In his position paper, the critic and
scholar of Israeli literature, Yosef Oren, suggests that we mark the
establishment of the state in 1948 as the beginning of a new era in the
history of Hebrew literature – the era of renewed sovereignty. The Israeli
period in the history of Hebrew literature reflects the reality of
sovereignty in various facets: in the conceptual domain – the replacement
of the secular stance that defied Judaism (during the three phases of the
era of the New Hebrew literature: the Haskalah, the Renaissance,
and the Zionist Immigrations) with a sovereign stance that redirected the
defiance to the Zionist ideology. In the thematic domain – the addition of
the dimension of the issues of sovereignty, the dimension that deals with
issues of the “Israeli condition”, to the two dimensions with whose issues
Hebrew writers had been concerned during the era of the New Hebrew
literature: issues of the “Jewish condition” and of the “human condition.”
In the domain of the image of the hero of each phase – replacement of the
images of wholeness that crystallized in each phase of the era of the New
Hebrew literature (the maskil, the recluse, and the pioneer) with
the image of the sabra, which with its earthiness and spiritual
qualities represents the native of the Land. And in written language – a
rapid abandonment of the language of the literary sources that form the
treasury of Hebrew culture in exchange for the language of sovereignty,
spoken Hebrew as the language of life in the state of Israel.
Yosef Oren’s proposal rejects the existing
tendency in scholarship to downplay the influences of sovereignty on the
Hebrew literature that has been written during the years of statehood. The
prevailing scholarship reflects this stance by making Israeli literature,
in its first fifty years, part of a continuum with the preceding two
hundred years – the era of the New Hebrew literature. Yosef Oren stresses
the ideological-political motives underlying this tendency in scholarship
to belittle, in this fashion, the manifestations of sovereignty in Israeli
literature. In addition to his basic thesis, Yosef Oren suggests
distinguishing four camps that are active today in Israeli literature: The
camp of "the generation of the Land", the camp of "the new wave", the camp
of "the disillusioned", and the camp of "the new voices". Likewise, he
points to the more salient trends today in Israeli fiction (which have
parallels both in poetry and in drama): The intellectual trend, the
political trend, the ethnic trend, and the trivial trend. In his
conclusions, the author proposes examining the literature of renewed
sovereignty that has been written during the years of statehood against
the background of the literary-cultural level of Hebrew literature over
the generations, and particularly the preservation of
visionary-ideological fervor and of uniqueness through avoidance of
excessive openness to the influences of global literature, which
throughout the world tends to obscure the sources of national cultures.
