Abstract

Allusions to Henrik Ibsen’s plays in the works of two prominent Israeli modernist writers, Amos Oz’s autobiographical A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004) and David Grossman’s The Zigzag Kid (1994) examined in the context of the Israeli reception of Ibsen in the 1950s and 1960s. To establish the variety of meanings Ibsen’s plays had for the audiences of the Habimah production of Peer Gynt in 1952 and The Kameri production of Hedda Gabler in 1966, this article draws on newspaper reviews and actors’ memoirs, as well as providing an analysis of Leah Goldberg’s translation of Peer Gynt. It emerges that both authors enlisted Ibsen in their exploration of the myths surrounding the formation of Israeli nationhood and identity.

Highlights

  • The year is 1970, the setting is a Jerusalem school, and the dramatis personae are an irate teacher, the near-13-year-old Nonny Feuerberg, and Gabi, his beloved guardian and his father’s secretary

  • The passage is longer than the corresponding lines in Peer Gynt, and the comparison must have been important enough for Oz to use it twice, along with additional references to Peer Gynt (Oz mentions seeing the play on a shelf and hearing Grieg’s suite)

  • The play premiered in Israel in May 1952, just a few months after Fania Klausner’s suicide and a few months before the young Amos changed his name from Klausner to Oz and left Jerusalem for a kibbutz

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Summary

Introduction

The year is 1970, the setting is a Jerusalem school, and the dramatis personae are an irate teacher, the near-13-year-old Nonny Feuerberg, and Gabi, his beloved guardian and his father’s secretary. The Zigzag Kid is about identity, Nonny’s and his country’s On his zigzagging journey into his parents’ past, Nonny mentally travels to Mandatory Palestine and to the early years of the State of Israel in the 1950s. He discovers that his grandparents are the supposedly infamous robber. The passage is longer than the corresponding lines in Peer Gynt, and the comparison must have been important enough for Oz to use it twice, along with additional references to Peer Gynt (Oz mentions seeing the play on a shelf and hearing Grieg’s suite) Both of these prominent Israeli writers include Ibsen in narratives dealing with childhood, bereavement, and the years immediately before and after the foundation of the State of Israel. What I hope to uncover through this method is an insight into the nature of Ibsen’s relation to Israeli literary modernism.

Background and Methods
Amos Oz and Peer Gynt in Habimah 1952
Leah Goldberg’s Translation
Sandro Malmquist’s Israeli Peer Gynt
Peer Gynt and the Lost Promised Lands
Grossman and the Imaginary Ibsen Performance
Conclusion
Full Text
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