The body of written works produced in the Hebrew
language and distinct from Jewish literature, which
also exists in other languages.
Literature in Hebrew has been produced
uninterruptedly from the early 12th century bc, and
certain excavated tablets may indicate a literature
of even greater antiquity. From 1200 bc to c. ad
200, Hebrew was a spoken language in Palestine,
first as biblical Hebrew, then as Mishnaic Hebrew, a
later dialect that does not derive directly from the
biblical dialect and one that gained literary status
as the Pharisees began to employ it in their
teaching in the 2nd century bc. It was not revived
as a spoken language until the late 19th century,
and in the 20th century it was adopted as the
official language of the new State of Israel. The
latter event gave impetus to a growing movement in
Hebrew literature centred in Israel.
Hebrew literature is not synonymous with Jewish
literature. Some Hebrew writing was produced by the
Samaritans and in the 17th century by Protestant
enthusiasts. Jews also produced important
literatures in Greek, Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo-Spanish
(Ladino), Yiddish, and a number of other languages.
Apart from the Aramaic writings, however, such
literatures always served only that part of Jewry
using the language in question. When the community
ceased to exist, the literature produced in that
language was forgotten (or, in the case of Greek
Jewish literature, became part of Christian
tradition) except for whatever part of it had been
translated into Hebrew and thus became part of
Hebrew literature.
The Hebrew language, though not spoken between c.
ad 200 and the late 19th century, has always adapted
itself to the needs of changing literary tastes. In
the Bible it develops from a simple and earthy idiom
to a language suitable for the expression of
sophisticated religious thought without losing the
poetic force and rhythmic fullness that
characterizes it. Mishnaic Hebrew is pedestrian and
exact, and yet it can reach heights of irony or of
warmth. In medieval poetry Hebrew allows extravagant
displays of verbal artistry but also, in
northwestern Europe, a simplicity equal to that of
the spoken languages of its milieu. One generation
of translators in the 12th century created a
scientific Hebrew that is not inferior to
contemporary Arabic or Latin in precision or
syntactic refinement. The 17th–19th centuries saw
the formation of a stately, rigid, classical style
based on biblical Hebrew, but at the same time
eastern European mystics made the language serve the
expression of their love of God. Literary Hebrew in
the 20th century draws upon ancient literature to a
marked degree, with styles often modeled upon
ancient predecessors. The modern period has also
evolved a new type of language for nonliterary
writing, while in novels the style is often based
upon the spoken language.
Ancient Hebrew literature
Preexilian period, c. 1200–587 bc
All that is
preserved of the literature of this period is
slightly more than 20 of the 39 books included in
the Old Testament (the remainder being from the next
period). Poetry probably preceded prose. Biblical
poetry was based on the principle of parallelism;
i.e., the two halves of a verse express the same
idea, either by repeating it in different words or
by stressing different aspects of it. Examples are
found in the book of Psalms: “But they flattered him
with their mouths; they lied to him with their
tongues” (Ps. 78:36); “He turned their rivers to
blood, so that they could not drink of their
streams” (Ps. 78:44). To this form was added a
simple rhythm, consisting mainly in having each half
of a line divided into an equal number of stressed
words. There were also folk songs, to which belonged
perhaps large parts of the Song of Solomon, dirges,
epic chants, and psalms. The use of various forms of
poetry in the work of the prophets appears to be a
later development.
The earlier prose texts were still very close to
poetry in structure and language. The first real
prose may well have been some of the laws recorded
in the Pentateuch. In Jeremiah and Deuteronomy a
high standard of prose rhetoric was achieved: some
of the conversations in the historical books were
attempts to reproduce in writing the style of
ordinary speech.
Period of the Second Temple, 538 bc–ad 70
The
literary output of this period was large, only part
of it belonging to the biblical canon. The biblical
Hebrew of the writings was artificial because it had
ceased to be spoken and had been replaced by
Aramaic, a related Semitic language, and Mishnaic
Hebrew. Works that are included among the Dead Sea
Scrolls belong to this period. Some of these works
provide evidence of a new kind of writing, the
homiletic, or sermonizing, commentary to the Bible
called Midrash. The only work of real literary merit
among the scrolls is the fervent personal poetry of
the Hymns of Thanksgiving.
Parts of the biblical books of Ezra and Daniel
and certain works among the Dead Sea Scrolls are in
an early form of Aramaic. This period also began to
provide translations (called Targums) of most of the
Hebrew Bible into a slightly later Aramaic.
