Modern Hebrew Fiction

Gershon Shaked's history of modern Hebrew fiction traces the emergence and development of a literature "against all odds" -- from its European roots in the 1880s, when it had neither a country nor a spoken language, to the flowering of a literary culture on Israeli soil from the founding of the State through the 1990s. The product of more than twenty years of research, it is unique in its scope, profiling four generations of Hebrew writers from Mendele Mokher Seforim, I.L. Peretz, and Haim Nahman Bialik through Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, to the recent writings of David Grossman, Meir Shalev, and Orly Castel-Bloom.

Through detailed discussions of themes and style in specific texts, Shaked conveys the richness of the Hebrew literary tradition. At the same time, through biographical surveys, historical observations, and sociocultural and political analyses, he illuminates the relationship of these writings to the context in which they were produced, revealing the complex intertextual play between Hebrew literature and life.