Israeli Literature Research Articles

The reception of modern Israeli literature in Turkey

The reception of modern Israeli literature in Turkey

Between Negative Stigma (Cultural Deprivation) and Positive Stigma (Learning Disability): The Historical Development of Two Special Education Tracks

This article posits an updated, broader perspective on the concept of learning disabilities (LDs) than that accepted in the local Israeli literature, revealing how it is immersed in class, ethnicity, and culture. This is shown through historical description, accreditation, and contrasting of the two special education discourses: the "cultural deprivation" discourse and the "LDs" discourse. There are three sections. Part One presents the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological background of the sociological and discursive debate about LDs. The social-constructivist model used in an analysis of the two categories is proposed as an alternative to the clinical-medical model. The definitions of LDs and cultural deprivation accepted in the Israeli discourse are presented in Part Two. The metamorphoses in the discourse about the category of LDs are uncovered through reference to their conceptual and historical antecedents. This part discusses the various understandings and constructions of learning difficulties. Part Three examines the textual representation of parents of children with disabilities in both cases, exploring the meanings of guilt, responsibility, and agency in each discourse. The conclusion clarifies the social and political significance of the distinct textual and rhetorical representations. It becomes evident that the discourse on LDs and the discourse on cultural deprivation are two special education tracks directed at different target audiences: the culturally enriched audience, well-off and educated on the one hand, and the Mizrahi audience of limited means and education on the other hand.

“Things That Are Better Concealed Than Revealed”: An Historical-Biographical Study of S. Y. Agnon's Attitude toward the Sabbatean Movement and the Traditional Jewish World

The literary works of many Israeli novelists and poets—among them Ḥaim Hazaz, Nathan Bistriski, Uri Ẓvi Greenberg, Amir Gilboa, Theodor Herzl, Abraham Samuel Stein, Zalman Shazar, Benyamin Shvili, and Yehoram Ben Meir—reference and develop the themes of Sabbatai Ẓvi and the Sabbatean movement; and scholars have explored the use of messianism in general and Sabbateanism in particular in Israeli literature. Yet no one has comprehensively examined the role that the Sabbatean movement plays in the oeuvre of S. Y. Agnon, the most important Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, despite numerous references to it in his work.

Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theater

In her article "Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theater" Zahava Caspi traces the traumatic experience as a point of departure in apocalyptic plays in Israeli literature. Caspi argues that in Israeli apocalyptic plays a critical gap opens up between the fictional narrative that ends with destruction and the theatrical apparatus that creates a sense of continuity. The theatrical text delivers a message to the audience inviting them to increase their engagement with and accountability for continuity not merely during the theatrical event, but more significantly, once the performance is over. The play's moral imperative to provide a "positive" ending to the apocalyptic narrative in the world outside the auditorium thus counters the effect of its ending on the stage. Caspi postulates that it is the active involvement with the play by its audience what makes theater a more ethical medium than any other.

Representation of Space in Mizrahi Fiction

Mizrahi writers are aware that their location in Israel—the geographical periphery—had hitherto not been portrayed in Israeli literature. This constitutes a cultural position of alienage and exceptionality and at the same time a new and concrete place—poor neighborhoods in southern Tel Aviv and western Jerusalem and development towns established in the 1950s and 1960s at the country's border and in sparsely populated areas as part of a policy of dispersal of the Mizrahi population and distancing it from the country's center. The disconnection from the centers arouses a Mizrahi consciousness of the periphery which divided the Israeli space, imagined to be uniform, into ethnic zones. Mizrahi fiction gazes into the distances of consciousness that distinguish the geographic center from its margins in a dual perspective: it examines the margins with a gaze that creates awareness of the existence of a prestigious and attractive center and examines the center itself as a place that cannot be penetrated by Mizrahim and turned into a home for them. In this sense, the spatial consciousness of Mizrahi authors highlights a lack of belonging—both to the periphery and to the center—and a constant migratory movement between these two split geographical foci. I argue that, instead of the hegemonic unitary and complete space, Mizrahi fiction of the second generation—texts written during the last two decades—offers an ethnic perception that divides space, thus defining a "diasporic" point of view.

Portrait of Haifa in 1948: The Poet, the Bay and the Mountain

Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets. Historically, Amichai belongs to the group of writers who founded “Israeli literature” in the 1950s and early ’60s, and were dubbed the “Generation of the State” because they were the first authors to publish in the State of Israel after it was established. Amichai and his peers rebelled against their predecessors’ grandiose, ideological verse and proclaimed that “understatement” and individualism would be two of their guiding principles. While doing research for my book, Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet (UPNE, 2008), I discovered 100 love letters that Amichai sent from Haifa to New York during 1947–1948. These are both a literary account and a historical testimony of great value. Amichai’s portraits of Haifa during those months have never been discussed. In this article, I describe the way the letters bring to life Haifa’s magnificent landscapes and the struggle of the Jewish city from Amichai’s unique point of view.