Talmudic literatureIn contrast to the works of
the Bible and the Second Temple were the collections
of writings concerned with Jewish civil and
religious law. Whereas the former were lengthy
writings bearing the imprint of their authors or
editors, early rabbinic literature consisted
entirely of collections of individual statements
loosely strung together. The individual paragraphs
exhibit the influence of Hellenistic rhetoric.
Collections that follow the arrangement of biblical
books are called Midrash, as opposed to works such
as the Mishna, where the material is arranged
according to subject. The Mishna was the main work
of the period c. 100 bc–ad 200. The following
period, ad 200–500, was notable for two main
innovations: the appearance of an additional
literary centre in Babylonia, where Jewry flourished
in contrast to its subjugation under the oppressive
rule of Rome and, later, Byzantium in Palestine; and
the literary use of the spoken local dialects of
Aramaic alongside Hebrew. The Talmuds produced by
Palestine and Babylonia in this period contained a
large proportion of Haggada, statements dealing with
theological and ethical matters and using stories,
anecdotes, and parables to illustrate certain
points. This material was later an influence on
Hebrew fiction of the Middle Ages and of the modern
period.
Literary revival, 500–1000
In the 6th century, some Jewish groups attempted to
enforce the exclusive use of Hebrew in the
synagogue, this tendency being part of a Hebrew
revival that began in Palestine and spread westward
but did not reach Babylonia until the 10th century.
Piyyuṭim Synagogues began in this period to
appoint official precentors, part of whose duty it
was to compose poetical additions to the liturgy on
special sabbaths and festivals. The authors were
called payṭanim (from Greek poiētēs, “poet”), their
poems piyyuṭim. The keynote was messianic fervour
and religious exuberance. Besides employing the
entire biblical, Mishnaic, and Aramaic vocabularies,
the payṭanim coined thousands of new words. Such
poems, presupposing a highly educated audience,
abound in recondite allusions and contain exhaustive
lists of rites and laws. It is known that the most
outstanding poets—Phineas the Priest, Yose ben Yose,
Yannai, and Eleazar ha-Kalir, or ben Kalir—lived in
that order, but when or where in Palestine any of
them lived is not known. The accepted datings are
3rd century and 5th–6th century ad. Many piyyuṭim
are still used in the synagogue.
Adoption of Arabic metreBiblical Hebrew was
re-established as the literary idiom about 900 by
Saʾadia ben Joseph, grammarian and religious
polemicist. The Arabic system of quantitative metre
was adapted for Hebrew during this period
(900–1000), probably by Dunash ben Labrat. At first
the piyyuṭ form was retained for religious poems,
and the new metres were used only for secular
poetry, which closely imitated Arabic models and,
like the latter, was chiefly employed for laudatory
addresses to prominent people.
The Middle Ages
The Palestinian tradition in Europe, 800–1300From
Palestine, the Hebrew renaissance soon spread into
the Byzantine Empire. In Sicily and southern Italy
(which belonged to Byzantium) several important
payṭanim were at work, and before 1000 a secular
literature began to arise in Italy: a fantastic
travelogue of Eldad the Danite; a historical
romance, Sefer ha-yashar (1625; Eng. trans., Sefer
ha-yashar, the Book of the Righteous) and Josippon,
a revision of Josephus’ Antiquities filled with
legendary incidents—this last-named book was popular
until modern times and was translated into many
languages. Nathan ben Yehiel completed in 1101 at
Rome a dictionary of Talmudic Aramaic and Hebrew,
the ʿArukh, which is still used.
In the middle of the 10th century members of the
north Italian family Kalonymos brought Talmudic
studies and piyyuṭim to Mainz, Ger., where the
yeshiva (school) became a centre of studies under
the direction of Gershom ben Judah, known as “the
Light of the Exile.” As a poet, he established a
distinctive style of European piyyuṭ in poems that
read very much like early European popular poetry.
The greatest alumnus of the Mainz academy was Rashi,
an author of complete commentaries on the Bible and
on the Babylonian Talmud, himself a poet of note.
