Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
“A sensitive and well-informed study of poems that combine to tell, in the medium of complex emotion, the cultural history of Israel in the early-statehood decades. As documentary writing, poetry preserves what may fall into the chinks between historiographical works and prose narratives, but we need help, such as provided by this book, with deciphering its codes.”
— Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading
“Ilana Rosen is to be commended for extending our knowledge of documentary literature to Israeli documentary poetry. This ground-breaking study surveys 42 representative poems by 30 poets who came of age in the first two decades of the State of Israel.
There are eight documented experiences: the memory of the Holocaust; transit locations; displacement as a shared fate of Jews and Arabs; life within Israeli multi-culture; learning, teachers, and school; Mizrahi women negotiating the transition from Levantine patriarchal culture to Israeli values of gender equality; the transition from languages of the diaspora to Hebrew; and poetry which addresses identities and identifications during the 1950s and 1960s.
Some poets may be familiar to readers outside Israel—for instance, Ronny Someck, Erez Biton, and Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann—but the majority appear in English here for the first time.
Rosen convincingly demonstrates that Israeli documentary poems encourage empathy and compassionate ‘meeting points’ for all readers, regardless of their communal affiliations.”
— Peter Lawson, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UKIntroduction: Israeli Documentary Poetry—Genre, Modes, Themes
1. Poetry about the Imprint and Memory of the Holocaust
2. Poetry about Transit Locations and Situations
3. Poetry about Displacement as a Shared Fate of Jews and Arabs
4. Poetry about Life within the Israeli Multiculture
5. Poetry about Learning, Teachers, and School Life
6. Poetry of and about Mizraḥi Women between Levantine Patriarchy and Western Liberalism
7. Poetry about the Languages of the Diaspora and Hebrew
8. Poetry about Identities and Identifications
Conclusion: Israeli Documentary Poetry—Voices, Claims, Messages
Bibliography:
Inclusive List of Poets and Poems Discussed in Each Chapter
Print and Online Sources
Films, Plays, Television, Newspaper, and Internet Databases
Index