Academic Studies Press, April 2025, ISBN: 9798887196725, 266 pages.

ISRAELI DOCUMENTARY POETRY: COMING OF AGE WITH THE STATE

Israeli Documentary Poetry: Coming of Age with the State introduces and explores documentary poetry written by Israeli poets who came of age during the first two decades of the state and who, since the 1970s and 1980s, have recorded their experiences of that period. This study offers a literary-cultural analysis of forty-two poems by thirty Israeli poets of various backgrounds, divided into themes such as: memories of the Holocaust and portraits of survivors and their offspring; transit locations and situations both en route to and within Israel; displacementas a shared fate of Jews and Arabs; growing up within the early Israeli moasaic of cultures, school and classroom experiences; Mizraḥi women between Levantine patriarchy and Western liberalism; languages of the diaspora versus Hebrew, and the senses of identity and identification of the poets belonging to the generation under discussion.

Ilana Rosen is S.Y. Agnon Chair of Contemporary Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.