Batya Shimony

Vered ha-Levanon (Rose of Lebanon; 2008), an autobiographical novel by Lea Aini, suggests a profound and subversive discussion on issues that constitute the foundation of cultural and social identity in Israel. The novel includes several narratives belonging to various literary genres but also deviating from them, including personal testimony, the story of second-generation Holocaust survivors, and a Bildungsroman. Each of these narratives is substantially deconstructed, and its components and contents reorganized. Two plots are interwoven in the novel: that of the narrator childhood as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and that of her meetings with Yonatan the wounded soldier. Each narrative represents a different father—the private one and the national one. The narrator, trapped between these fathers, is struggling to find her authentic voice. In doing so, she rejects both narratives, but at the same time she uses her personal story in order to stress some essential insights about the sociopolitical situation in Israel.

return to this section after reading Dauber’s more innovative and animated case studies in Parts 2 and 3. In the field of Yiddish Literature, a recent scholarly thrust has been toward late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Modernism, a moment which, admittedly, produced fascinating literary output. It is therefore all the more important that Dauber has furnished scholars of Jewish Studies and literary criticism with a sensitive study of Mendelssohn, Wolfssohn, and Perl. The book not only offers an overview of the early poetic, linguistic, and social challenges of Yiddish and Hebrew literature; it invites the reader to examine the varied contexts of the Jewish Enlightenment as a means of better understanding Modern Jewish Culture.

ABSTRACT: The article examines the literary representation of the Mizrahi soldier in the wars during Israel’s first decade, a subject that is almost entirely absent from literary and scholarly discourse about that period. The texts discussed were written during the 1950s and 1960s by hegemonic writers and present “Orientalized” soldiers who fought in the war. The Mizrahi soldier has a dual status: he participates in the battle for the country’s borders while simultaneously presenting a threat to its social and cultural image. These issues are examined by exposing the orientalist gaze on the ambivalent representation of the Mizrahi body, which shifts between the figure of the legendary warrior and the animalistic lump of flesh.

Background A new, daring and boundary-bending kind of Holocaust literature has appeared in Israel since the mid-1990s. It emanates from an Israeli subculture for which the annihilation of European Jewry is not a part of family history – Mizrahim;1 specifically the children of immigrants who arrived in Israel during the wave of mass immigration from the Mediterranean and Islamic world in the 1950s. A group of writers from this second Mizrahi generation has made the Holocaust a central theme in their works, just as the children of Ashkenazi survivors have. Their surprising and subversive use of the Holocaust theme deserves special attention. First, however, some background on the Holocaust in Israeli literature is in order. The Holocaust and memory of the Holocaust have become, since the 1940s, a foundational theme in Hebrew literature. Never absent from the literary agenda, they have come to occupy an ever more central position. By its very nature, a topic located at the center of public discourse becomes more varied over time and undergoes transformation; and indeed, the first generation Holocaust writing does not resemble that of the second generation, which began to appear in the 1980s, and even less so that of the generation writing in the twenty-first century. In his review of the Holocaust theme in Israeli fiction up to the 1990s, Avner Holtzman traces the main contours of this development.2 While Holtzman begins by surveying the biographies and literary characteristics of the first generation of writers on the Holocaust, up to the 1970s, the bulk of his

In recent years, a new voice has made its way into literature on the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. Alongside the literature of the first and second generations, which has been defined and studied extensively, works with new characteristics are now appearing. This is literature written by Mizrahi writers, the second generation of the immigration of the nineteen fifties, whose parents came to Israel from Arab countries, North Africa, and Greece. These writers comprise a literary generation that represents a sub-group in Israeli society. Dan Miron defined a literary generation as "the most conscious, aware, and articulate part of a broad social stratum at a certain historic moment," adding that this select group "has the power to express the sensitivities of this stratum in a sharp and vibrant manner, and by doing so, to position them at the center of the public agenda and public debate." While Miron referred in his definitions to "generation" in its bro...