Rethinking theNakba

In The Orchard (1972), the Israeli writer Benjamin Tammuz reformulated the image of the land as the arena of the struggle in Palestine.1 In this symbolic novella, the Israeli writer tries to go beyond the image of the Arab in the Israeli literature as a mute shadow. The mute in this novella is Luna, the woman who symbolizes the land, and the struggle between the two brothers who are her lovers results in their deaths and her son’s appropriation of the motherland. The highly symbolic style in Tammuz’s work overshadows the magic elements in the tale. The memoir of the narrator shows the limits of symbolism and how the story of pain in the Palestinian theater is erased by a poor imitation of the Old Testament myth of Abraham and his two wives and sons. In the novella Ishmael and Isaac take the names of Obadiah (Abdullah) and Daniel, two brothers born to a Russian German father, the first from a Muslim Turkish mother and the second from a Jewish Russian mother. Both meet in the orchard of Mahomet Effendi, a Turkish land owner in Jaffa, who has an adopted girl whose origins are vague: was she a Jewish or a Muslim Arab? No one knows. The fight between the two brothers for the woman, who takes the shape of a mythical character, ends with their deaths, and their mother becomes pregnant by her Palmachi son. One can read this novella as a new version of A. B. Yehoshua’s story “Facing the Forests.”2 The same dream of fire and the same ambiguities veil the story of the indigenous Palestinians. In “Facing the Forests” not only is the nameless Palestinian called an Arab but the name of his original village

The Shadow of Death: Letters in Flames (review)

Reviewed by: The Shadow of Death: Letters in Flames Zev Garber The Shadow of Death: Letters in Flames. By Moshe Pelli. Pp. 141. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. Paper, $22.95. The effort of Moshe Pelli to understand Jewish and Israeli literature on the Shoah is distinguished by a dual accomplishment. His introductory chapter presents an overview of Jewish literature on the Shoah, which recounts the horrors of the Nazi treatment of Europe's Jews in the historical [End Page 431] context of deep-rooted prejudices and ethno-centric behavior. The literature surveyed is referenced as "letters in flame," and encompasses memoirs, testimonies, and poetry that speak of anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, hypocritical humanism, and theological issues as contributing factors in the murder of six million Jews. He pinpoints evolving characteristics of Shoah writing as conveyed by the literary critic Lawrence Langer and others. Second, Pelli's cogent methodology provides a critical view of the literary structures and secondary sources under discussion. He sees additional sources in the basic narrative, and his literary analytical approach enables the reader to encounter literary themes and approaches in context and to appreciate different opinions on the Shoah imagination. His chapters are carefully planned and argued: anatomy of a literary composition, levels of interpretation, sample readings, several footnotes, and an acceptable bibliography. Pelli's volume is divided into two sections. Section one, "The Holocaust Experience from Within," discusses the Shoah experience of survivors in an architectonic fashion: premonition of roundup and exclusion in Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939; issues of theology and indictment of faith in Elie Wiesel, Night; nature of Man in Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; depiction of Planet Auschwitz in Ka-Tzetnik (Yehiel Dinur), Star Eternal (Heb, Kokhav ha-efer); and the use and limits of metaphor in Shoah related matters in Jerzy Koseinski, The Painted Bird. Section two, "After the Holocaust—Experience from Without," embraces three Israeli writers on the reality of the Shoah from the view of a Jewish state that emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz, namely, Hanoch Bartov, The Brigade, Hayim Gouri, The Chocolate Deal, and Yehudah Amichai, Not of This Time, Not of This Place. In his review of the television mini-series Holocaust presented on NBC television in April 1978, Elie Wiesel wrote: The witness feels here duty bound to declare: What you have seen on your screen is not what happened there. You may think you know how the victims lived and died, but you do not. Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair: the dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy or capable of recovering. The seemingly surrealistic category of Holocaust writing where time, identity, and historical reality are distorted is underscored by Pelli's treatment of Ka-Tzetnik's fragmentary chapters of Star Eternal that portrays a day in Auschwitz: second person voice in the present yet a lack of dialogues and [End Page 432] lack of personality. An inverse universe abounds. Heavenly bodies are examined, and Abrahamic covenantal promise and divine guidance are shattered in the Holocaust universe. Wiesel, who consciously associates the churban of European Jewry with the akeda, or "binding" of Isaac in the biblical story where Abraham is tested and Isaac is victimized (Genesis 22), raises in Night questions of God's presence in face of radical dehumanization. This act of questioning is a Wieselian din Torah with not against God, which does not diminish the divine-human paradox of the Shoah, but serves to make the event more significant and more troubling, and therefore also more full of hope. Likewise, Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, is a stark journey to hell and back of a highly intelligent detached Jewish Italian chemist. Pelli's artful rendition of Levi's prose conveys appropriately the dehumanizing process which bears witness to the depth of human depravity fed by hatred of the other and tolerated by a world standing silent. The sensitivity and authenticity of Levi's language conveys the hope that this depraved Auschwitz world will never be again. Sidra DeKoven...

