This book explores through literature the long and complex evolution of Jewish identity in Israel and the central role that language, ideology, memory, and culture have played in that journey. Language is possibly the most important component of any collective identity. Indeed, any nation can be better understood through its imaginative literature and never more so than in the case of Israeli literature, whose story runs in parallel with that of the State of Israel and with Zionism. The political task of nationalism directed the course of Israeli literature into a distinct national literature...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, women could not participate in the development of modern Hebrew literature. As pointed out in 1996's New Women's Writing from Israel, to which this is a successor volume, they could give vent to their poetic talents either in Yiddish, their spoken language, or in Russian, but not in Hebrew. While Yiddish writing did not insist on the national element as a required poetic norm, Hebrew literature did. The ideological dictum insisted on the symbiosis of the collective experience with the private, of the myth of the nation with the myth of the...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, women could not participate in the development of modern Hebrew literature. As pointed out in 1996's New Women's Writing from Israel, to which this is a successor volume, they could give vent to their poetic talents either in Yiddish, their spoken language, or in Russian, but not in Hebrew. While Yiddish writing did not insist on the national element as a required poetic norm, Hebrew literature did. The ideological dictum insisted on the symbiosis of the collective experience with the private, of the myth of the nation with the myth of the...