Table Of ContentSince 1948
SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture
Ezra Cappell, editor
Dan Shiffman, College Bound:
The Pursuit of Education in Jewish American Literature, 1896–1944
Eric J. Sundquist, editor, Writing in Witness:
A Holocaust Reader
Noam Pines, The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature
Oded Nir, Signatures of Struggle:
The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction
Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations:
A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry
Richard J. Fein, translator, The Full Pomegranate:
Poems of Avrom Sutzkever
Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky, editors,
New Directions in Jewish American and
Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching
Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe:
The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Ruthie Abeliovich, Possessed Voices:
Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theater
Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith, editors,
The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, editors,
Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism
Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, editors,
Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making
Since 1948
Israeli Literature in the Making
Edited by
Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff
Cover: The Shrine of the Book under construction 1964–65.
Photo by Alfred Bernheim © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Translation of “Beterem” by Yehuda Amichai from Mishkan HaNefesh: Machzor for
the Days of Awe, Yom Kippur copyright © 2015, by Central Conference of American
Rabbis, under copyright protection by the Central Conference of American Rabbis
and reprinted for use by permission of the CCAR. All rights reserved.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berg, Nancy E., editor. | Sokoloff, Naomi B., editor.
Title: Since 1948 : Israeli literature in the making / [edited by] Nancy E. Berg,
Naomi B. Sokoloff.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2020. | Series: SUNY series in
contemporary Jewish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002269 (print) | LCCN 2020002270 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438480497 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480503 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Israeli literature—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PJ5021 .S56 2020 (print) | LCC PJ5021 (ebook) | DDC
892.4006—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002269
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002270
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Under Construction: A Kind of Festschrift for Israeli Literature 1
Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff
Part One:
Through Time: Silences, Voices, Echoes
Not One, but Five Moments of Silence: On the Poetics and
Politics of Asking for Silence 27
Eran Tzelgov
Sounding the Mizrachi Voice: H.afla Thematics from the
Ma‘abarah to the Post-Arabic Novel 43
Michal Raizen
Anthological Poetics: Reading Amichai and Halfi in Liberal
Prayerbooks 59
Wendy I. Zierler
Part Two:
Across Language and Territory: Literature and Identity
When Yiddish Was Young in Israel 83
Shachar Pinsker
A Canaanite Story: Language, National Identity, and the 1948 War 103
Yael Dekel
vi Contents
Hebrew Unbound: Alternative Homelands in the New World 123
Melissa Weininger
Part Three:
Between the Lines: Rethinking Genres
From Here to Elsewhere and Back in Israeli-Hebrew
Children’s Literature 143
Shai Ginsburg
“The pigs were my best friends”: Animals and the Holocaust
in Alona Frankel’s Memoirs 163
Naomi B. Sokoloff
Stalagim: At the Limits of Israeli Literature 183
Eric Zakim
Part Four: Concerning Canons
Disruptive Nativity: The Poetry of Rina Shani and the Sixties
in Israel 207
Riki Traum
Asaf Schurr and the Critique of Postmodernism in Contemporary
Hebrew Literature 229
Yaron Peleg
“And the Winner Is . . .”: The Economy of Literary Awards 247
Nancy E. Berg
Appendix
A Canaanite Story: “The Lord Be Praised” 267
Eitan Notev
On Our Bookshelf 277
Contributors 279
Index 283
Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Carmit Rosen, “chorus” 35
Figure 3.1 Psalm 95 and Yehuda Amichai, “Shir shel shabbat” 65
Figure 3.2 Psalm 92 and Avraham Halfi, “Tefilah” 68
Figure 3.3 S’lichot and Yehuda Amichai, “Beterem” 72
Figure 4.1 Photograph of Yung Yisroel Members (courtesy of
Tzvi Eisenman) 91
Figure 4.2 Cover of the journal Yung Yisroel, December 1954 92
Figure 4.3 Cover of Mendel Mann, In a farvorloztn dorf 96
Figure 4.4 Cover of Tzvi Eisenman, Di ban: dertseylungen 97
Figure 9.1 Cover of Ivan Spasky, Stalag Stalingrad 189
Figure 9.2 Cover of Roy Adams, Stalag banot hasatan
(Devil Girls Stalag) 192
vii
Acknowledgments
This book grew out of a conference at Washington University in St. Louis,
“Enshrining the Book: Israeli Literature at 70,” that we directed in April
2018. We are grateful to all the academic units in the School of Arts and
Sciences at Washington University that provided financial support: the
Center for the Humanities, the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Near
Eastern Languages & Cultures (now known as Jewish, Islamic, and Middle
Eastern Studies), the Department of History, and the Programs in Com-
parative Literature, Religious Studies, and International and Area Studies.
The Israel Institute awarded a generous—and deeply appreciated—grant.
The administrative support provided on the ground by Stephen
Scordias, as well as media assistance by John Moore and accounting by
Leslie C. Smith, made the conference possible; the emotional support from
those individuals made the planning enjoyable. We have loved working
with all of the conference participants-turned-contributors: those who
were timely, receptive, and simple to edit, as well as those who struggled
with deadlines, writing, and revisions. They have shaped this volume. We
hope that the reader learns as much from the end product as we have
learned from the process.
We also want to thank Tim Huskey for his guidance. Much appre-
ciation goes to our editorial team at SUNY Press, and to our anonymous
readers for their comments on the manuscript. Special acknowledgment
is due both to the Weiner Fund at Washington University and to Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion for providing funds for reprint-
ing poetry in this volume.
We were both on sabbatical leave for part of the time we were pre-
paring the manuscript for publication. For the freedom to complete this
work, Nancy is grateful to both Washington University in St. Louis and
ix