The slaughter of Jewish peoples in western and
central Europe during the Crusades drove large
masses of Jews into eastern Europe. The German Jews
carried with them their Yiddish speech but hardly
any literary culture. In Germany accounts of the
disaster were written in a new prose style permeated
with poetry; liturgical poetry became henceforth
mainly a chronicle of persecutions. These sufferings
inspired an important mystical movement, largely
propagated through stories, of which the chief
collections are the Ayn Shoyn Mayse Bukh (1602;
Maʿaseh Book) and the Sefer Ḥasidim (1538; “The Book
of the Just”), the latter attributed to Judah ben
Samuel, “the Hasid” of Regensburg (died 1217).
The golden age in Spain, 900–1200Spanish Jewry
began to flourish in Muslim Spain under the
caliphate of Córdoba, where Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a
vizier, was the first great patron of Hebrew
letters. His secretary, Menahem ben Saruk (died c.
970), wrote a biblical lexicon, which was criticized
by Dunash ben Labrat when the latter arrived in
Spain with philological ideas from the East. Samuel
ha-Nagid, vizier of Granada (990–1055), himself a
poet and philologist, gathered around him a group of
poets, most outstanding among whom was Ibn Gabirol.
Moses ibn Ezra of Granada (died c. 1139) was the
centre of a brilliant circle of poets. Moses’
kinsman Abraham ibn Ezra, a poet, philosopher,
grammarian, and Bible commentator, attacked the
language and style of the early payṭanim; he and
Judah ben Samuel Halevi were the first to use Arabic
metres in religious poems. Dominated by Arab
standards of taste, the secular poetry dealt with
themes of Arabic poetry and often reproduced Arabic
phrases; it was written to be appreciated by a small
circle of connoisseurs and declined with the
collapse of Jewish prosperity in Muslim Spain. The
last major poet in Spain was Judah ben Solomon
Harizi, who translated various philosophical works
into Hebrew.
The use of biblical Hebrew was made possible by
the work of philologists. Of great importance was
the creation of comparative linguistics by Judah ibn
Kuraish (about 900) and Isaac ibn Barun (about
1100). Judah Hayyuj, a disciple of Menahem ben
Saruk, recast Hebrew grammar, and, in the form given
to it by David Kimhi of Narbonne (died c. 1235), the
new system was taken over by the Christian humanists
and through them by modern scholarship. The first
complete Hebrew grammar, Kitāb al-lumaʿ (1886; “The
Book of the Variegated Flower Beds”), was written by
Ibn Janāḥ of Córdoba (died 1050).
Jewish medieval philosophers in Spain wrote in
Arabic, not Hebrew, until the 13th century. Apart
from Isaac Israeli (north Africa, died c. 940) few
medieval Jews made original contributions to
science, but the Spanish Jews shared the best
scientific education. Abraham bar Hiyya (died c.
1136) of Barcelona was an original mathematician who
wrote in Hebrew works on mathematics, astronomy, and
philosophy. When the Almohads expelled the Jews from
Muslim Spain in 1148, many learned refugees went to
Languedoc and Provence and there translated
scientific and philosophical works.
The period of retrenchment, 1200–1750
Hebrew culture in western EuropeFrom 1200 to 1750
was the era of the ghetto, during which the area of
western European Hebrew culture shrank to a remnant
in Italy, while an entirely different culture arose
in eastern Europe. The appearance in 1200 of the
Hebrew version, translated from Arabic, of Moses
Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim (1851–85; The Guide of
the Perplexed), which applied Neoplatonic and
Aristotelian philosophy to biblical and rabbinic
theology, provoked orthodox circles into opposition
to all secular studies. As a result of Maimonides’
work, there was a return to Neoplatonist mysticism
in a form known as Kabbala. This culminated in the
theosophy of the Zohar (1560; “The Book of
Splendor”), which is ascribed to Moses de Leon and
which exercised an influence comparable only with
that of the Bible and Talmud. Hebrew culture,
however, was reduced to a miniature scale in the
West after the expulsion of the Jews from England
(1290), from France (1306), and from Spain (1492).
It continued in Italy, where it remained in contact
with contemporary Christian thought. The most
outstanding figure was the mystical philosopher
Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto, who wrote a work on poetics
and three remarkably modern plays.
Eastern Europe and the religious crisisIn the
kingdom of Poland (which then extended from
Lithuania to the Black Sea) refugees from German
persecution mingled with earlier Byzantine émigrés
to create, by the 15th century, a prosperous Jewry
with extensive autonomy. Their culture was not a
continuation of western European Hebrew civilization
but a new creation. The Bible (except for the
Pentateuch) was neglected, while the Babylonian
Talmud—hitherto studied only by specialists—became
the basis of all intellectual life, particularly
since the so-called pilpul method of Jacob Pollak
had turned its study into an exciting form of mental
gymnastics. The typical literature consisted of
novellae (hiddushim), ingenious discussions of
Talmudic minutiae written in an ungrammatical
mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic. Imaginative
literature existed only in Yiddish, for women and
the uneducated.
