Back to the Future (PDF)

This book provides a wide-ranging survey of a large number of Israeli novels and short stories written in the 1980s and 1990s and brings together a range of fresh critical perspectives that will benefit teachers and students of Hebrew literature and fans of literature in general.This eye-opening and vibrant study furnishes the reader with insights about three dominant genres that emerged during these norm-defying decades and provides new understanding about how modern Israeli fiction evolved to be what it is today. Abramovich provides the social and political background for the dramatic and broad transformations that took place in Israeli society during this period of transitionAA- the Yom Kippur War, the election of the Likkud Party, The Lebanon War, the rise of postmodernism, the impact of feminism, the collapse of national consensus- and links those developments to the literary changes that seeped into the fabric of Israeli writing of that time. The book deals with three pivotal areas that emerged and flowered in the 1980s and 1990s - Second Generation Holocaust literature, the Mizrachi novel, and detective fiction - and meticulously and comprehensively analyses the works' subject-matters, ideas and aesthetic strategies. Extensively discussed and evaluated are the groundbreaking themes found in the stories of authors David Grossman, Sami Michael, Ronit Matalon, Savyon Liebrecht, Batya Gur, Eli Amir, Shulamit Lapid, Itamar Levy, Gila Almagor, Nava Semel, Dorit Rabinyan, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Dorit Peleg and Lily Peri Amitai. From best-sellers to cult-classics, from the mainstream to the marginal, Back to the Future: Israeli Literature of the 1980s and 1990s is a significant and praiseworthy effort that celebrates the creative energy of Israeli culture and is sure to engage readers of many tastes.