Browsing by Subject "Israeli literature"

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The re-generation of exile : the orphan figure in Israeli literature as an agent of diasporic imagination
(2007-05-19) Raizen, Michal; Grumberg, Karen
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the birth of a national literature invested with over two millennia of discursive underpinnings, served to foreground a tension between the physical realization of the Jewish national homecoming narrative and the endless deferral of this realization in the realm of the Jewish literary imagination. This tension, often characterized in terms of a binary opposition between Zion and Exile, occupies center stage in the critical discourse surrounding Israeli literature of the late twentieth century. The aim in this work is to challenge the motion of collapsing this inherently ambiguous tension into the confines of a binary opposition. The discussion, which draws upon poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical approaches, centers on the orphan figure as a literary embodiment of both the tension and its ambiguities. Through my analysis of four works of Israeli fiction--Eli Amir's Scapegoat, Amos Oz' A Tale of Love and Darkness and Panther in the Basement, and Ronit Matalon's The One Facing Us--I demonstrate how the orphan figure functions as an agent of diasporic imagination that serves to perpetuate the exilic essence of the Jewish literary imagination while negotiating the boundaries of a national narrative predicated on homecoming and historical closure.
Yemeni Jewish identity in the works of Simha Zaramati Asta
(2013-08) Hunter, Stephanye Ann; Grumberg, Karen
In this paper, I consider the collection of short stories and photographs Neighborhood Album A by Yemeni Israeli author Simha Zaramati Asta. I argue that Asta contributes to a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity in Israel. While Asta could be considered a Mizrahi author, I claim that a study of Asta’s text as Mizrahi in fact erases the distinctive Yemeni elements of Asta’s writing. Instead, Asta is purposeful about her inclusion of Yemeni culture and her establishment of Yemeni identity in her text. This Yemeni culture is evident in Asta’s inclusion of the songs of Yemeni Jewish women which constitute an oral tradition of memory within Yemen and Israel. Asta further creates a distinctive Yemeni identity through a sense of place in the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv in both her stories and photographs. Through descriptions of the sights, smells, and traditions of the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv, Asta elevates the neighborhood, claiming it as a place where the divine spirit can be found. While Asta is purposeful in her creation of a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity, she demonstrates the hybridization of this Yemeni Jewish literature and identity with Israeli literature and identity. By noting the importance of Yemeni Jews to the creation of Israel and the influence of Israel on these Yemeni Jews, Asta claims Israeli identity for Yemeni Jews. She demonstrates the hybridization of the Yemeni Jewish identity and Israeli identity through intertextual references to canonical Israeli poets and authors. Yet while Asta values this hybridization, she uses the characters in her stories to question whether the hybridization of Yemeni Jews in Israel can in fact succeed.