InniutandKooliut: Trends in Israeli Narrative Literature, 1995-1999

Abstract

IN MARCH 1998, A MEETING of prominent Israeli and Swedish women writers took place in Stockholm. One of the Swedish writers asked Orly Castel-Bloom, the most eminent and prominent Israeli writer in recent years, a question related to her preoccupation with the process of writing and her outrageous, hilarious, absurd, avant-garde narratives. The question was: How can you write such stories in it difficult to be a writer and live in Israel? In the good Jewish tradition, Castel-Bloom replied with a question: Is it difficult to be a writer and live in Sweden? The audience was stupefied. After long moments of silence everyone burst into laughter. It sounded like a joke, but it wasn't. These two writers came from two opposite worlds: the Israeli writer, from a pressure cooker of constant changes, political, ideological, social and familial intensity and density, permeated with an anxiety about claustrophobic suffocation; whereas the Swedish writer lived in a place where, according to her own account and the account of her fellow writers, the last exciting event that happened in their country was the student revolution in the late I96os, on which they are all still feeding. Their loneliness is agoraphobic--not the one of a prison, but of a desert island, where all is open, but there is nothing around one-nothing external is happening. Since the I950s, an increasing number of American themes, characters, landscapes, and experiences have entered Israeli literature, but usually they are presented in contrast to Israeli reality. Over the years, we have witnessed a process of Americanization in Israeli life that finds its various expressions in literature. This process has reached extreme dimensions in the last ten years, and today we find great similarities between the literatures of the