Reading for the Nation: 'Third-world Literature' and Israel/Palestine

Abstract The lack of attention to reading and reception in postcolonial literary studies makes it easy to forget that one of the field's earliest points of reference is a theory of reading. Fredric Jameson's controversial 1986 essay on 'Third-World Literature', which famously dutinguuhes first-world' from 'third-world' writing, also posits a difference between first' and 'third' world readers by arguing that the first-world' reader L· seriously limited as a reader of 'third-world' texts. This essay returns to Jameson, and to the idea of national allegory, as a way of understanding and responding to the popular and academic reception of Palestinian and Israeli literature. Although metropolitan readers have generally been very willing to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts as national allegories in something like the sense described by Jameson, readers of Palestinian and Israeli women 's writing have tended to privilege these writers ' gender over their nationalism. Drawing on the work of two of the most internationally recognizable female novelists from Israel/Palestine, Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh, the essay argues that national allegory should be understood as a reading and a writing practice, one that writers of both genders anticipate and emphasize in contexts where the nation's political and imaginative force remains urgent and immediate. Keywords Fredric Jameson, national allegory, Palestine, Israel, women's writing, Sahar Khalifeh, Orly Castel-Bloom The lack of attention to reading and reception in postcolonial literary studies makes it easy to forget that one of the field's earliest points of reference is a theory of reading. Fredric Jameson's controversial 1986 essay on 'third-world literature', which famously distinguishes 'first-world' from 'third-world' writing, begins by positing a difference between first world and third world readers. It is worth revisiting the terms of this claim: [A]s western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share.1 Jameson's concern in this passage is not that 'third-world' writers 'are still writing novels like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson',2 a statement that Aijaz Ahmad and others after him indignandy took at face value.3 Instead, as the quotation marks around the reference to Dreiser and Anderson indicate, Jameson is imagining the response of a hypothetical 'first-world' reader whose engagements with texts from the rest of the world are limited by the narrow political and aesthetic horizons of his or her education and experience. We have been trained, Jameson writes, to 'restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts'.4 This failing in our reading practices is what motivates the better remembered corrective that follows, that 'all . . . third-world texts are to be read as what I will call national allegories',5 which, in contrast to the unconscious political allegories of modern and contemporary 'first-world' literature, are 'conscious and overt'.6 If we are 'to coincide in any adequate way with that Other ideal reader'7 of the conscious allegory, we need to be able to recognise the 'epistemologica! priority',8 in a materialist sense, of narratives that do not institute a 'radical split' between the private and the public,9 and to take seriously the idea that 'the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself'.10 As Neil Lazarus has suggested in his account of this challenge to the first world reader - who for Lazarus is not any first world reader, but a reader with a particular kind of literary and political training and set of beliefs1 [ -Jameson's 'third-worldness' is best understood not as a geographical term, but as the name of a political desire for autonomy and collective self-determination in a world where the nation remains 'unforgoable as a site of liberation struggle'. …

Examining Hebrew-Amharic bilingual children's literature in Israel: Language, themes, and power

This article examines the emerging Israeli phenomenon of bilingual literature for children with a particular focus on Hebrew-Amharic children's literature and its representation of themes in a cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic context.

Il teatro di Edna Mazya: dal dramma famigliare a quello storico-politico

A macroscopic trend in contemporary Israeli literature concerns the growing success and increase of women writers. Even in theatre - a genre which, in current Jewish culture, is new in many aspects -, many women dramatists are gaining considerable achievements. The incidence of this phenomenon may be valued in the light of some innovative contributions, such as the elaboration of various female - or feminist - themes. The dramatic writings of Edna Mazya are particularly eloquent if read according to this analysis. In this article we will deal with some of her literary topics, which recur especially in her drama Herod (May 2000): on the one hand, the biblical inspiration and the actualization of biblical features and Mazya's leitmotif, i.e. the representation of marginalized characters and their stories in contrast to the “main stream”.

