamar S. Drukker discusses the only surviving Hebrew-language docu-novel of the Great War, written by Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970), a Hungarian Jewish officer. His 1930 memoir The Great Madness is a wartime personal journal about his life at the Russian front. Many of the episodes described in The Great Madness receive a more styled treatment in Hameiri's wartime short stories which appeared in three collections during the 1920s. These stories are sometimes surreal, symbolic, and carefully crafted. Drukker's study of Hameiri's wartime life writing and his literary rendition of experience into stylized stories shed light on the purpose of his writing, the intended audience, and in particular Hameiri's choices -- linguistic, literary and ideological -- in choosing the medium for recounting and documenting in writing life experience in extreme conditions.