The expulsion from Spain produced a wave of
messianic emotion. Kabbala flourished in Safad, the
new Palestinian centre, the meeting place of
Spanish, European, and Oriental Jews. There, in
1570–72, Isaac Luria created a cosmic messianism.
Though its formulation, in the writings of his pupil
Ḥayyim Vital, was abstruse and esoteric, its
phraseology penetrated the widest masses, as a
result of the introduction of Kabbalist prayers, and
coloured all later Hebrew writing. Luria’s teachings
were developed by the false messiah Sabbatai Zebi in
the next century, for and against whom a vast
literature was written.
The sufferings of Polish Jewry in the Cossack
massacres of 1648—described in a long poem by the
Talmudist Yom Ṭov Lipmann Heller—opened their
country to Lurianic mysticism. Out of popular
Kabbalist elements, Israel ben Eliezer, called the
Baʿal Shem Ṭov, produced Ḥasidism. His teaching,
like that of his successors, was oral and, of
course, in Yiddish; but it was noted by disciples in
a simple, colloquially flavoured Hebrew. Since they
taught mainly through parables, this may be
considered to mark the beginning of the Hebrew short
story. Indeed these narratives exercised, and still
exercise, a profound influence on modern Hebrew
writers.
The 18th and 19th centuries
In the 18th century the conservative mystical
movement of Ḥasidism spread rapidly over all eastern
Europe except Lithuania. There, Elijah ben Solomon
of Vilna, a writer of unusually wide scope,
advocated a better graded course of Talmudic
training. Shneur Zalman of Ladi created the highly
systematized Ḥabad Ḥasidism, which was widely
accepted in Lithuania. The Musar movement of Israel
Salanter encouraged the study of medieval ethical
writers.
Beginnings of the Haskala movementIn the Berlin
of Frederick II the Great, young intellectuals from
Poland and elsewhere, brought in as teachers, met
representatives of the European Enlightenment; they
came under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and
also met some representatives of Italian and Dutch
Hebrew cultures. One, a Dane, Naphtali Herz Wessely,
who had spent some time in Amsterdam, wrote works on
the Hebrew language, and another, an Italian, Samuel
Aaron Romanelli, wrote and translated plays. Out of
these contacts grew Haskala (“Enlightenment”), a
tendency toward westernization that venerated Hebrew
and medieval western Jewish literature. Among German
Jews, then already in rapid process of
Germanization, this Hebrew movement had no place.
The Enlightenment was introduced in Galicia
(Austrian Poland), a centre of Ḥasidism, by the
Edict of Toleration (1781) of the emperor Joseph II.
By supporting some of its aims, Hebrew writers
incurred hatred and persecution. Their chief weapon
was satire, and the imitation by Joseph Perl of the
Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515; “Letters of
Obscure Men”) of Crotus Rubianus and the essays of
Isaac Erter were classics of the genre. One poet,
Meir Letteris, and one dramatist, Naḥman Isaac
Fischman, wrote biblical plays.
Romanticism
Galicia’s chief contribution was to
the Jüdische Wissenschaft, a school of historical
research with Romanticist leanings. The impact of
Haskala ideas upon the humanistic Italo-Hebrew
tradition produced a short literary renaissance. Its
main connections were with the Jüdische
Wissenschaft, to which Isaac Samuel Reggio
contributed. Samuel David Luzzatto, a prolific
essayist, philologist, poet, and letter writer,
became prominent by his philosophy of Judaism, while
a poet, Rachel Morpurgo, struck some remarkably
modern chords. For the Jews of the Russian Empire,
the Enlightenment proper began with Isaac Baer
Levinsohn in the Ukraine and with Mordecai Aaron
Ginzberg (Günzburg), in Lithuania. In the 1820s an
orthodox reaction set in, coinciding with the rise
of a Romanticist Hebrew school of writers. A.D.
Lebensohn wrote fervent love songs to the Hebrew
language, and his son Micah Judah, the most gifted
poet of the Haskala period, wrote biblical romances
and pantheistic nature lyrics. The first Hebrew
novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (1853; “The Love of Zion”), by
Abraham Mapu, was a Romantic idyll, in which Mapu,
like all Haskala writers, employed phrases culled
from the Bible and adapted to the thought the writer
wished to express.