Informal payments for health care – the phenomenon and its context

This paper reviews current research and literature on the issue of informal payments for health care and its context and suggests a new perspective for a better understanding of this phenomenon. This perspective, based on political culture and behavior and on wider social processes, is already used to explain various phenomena from different fields of public policy. The paper explains the impact of a specific type of political culture, called 'alternative politics' (AP) in the Israeli literature, on healthcare policy and institutional healthcare settings. AP is based on a 'do-it-yourself' approach adopted by citizens to address their dissatisfaction with governmental services. When such a mode of political culture is diffused to all sectors and levels of society, all players, including bureaucrats and politicians, are guided by short-term considerations and apply unilateral strategies that bypass formal rules either through illegal activity or by marginalizing formal rules. Explaining informal payments by analyzing social processes and political culture and behavior has some disadvantages, but it provides us with a better understanding of the phenomenon while covering most of its characteristics and configurations.

Russian Israeli Literature through the Lens of Immigrant Humor

Russian Israeli Literature through the Lens of Immigrant Humor

Yehuda Amichai, Jerusalem, and the Fate of Others

Yehuda Amichai, Jerusalem, and the Fate of Others Ranen Omer–Sherman Yehuda Amichai (1924‐2000) remains a profoundly influential influence on Israeli literature’s grappling with the problem of competing claims to the land’s sacred spaces. More than any other poet, he transformed the Hebrew language into a colloquial and immediate medium for addressing the troubling violence to which he bore witness.1 Many of Amichai’s most timeless and compassionate poems examine the meaning of Jerusalem, in both its temporal and heavenly dimensions, as a shared space in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims sometimes coexist, and sometimes struggle against the Other. This essay grapples with a few of the important ways in which the poet engaged and was engaged by the troubled city. Reading Love Poems (1981) and the more politically fraught 1988 Poems of Jerusalem, one is impressed by how the ostensibly disparate categories represented by these two collections distinctly echo off each other.2 In the classroom I have often noticed how, it is the indelible tone he achieves—a confluence of humor, indelible irony, and more than a hint of melancholy that always withstood existentialist despair even when it was not unfashionable—which ensures the likelihood of Amichai’s enduring stature as one of the most distinctly representative Israeli voices as the modern Hebrew canon continues to evolve. Whenever and wherever one happens to be situated in relation to the peaks and valleys of Israel’s triumphs and heartbreaks, to read Amichai is to experience an iconoclastic movement between the tribal and the universal, the personal and the collective. But as a forcefully Jewish voice he also stands as one of the most dazzlingly literate and intertextual of our age, moving fluidly between Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekial, insistently demanding that readers grapple with allusions to festivals and ritual life presented in unexpected ways. As he explained of the critical condition of the modern Hebrew poet: “Every word we use carries in and of itself connotations from the Bible, the Siddur, the Midrash, the Talmud. Every word reverberates through the halls of Jewish history” (quoted in Abramson, 14). Yet in spite of that vast spatial and temporal landscape, Amichai’s poems are refreshingly startling in the way they encounter Jerusalem without the seductive masks and retreats of fictive or archetypal personae. For many years, Amichai lived in Jerusalem as a true pedestrian at heart, ambling through the city’s streets and open markets. In this way, he was in acute proximity to the inexorable and vulnerable limits of Israeli and Palestinian bodies surrounded by the city’s stony eternity. In the aftermath of Amichai’s passing, numerous readers reverently remarked on the nature of the poet’s relation to his city, though not always with a great deal of specificity. Poet David Biespiel felt that Amichai consistently sought to create “a language of and for the city, merging the contemporary and the eternal” while Aviya Kushner magnanimously declared that the poet was simply “Jerusalem’s great friend. He wrote of her as a child, a lover, a companion, and an enigma. She was always on his mind, and he was always trying to understand her” (613‐14).3 Few poets before Amichai succeeded so well in writing of the city directly out of the continuum of Jewish textual tradition while still managing to address its deep contemporary conflicts, the vexing new reality of inhabiting rebuilt Jerusalem. In other words, the poet’s rich intertextuality never lets the reader forget that in these ancient sources, the “ideal” is already at odds with the “real.” Born in the Bavarian town of Würzburg during the unstable days of the Weimar Republic, Amichai’s Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to Palestine in 1936. Amichai left behind Ruth, a childhood girlfriend who was killed in the Holocaust.4 After a brief stay in Petah Tikva, the family moved next to Jerusalem where Amichai would remain until his death (except for a sojourn in Haifa and brief periods when he taught in the United States), bequeathing the poet the sense of a casual intimacy with the city that resonates throughout his works. He began writing poetry in...

