h [i.e., pre-State] generation,” that is, in the writings of S. Yizhar (b. 1916), Moshe Shamir (1921–2004), and Nathan Shaham (b. 1925), but also in the literary revolution of the subsequent “generation of the state,” encompassing the works of A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1931), Amos Oz (b. 1939), and Yoram Kaniuk (b. 1930), in which women were on the sidelines and had even taken on a negative dimension (Fuchs 1987). If in the previous generation love was the opposite of war, in the literature written by men in the 1960s and 1970s there is an emphasis on the element of danger in the figure of the woman, and the language of war makes its way into the realm of love (in the opinion of Esther Fuchs).
The women writers’ “incursion” into Hebrew literature during the generation of the state also involved a struggle over the stereotypical portrayal of women. Women’s suffering stood at the heart of the work of such writers as Judith Hendel, whose first book, Anashim Aherim Hem (They are different, 1950), was extremely courageous in that it provided a voice to other groups that were “different” in Israeli society: Holocaust survivors and families whose sons had fallen in battle. Years before the concept of “the other” (aherim in Hebrew can be rendered as both “different” and “other”) became popular, Hendel felt the pain of those who could not find a place for themselves in the surrounding culture. With bitter irony, a survivor of the concentration camps explains to his friend that, despite their being involved in the Israeli war effort, they are not like the sabras, who had not been forced, as they were, to experience the atrocities of the Holocaust: “They are different.” Hendel was not deterred by the limited Hebrew of the survivors, and the spoken Hebrew of her protagonists became a trademark of her literary style throughout her career.
Another area in which Hendel consistently defied contemporary literary norms was in her attitude toward the price of war. Already in the collection Anashim Aherim Hem and the novel Rehov ha-Madregot (Street of the steps, 1954), which was also adapted into a play mounted by the Habimah Theater, Hendel allowed the casualties of war to speak: the wounded, their girlfriends, the widows, and the bereaved parents. Against the backdrop of the national ethos forged in the War of Independence, which portrayed the death of a hero as an inspiration to carry on the fight, Hendel stood out for her emphasis on the terrible suffering of those who are left behind.
It actually was just during the early 1950s that women poets and you will authors out of prose been successful into the incorporating their subversive sounds on Hebrew literary works, and that had to do with the feel of the war regarding Versatility. Due to the fact battle is by characteristics a gender-discussed passion that ladies are needed to observe throughout the secure house front rather than about unwrapped battleground, Israeli women was indeed excluded of detailing it; it, while they played a dynamic character throughout the assaulting. Conflict is actually traditionally seen as a stadium where in actuality the combatant shows his masculinity; for this reason, actually women who excelled during the treat and you may supported as the commanders (of men), such as for instance Netiva Ben Yehuda, was in fact compelled to wait until the new eighties observe the ebook of its works in regards to the Conflict away from Independence.