Mapu’s third novel, ʿAyiṭ tzavuaʿ (1857–69; “The
Hypocrite”), marked a departure. It dealt with
contemporary life and attacked its social evils and
portrayed a new type, the maskil (possessor of
Haskala), in a fight against orthodox obscurantism.
The new, aggressive Haskala soon came under the
influence of Russian left-wing writers, such as
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Dmitry
Pisarev. Judah Leib Gordon, like Mapu, had started
as a Romantic writer on biblical subjects. From 1871
onward he produced a series of ballads exposing the
injustices of traditional Jewish life. Moses Leib
Lilienblum began as a moderate religious reformer
but later became absorbed by social problems, and in
Mishnat Elisha ben Abuyah (1878; “The Opinions of
Elisha ben Abuyah”) he preached Jewish socialism.
Peretz Smolenskin created in six novels a
kaleidoscope of Jewish life in which he rejected the
westernized Jew as much as orthodox reactionaries
did.
Modern literature in Hebrew
Formative influencesThe first formative influences
on 20th-century Hebrew literature belong to the late
19th century. The middle classes of eastern European
Jewry that read Hebrew books turned to Jewish
nationalism, and Zionist activity, coupled with the
movement for speaking Hebrew, widened the circle of
Hebrew readers. Hebrew daily papers began to appear
in 1886. Writers borrowed extensively from medieval
translators and European languages, and the Hebrew
language assumed a new character. A key figure in
the transition to modern writing was Shalom Jacob
Abramowitsch, who wrote under the pseudonym of
Mendele Mokher Sefarim; after his first novel he
became convinced that biblical Hebrew was unsuitable
for modern subjects and turned to Yiddish. From 1886
onward he returned to writing mainly in Hebrew and
by using Hebrew and Aramaic phrases from the Talmud
was able to capture the homeliness he prized in
Yiddish. His stories depicted life as it really was,
and his style and support of traditional values
attracted a wide readership. The popularity of his
stories of ghetto life ensured that they would
remain the most read and written genre of Hebrew
literature until the mid-20th century. A group of
writers adopted “grandfather Mendele” as their
model. One of these, Asher Ginzberg (Aḥad Haʿam),
wrote, from 1889 onward, articles evolving a secular
philosophy of Jewish nationalism. His periodical
ha-Shiloaḥ attained editorial standards previously
unknown in Hebrew. From 1921, he devoted his last
years to the editing of his correspondence, a
valuable documentary of the period.
Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, an important poet,
essayist, editor, and anthologist of medieval
literature, was, for a time, literary editor of
ha-Shiloaḥ and was much influenced by Aḥad Haʿam.
His poetry expressed the inner struggles of a
generation concerned about its attitude to Jewish
tradition. Saul Tchernichowsky, on the other hand,
was untroubled by tradition, and his poetry dealt
with love, beauty, and the three places where he had
lived: the Crimea, Germany, and Palestine. Isaac
Leib Peretz, who wrote both in Hebrew and in
Yiddish, introduced the Ḥasidic, or pietistic
devotional, element into literature. The
emotionalism and simple joy of life of that milieu
thereafter strongly influenced writers, and the
language absorbed many Ḥasidic terms. A literary
historian, Ruben Brainin, discerned the presence of
a “new trend” in literature and foresaw a
concentration on human problems. Bialik had already
pointed to a conflict between Judaism and the
natural instincts of Jews. This psychological
interest dominated the work of a group of
short-story writers and, in particular, that of the
writer and critic David Frischmann, who, more than
anyone else, imposed European standards on Hebrew
literature. European literary tendencies thus became
absorbed into Hebrew. Uprooted by the pogroms of
1881 and the two Russian revolutions of 1905 and
1917, Jews had emigrated to western Europe and
America, and Hebrew literary activity in eastern
Europe was disrupted. The Soviet Union eventually
banned Hebrew culture, and it also decayed in other
eastern European countries and in Germany as the
position of Jews deteriorated.
Émigré and Palestinian literature
The writers of
this generation were known as the émigré writers.