My Imaginary Offspring: Reality and Fantasy in Days of Ziklag by S. Yizhar and in If There is a Heaven by Ron Leshem

The union of language and life bought upon us by the modern age of the internet—that truism that the world has become one global village—does not apply to the unique army experience of young people in Israel. At the same time, it is surprising that this elemental experience of the Israelis enjoys only an indirect, not a central, reflection in Israeli literature. The article compares two stark war novels: Days of Ziklag (1958) by S. Yizhar, considered the epic of Israel's War of Independence, and If There Is a Heaven (2005) by Ron Leshem, deemed the most important novel of the first Lebanon war. Both novels use factual historical material in the literary design of the war experience, and the Aristotelian separation of literature from history is blurred in them. In fact, in the second novel this separation hardly exists. Yizhar's work still evinces clear marks of fiction, such as the name Ziklag, which is a fictive biblical place where the battle took place, and is written by the stream-of-consciousness technique; the "Yizharian" language too is highly literary. By contrast, all these "literary" components are missing from Ron Leshem's war novel of the 2000s. Place, language, events, and characters are drawn from a concrete and known reality. For all that, If There Is a Heaven is a work of fine literature.

A Question of Language and Audience: On the Possibility of "Iraqi Novels" in Hebrew

This article focuses on two short novels, Sami Mikhael's Hofen shel Arafel (A handful of fog) and Shimon Balas's Vehu Akher (The other one), written in Hebrew by Israeli writers born in Iraq. Set in Iraq, the two novels are imbued in its reality and history, and the personality at the center strives to belong to Iraq yet often feels rejected by the surrounding society. The question at the center of the article is whether these articles should be considered Israeli or Iraqi? If translated to Arabic, they will be read as Iraqi novels, yet they were published in Hebrew and thus were targeting the Israeli reader, unfamiliar as he is with that reality. For the first time, this article tries to place Mikhael and Balas alongside Iraqi Arab writers, living in Iraq and in exile, and publishing in Arabic and other languages, to examine the interrelations between the writer, his intended audience, his identity, and the language he uses as a tool. This article finds great differences between the two writers and their Iraqi colleagues that shed a new light on various expressions of Iraqiness, experiences of exile, and trends in Israeli literature and intellectual life.

Reorienting Hebrew Literary History: The View from the East

Although Hebrew literary criticism has begun redressing the exclusion of women and minority writers from the Hebrew canon, the literary geography of modern Hebrew remains largely unquestioned. Modern Hebrew literature is still viewed as the progeny of European maskilim, while the concurrent production of belles lettres in Hebrew and other languages by non-Ashkenazi Jewries has been overlooked. What are the ramifications of this Eurocentric viewpoint for our understanding of the origins of Jewish cultural modernity, of modern Hebrew literature, and of contemporary Israeli literature produced by Mizraḥi and Sephardi writers?

Social semiotics and memory in contemporary Jewish American fiction

Despite being largely influenced by Israeli literature, contemporary Jewish American writers rarely draw upon Sephardic culture. This indicates a detachment from questions like the political ones Israeli writers emphasize, and points towards a tendency tofocus on the search for identity in a new country. The aim of this paper is to take a semiotic approach in examining this phenomenon from the standpoint of the Hebraism of American culture. I will take into account concepts of social semiotics to expand the analysis of discursive praxis, focusing also on extra and pre-textual elements. This will ultimately lead us to matters of memory, immigration, filiation and search for a national and cultural identity, which, in turn, must be seen from a historical viewpoint that cannot be set apart from discourse analysis itself.

Israeli Literature Trends And Its Philosophy

Israeli Literature Trends And Its Philosophy

Some Thoughts on Russian-Language Israeli Fiction: Introducing Dina Rubina

The article seeks to introduce Russian-language Israeli literature, specifically focusing on the works of one of its best-known representatives, Dina Rubina. The article traces the three most prominent themes in her works: the theater, the autobiography, and the cultural synthesis between post-Soviet and Israeli Jewish cultures accompanied by the complex linguistic relationships between Russian and Hebrew. Drawing on the Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque and of the humor associated with the lower bodily stratum, as well as on the topos of teatrum mundi and the legacy of Russian drama, the article examines Rubina’s commentary on Israeli society and culture. Her focus on the ridiculous and the absurd, on the permutations of masks and identities in Israel, and on the multifaceted immigrant experience is essential for understanding her writing.