Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
copies in a very short time. Many of the latter are translations of foreign books, especially best-
sellers, but such potboilers also appear from Israeli authors.
Still, new authors continued to appear who used innovative methods to describe Israeli life
and society. David Grossman is considered the main heir of the 1960s generation. In
See Under:
Love
, he demonstrated his talent at using varied international styles. Another writer who built
on the innovations of the 1960s generation is Meir Shalev, who produced sociohistorical pieces
that mixed nostalgia, realism, and magical realism in original ways. In
The Blue Mountain
(1988), Shalev satirized the kibbutz through his main character, who becomes the kibbutz un-
dertaker, a refl ection on the institution's moribund aspects. Shalev's novel
Esau
(1991) includes
two popular themes in Israeli fi ction: a reworking of Biblical material and a leading character
who leaves the country.
As a Few Days
(1994), set in the 1930s, is about three very different men
competing over who will get a woman and who will raise her son.
Among internationally successful works is Ron Leshem's fi rst novel,
If There is a Garden
of Eden
(2005; better known by its English title,
Beaufort
). This story of an Israel Defense
Forces unit at the strategic Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon just before the Israeli with-
drawal in 2000 was made into a fi lm that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2007. Dorit
Rabinyan's fi rst novel,
Persian Brides
(1995), is a magical realist tale about a Jewish family —
and especially the young women in it — in a small Iranian town at the start of the twentieth
century. The novel was featured on the cover of the
New Yorker
in 2007. Gail Hareven's
The
Confessions of Noa Weber
won Rochester's Best Translated Book Award in 2010. The topic de-
scribes a middle-aged writer's love for a man she made a marriage of convenience with.
Israeli fi ction thus encompasses the whole gamut of styles and themes, from mysteries to
best-sellers to ambitious novels seeking to sum up Jewish existence in Israel or thousands of
years of Jewish life in the Diaspora.
Women Writers
Women authors of Hebrew works have proliferated only recently. The best-known woman
author in Israel's early years was Naomi Frankel (1918 -2009), who wrote the notable trilogy
Saul and Johanna
(1956 -1967) about an assimilated German Jewish family in pre-Nazi Ger-
many whose daughter becomes a Zionist. The topic was somewhat autobiographical, since
Frankel was born in Berlin, immigrated to Israel at age sixteen, and lived on a kibbutz for
several decades.
The author most prominent in creating a feminist consciousness in Israel, beginning in the
1960s, was Amalia Kahana-Carmon. She dealt with relations between men and women and
with family experiences in various periods, regions, and classes in Israel.
During the 1970s and 1980s, when new infl uences affected Israeli fi ction, the feminine voice
almost disappeared. The stereotype of women's fi ction as dealing with family issues seemed
to contradict the tide of writing about political and societal subjects. In fact, the only fi eld in
which women were dominant during the 1970s and 1980s was in children's and juvenile litera-
ture, Devorah Omer and Galila Ron-Feder being the best known.
In the late 1980s, many important women writers appeared on the literary scene both be-
cause of Israeli readers' changing interests and because of the wave of women's fi ction abroad.