Their work was pessimistic, as the rootlessness
without hope of Uri Nissan Gnessin and Joseph Ḥayyim
Brenner exemplified. The majority of writers active
in Palestine before 1939 were born in the Diaspora
(Jewish communities outside Palestine) and were
concerned with the past. An exception was Yehuda
Burla, who wrote about Jewish communities of Middle
Eastern descent. The transition from ghetto to
Palestine was achieved by few writers, among them
Asher Barash, who described the early struggles of
Palestinian Jewry. S.Y. Agnon, the outstanding prose
writer of this generation (and joint winner of the
1966 Nobel Prize for Literature), developed an
original style that borrowed from the Midrash
(homiletical commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures),
stories, and ethical writings of earlier centuries.
While his earlier stories were set in Galicia, he
later began to write about Palestine. In Ore’aḥ
nataʿ lalun (1938; A Guest for the Night) the
narrator recounts his return to his native town in
Galicia. Temol shilshom (1945; Only Yesterday),
widely regarded as Agnon’s finest work, satirizes
the ideals of both secular Zionism and religious
Judaism.
Poetry immediately addressed Palestinian life.
Among outstanding writers were Rachel (Rachel
Bluwstein), who wrote intensely personal poems; Uri
Zevi Greenberg, a political poet and exponent of
free verse; and Abraham Shlonsky, who would lead
Israel’s Symbolist school.
Israeli literatureWorld War II and the
Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49 brought to the fore
Palestinian-born writers who dealt with the problems
of their generation in colloquially flavoured
Hebrew. In the State of Israel, where Hebrew had
become the official language, literature developed
on a large scale, mainly along contemporary western
European and American lines. The extreme diversity
in culture of parts of the population and the
problems of new immigrants provided the main themes
for fiction. Poetry flourished, but original drama
at first was slow to develop. Greenberg’s Rehovot
HaNahar (1951; “Streets of the River”) traces the
process by which the humiliation of the massacred is
transmuted by the pride of martyrdom into the
historical impulse of messianic redemption. In a
long dramatic poem, Bein ha-Esh ve-ha-Yesha (1957;
Between the Fire and Salvation), Aaron Zeitlin
envisioned the annihilation of European Jewry in
mystical terms, examining the relationship of
catastrophe and redemption.
Native Israeli prose writers wrote of their life
in the kibbutz, the underground, and the war of
1948–49. S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir emerged as the
outstanding representatives of this generation,
probing the sensibility of the individual in a
group-oriented society. But the establishment of the
State of Israel could not allay the anxieties of the
individual. The dominant themes of writers who had
no access to collective ideals were personal
ones—frustration, confusion, and alienation. The
works of Yehuda Amichai and Haim Gouri are
representative of the poetry of this period and of
the following decades; their poems emphasize the
dissolution of social coherence and express the
individual devoid of a sense of historical and
spiritual mission. The novelist Aharon Megged’s
Ha-Hai ʿal ha-met (1965; The Living on the Dead)
casts a putative hero of the pioneer generation in
an ironic light.
Memories of the Holocaust haunt the lyrical work
of Aharon Appelfeld. Flight and hiding are the
characteristic situations of his early stories. His
Badenhaim, ʿir nofesh (Badenheim 1939), published in
1975, captures the ominous atmosphere of the
approaching Holocaust sensed by a group of
assimilated Jews vacationing at an Austrian resort.
It describes social and spiritual disintegration, as
do his novels Tor ha-peli ʾot (1978; The Age of
Wonders) and Katerinah (1989; Katerina). Appelfeld’s
many other novels and novellas consider the theme of
the survivor’s spiritual paralysis (as, for example,
in Bartfus ben ha-almavet [1988; The Immortal
Bartfuss]) at the same time that they explore the
frozen spiritual landscape of the post-Holocaust
world.
The New Wave is the name given to the generation
of prose writers who began publishing in the late
1950s and ’60s. Shimon Ballas’s novel Ha-Maʾabarah
(1964; “The Transit Camp”), which describes the
struggle of immigrants from Iraq in an Israeli
transit camp, is one of the first books in which the
absorption of Jewish immigrants of the Mizrahi
religious Zionist movement is recounted from the
immigrant’s perspective. But many New Wave
writers—including A.B. Yehoshua, Yaʿakov Shabtai,
and Amos Oz—made attempts in their early work to
distance themselves from preoccupations with Israeli
reality. In Yehoshua’s stories the narrator’s tone
is remote and the people are drained of emotion.
