Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
These included Savyon Liebrecht (
Apples from the Desert
; 1986), Leah Aini, Yehudit Katzir,
Hannah Bat-Shahar, Dorit Peleg, Nava Semel, and Orly Castel-Bloom, who all gave a new
feminine perspective to old subjects. Castel-Bloom wrote about the condition of contempo-
rary women in
Dolly City
(1997), a novel set in a futuristic city; in it a woman doctor fi nds a
baby, gives up her laboratory, and becomes an obsessive, destructively overbearing mother in
a society riddled with war and bizarre behavior.
Israeli Arab Writing
The works of most Israeli Arab writers are written in Arabic. The best known among them is
Emile Habibi, a veteran Communist who was a member of the Knesset in the 1950s and 1960s
and who won the Israel Prize (the country's highest honor) for Arabic literature in 1992. He
quit politics in 1974 to focus on writing, and his most famous novel,
The Secret Life of Said the
Pessoptimist
, was published that year. It tells the story of an Israeli Arab hero through satire.
There are also a few major Israeli Arab poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and
Samih al-Qasim (b. 1939), whose works have been translated into Hebrew. The themes domi-
nant in the poetry of Israeli Arabs are longing for Palestine, the experience of being uprooted,
and resistance to the current state of affairs.
The most famous Arab poet, originally a citizen of Israel, is Mahmoud Darwish, who began
his career as a journalist and political activist and later turned to poetry. He published his fi rst
collection,
Wingless Birds
, in 1960, but it was his 1964 volume,
Olive Trees
, that established his
reputation as the “poet of the Palestinian resistance.” Two of Darwish's famous poems are
“Identity Card” (1964) and “State of Siege” (2002). He left Israel in 1970 to study in the Soviet
Union, joined the PLO, and called for Israel's elimination. In 1995 he moved to Ramallah in the
West Bank, where he died in 2008. In 2000, a debate occurred when the education minister,
Yossi Sarid, added Darwish's poetry to the Israeli public school curriculum, a decision that was
eventually revoked.
The most prominent Israeli Arab fi ction writer today is Sayed Kashua, who explores what
it means to be both an Arab and an Israeli; that was a theme particularly in his fi rst novel,
Israeli Arab journalist and
writer Sayed Kashua speaks
at the International Writers'
Festival held in Jerusalem on
May 4, 2010. (Miriam Alster /
Flash90.)
