Not Just Milk and Honey: An Anthology of Hebrew Short Stories

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The growth and development of Hebrew fiction is as fascinating as the stories in this collection. Rootless and hounded by an exilic past spanning over two millenia, Hebrew language thrived in host cultures till the establishment of the state of Israel and its extraordinary revival as spoken language by the turn of the century. Restlessness to peace, the transition has only been tragic humiliation, persecution, holocaust, war and huge political changes. Reflecting and embodying this dynamics of change, as this collection amply demonstrates, is the Hebrew fiction which despite being so much younger has yet been able to capture the images in a diversity of styles, structures and narrative excitements. While it includes established writers like Amoz Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and S. Yizhar, it also marks younger writers less well-known but no less fascinating, grappling with complex contemporary issues.

Haya Hoffman teaches at the department of Hebrew literature in Tel Aviv University. She is also the editorial consultant with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew literature.

The story of modern Hebrew literature is closely bound with the renaissance of the Hebrew language. The revival of the language and its cultivation were essential elements of the Jewish Enlightenment, which arose in Europe in the mid-18th century, and later of the Zionist movement, which arose at the end of the 19th century and campaigned for a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Between antiquity and modern times Hebrew was a sacred language, reserved for liturgy and poetry, but was not a vernacular language. Hebrew literature has a long history, beginning in biblical times and continuing to the present day. Literary creation in Hebrew continued during the two thousand years of Jewish exile, and even enjoyed periods of flowering and high achievement, for example in medieval Spain and later in Italy, but a new phase began in the late 18th century. Since that time it has been greatly influenced by modern European literature and became closely related to Western literature. The processes and changes it underwent stemmed from the social, political and cultural developments that took place among the Jewish people in the past two hundred years, but they also reflected the influence of Western literature. It began as a literature without a homeland, developing in certain centres in East- ern Europe, such as Odessa and Warsaw, but from the beginning of the 20th century chiefly in Palestine, called Eretz Israel in Hebrew. Thus Hebrew literature and the Hebrew language played an important role in shaping the Israeli-Jewish identity in the old-new land. A brief historical review reveals the inter- action between literature and the development of the national identity.

Although during the first decades of the century there were few writers in the country, they did produce some fine works, first in fiction and later in poetry.