Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the idea of the “New Jew,” or Sabra, each a healthy, handsome, secular, and socialist person
engaged in building a new society. Their characters devoted themselves to the welfare of nation
and community.
Unlike the previous generation's works, the writings of the Palmach generation had ever-
present elements of death, war, and self-sacrifi ce as a heroic act. The writers of this “1948 gen-
eration” were linked in their shared belief that it was their duty to advance the Zionist move-
ment and Israel's creation as a national homeland. The characters had personal diffi culties to
overcome too, but their dedication to the collective was also central in their lives.
Moshe Shamir's popular wartime hero characters in
He Walked Through the Fields
(1947),
which became the fi rst play performed in the country after independence, and
With His Own
Hands
(1951) refl ected the “religion of labor” and collectivist ideology of the youth movements
and the kibbutzim. The latter work is a tribute to the life of Shamir's brother, a young Haganah
fi ghter killed in the 1948 war while defending an aid convoy on the road to besieged Jerusalem.
The Holocaust in Israeli Literature
Israeli writers who had been in Europe during World War II, and thus had not shared the early
experiences of the Palmach generation, also tried to deal with the Holocaust, the most trau-
matic event in the Jewish people's modern history. Two Holocaust survivors and authors, Uri
Orlev and Aharon Appelfeld, were the main pioneers in the effort; Appelfeld is considered the
most prominent writer on the Holocaust. While Orlev wrote of the memories of a child wan-
dering in the death camps, Appelfeld focused on the period following the Holocaust, during
which many surviving Jews were refugees in Europe. His characters live in the past and cannot
awaken from the horrors they have seen and suffered.
The Holocaust remained proportionately less important for Israeli writers than for Jews
outside Israel. During the 1980s, a new wave of Holocaust literature appeared whose writers,
notably David Grossman, sometimes violated the earlier taboo that the Holocaust could be
addressed in fi ction only with the utmost seriousness. In
See Under: Love
(1986), the main
character, Momik, is a child of Holocaust survivors. Momik is deeply affected by his parents'
experience and weaves surrealistic fantasies that he is channeling writers who were killed in it.
Creating Modern Hebrew Poetry
The attitudes and experiences of succeeding generations shaped poets as well as fi ction writers.
Nathan Alterman (1910 -1970) and Avraham Shlonsky (1900 -1973), best known in the second
generation of poets, moved beyond exhortations to aid in the national revival to verse about
the Land of Israel. They used a modernist style quite different from the style of their predeces-
sors, who were still using the forms of traditional Hebrew poetry.
Alterman was so fi ery and infl uential that the British Mandate authorities banned many of
his poems, which heightened their popularity in the Yishuv. After Israel's independence, Alter-
man attained the type of status that had been accorded to Bialik. His work
The Seventh Column
was so renowned that a cultural journal was named after it, and his poem “The Silver Platter”
virtually became the country's anthem. It tells those who come later to remember they received
