This article explores border crossing and the Palestinian city as a literary metropolis—two major themes in the works of emerging Palestinian novelists in Israel. It looks at the “re-Palestinization” of urban space by writers who belong to a post-Oslo generation of Palestinian intellectuals that left villages and small towns in Israel to go and study, work, and live in the city. What distinguishes the literature of this generation is its negotiation of border crossing in a fragmented geography and its engagement with the city as a space of paradoxical encounter between a national imaginary and a settler-colonial reality. Based on a critical reading of their works, the article argues that Adania Shibli and Ibtisam Azem challenge colonial border discourse, exposing the ongoing Zionist erasure of the Palestinian city and creating a new topography for Palestinian literature. The article also traces the role of these writers in the “twinning” of Haifa and Ramallah starting in the late 19...

This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two fin-de-siècle futuristic tales: Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902) and Violet Guttenberg’s A Modern Exodus (1904). Focusing on the northern port-city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the city’s spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different views concerning the national Jewish rejuvenation: for Herzl, it becomes a utopian triumph; for Guttenberg, a deplorable failure. Notwithstanding their different assessments of the Zionist vision, both authors share certain anti-Semitic assumptions about the nature of “the Jew” (greedy, intolerant, vulgar), which are inscribed into the urban space. Herzl’s ideal Haifa is designed precisely to reform the diasporic Jew by introducing such modern urban measures that would render these detestable Jewish traits obsolete. Guttenberg’s disordered city, in comparison, reflects an inability to alter the Jewish character: no wonder that London, not Haifa, becomes the final destination of her “Modern Exodus”. Read alongside Herzl’s classic work, then, Guttenberg’s dystopia is revealed as a significant literary intervention, shedding light on the ambivalent meanings attributed to “the Jew”, especially the “desirable dosage” of Jewishness required for the future of Europe’s own cities.

This paper was presented during the 12th EAJS congress in Frankfurt on July 16th - 20th, 2023. It focuses on the urban mythology and mythopoetics utilized by Russian-Israeli writers in their work. Specifically, it examines three novels about three Israeli cities: Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Through these examples, the paper analyzes the various mythological devices and strategies employed by the authors to create new, symbolic images of these cities. This exploration aims to provide a deeper understanding of the ways in which mythology contributes to the creation of literary works in Russian-Israeli literature and the ways in which myths and symbols are used to represent urban spaces.

The date in the article's title hints at Virginia Woolf 's famous assertion that in this month "the human character had changed," a change that, according to Woolf, altered the forms of literary representation of subjective experience and marked the rise of twentieth-century modernist literature. Interestingly, in this month or in the month preceding it, the prominent Hebrew writer Y. H. Brenner published his Hebrew novella Nerves. I argue that in the Jewish Hebrew context December 1910 marked precisely the decline of the early Hebrew modernist turn, parallel to the establishment of a new literary center for Hebrew literature in Eretz Yisrael. I first shed light on the story’s complex treatment of the figure of “nerves” and argue that through this figure Brenner’s story articulates the irresolvable tension between two forms of life as two forms of representation. I then contextualize the tensions inherent to the historical and poetic figure of nerves within the wider discussion of the process of decline of Hebrew modernist poetics at the very moment in which the language performed its national “return” to its native soil.