The emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth-century and the evolution of Zionist society in Palestine were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew literature of the day. As Todd Hasak-Lowy cogently argues in this book, Hebrew authors wrote with the belief that accurately representing Jewish society--including its history--in their texts would both record the past and establish its future course.
Hasak-Lowy traces the tensions between the extraliterary--the historical, social, and political--and the literary--the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic--in Hebrew fiction. Focusing on canonical Hebrew texts by S.Y. Abramovitz, Y. H. Brenner, S.Y. Agnon, and S. Yizhar, the author establishes how their works and the works