War Lives
Revenge, Grief, and Conflict in Israeli Fiction

Nitza Ben-Dov (Author)

9780815637981

Paperback / softback, published 15 November 2024

277 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.592 kg

Highly important, elegantly composed, and extremely valuable. It serves as a new and exciting overview of modern Hebrew literature and the Israeli experience."" - Yael Halevi-Wise, author of The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua

""Provides English speaking audiences with a wonderful opportunity to learn more about Hebrew novels and the context, themes, structure, and motifs in these texts."" - Adia Mendelson-Maoz, author of Territories and Borders in the Shadow of the Intifada

""Ben-Dov, one of Israel's leading literary critics, illuminates a series of Hebrew novels that engage the experience of war. Israel has lived with war or the shadow of war since its inception, and the deft analysis of this book demonstrates how literature can serve as a sensitive barometer to the quandaries of a nation enmeshed in armed struggle by the conditions of its historical situation."" - Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley

Since the nation’s founding, Israel has existed in a state of near perpetual warfare. Despite this, Hebrew novels that deal with the experience of contemporary conflict are surprisingly rare. In War Lives, Nitza Ben-Dov argues that Israeli writers employ the freedoms granted by fiction to challenge the heroic myth of war. She suggests that these writers do so not only by turning inwards, towards the home front and the psyches of individuals marked by post-trauma, but also by unsettling the relationship between historical fact and fiction, between purported reliability and representation.

Through close readings of a range of novels by authors such as S. Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, and Amos Oz, Ben-Dov foregrounds war as a coordinate from which Israeli novels are driven and to which they return in equal measure. While each chapter focuses on a different theme—from mourning to battleground camaraderie to vengeance—Ben-Dov’s literary analyses demonstrate how these canonical works afford an in-depth view of the symbiosis between civilian and military life, the comorbidity of life living under the constant threat of war.