Occasionally, an act of feeling or meaning breaks
the mood of boredom and illuminates a character’s
humanity. In both Ha-Meʿahev (1976; The Lover) and
Gerusḥim meʾuḥarim (1982; A Late Divorce), Yehoshua
explores the confrontation between the philosophy of
his generation and the ideology of the Zionist
founders. His Mar Mani (1990; Mr. Mani), a complex
and innovative work about a Sephardic family whose
history is linked to the significant events in
Diaspora and Israeli history, spans a period of 150
years. Shabtai’s novel Zikhron devarim (1977; Past
Continuous) broke new ground in its evocation of the
family in society. Oz, in a series of later novels,
confronted the difficulties of life in Israel.
Kufsah sheḥora (1987; Black Box) utilizes a
satirical epistolary style to depict a family at war
with itself, while La-daʾat ishah (1989; To Know a
Woman) also details family relationships. Panter
ba-martef (1994; Panther in the Basement), written
from the point of view of a child, is set in
Palestine in 1947 as British rule over the region is
coming to an end. Oto ha-yam (1999; The Same Sea) is
an unconventional novel of love, family, and loss,
written in a mixture of poetry and prose.
Personal frustration and religious vision are the
subjects of the novelist Pinḥas Sadeh. Yitzḥak
Orpaz’s novels tend toward psychological
exploration, particularly in the series beginning
with Bayit le-adam eḥad (1975; “One Man’s House”).
Yoram Kaniuk’s work examines the alienated Israeli,
but Ha-Yehudi ha-aḥaron (1981; The Last Jew)
explores the Israeli experience as a response to the
Holocaust. The realistic stories of Yitzḥak Ben Ner
are set in rural and urban communities (Sheḳiʿah
kefarit [1976; “A Rustic Sunset”] and Ereẓ reḥokah
[1981; “A Distant Land”]). The writings of Amalia
Kahana-Carmon explore the subjective impressions of
experience and the complexities of time and memory
through a stream-of-consciousness technique.
In the 1980s and ’90s a new generation of
writers, including Yehoshuʿa Ḳenaz and David
Grossman, began to emerge. Ḳenaz’s Hitganvut yeḥidim
(1986; “Heart Murmur”; Eng. trans. Infiltration)
depicts a group of recruits in the Israeli army who
are representative of Israeli society. Grossman’s
ʿAyen ʿerekh: ahavah (1986; See Under: Love), a
novel about the Holocaust, is regarded by some as
one of the great novels of the modern period. In
Viḳṭoryah (1993; Victoria) Sami Michael traced the
history of a Baghdadi family in Israel. The
experiences of immigrants from North African and
Middle Eastern countries were described by other
writers, including Albert Swissa in his novel ʿAḳud
(1990; “The Bound One”) and the poets Ronny Someck,
Erez Biṭon, and Maya Bejerano. Yoel Hoffmann, whose
work is characterized by stylistic experimentation
and the influence of Japanese literature,
represented the experience of German Jewish
immigrants to Palestine in Bernharṭ (1989; Bernhard)
and Krisṭus shel dagim (1991; The Christ of Fish).
In the last decades of the 20th century, writers
explored a wide variety of themes and styles,
influenced more than previously by American popular
culture. In Agadat ha-agamim ha-ʿatsuvim (1989; “The
Legend of the Sad Lakes”) Itamar Levi attempted to
confront the subject of the Holocaust in a
surrealistic manner. One of the phenomena of these
decades was the appearance of a number of women
writers, including Judith Katzir, ʿEdnah Mazya, Orly
Castel-Bloom, and many others, who provided a
powerful alternative to the male voice that had
dominated Hebrew letters from the start of the
modern period. Many of these writers traced their
own family histories. The literary world of Leʾah
Eni (Leah Aini) is one of memory, in which two
central elements intersect: the community in which
she spent her childhood and the Holocaust. The work
of Hanna Bat Shahar (a pseudonym) deals
predominantly with the inner world of women who are
bound by the strict rules and customs of Orthodox
communities.
At the turn of the 21st century, Hebrew poetry
remained innovative. Some poets addressed subjects
previously considered taboo for Hebrew literature,
such as homosexuality. The poetry of Itamar
Yaʿoz-Ḳesṭ, Admiel Kosman, Benyamin Shvili, and
Chava Pinchas-Cohen (Ḥava Pinḥas-Kohen) tended
toward broadly metaphysical, even religious,
expression.
Chaim Rabin
Samuel Leiter
Glenda M. Abramson
Ed.
