subject: Israeli Literature: Truly the Nation's Pride [print this page] Literature is a fundamental element of any nation's culture. It serves as a reflection of the universal thoughts, feelings and experiences of the people sharing the same custom, tradition, mores, ethnicity and boundary. Israel is famous for a significant number of well-renowned names in literature. Once visitors take a tour to Israel, the literary ambience could be evident amongst the many streets and roads in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They are named after the legendary institutions like Yosef Hayim Brenner, Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernikowsky.
Yosef Hayim Brenner, a contemporary Hebrew literary figure, was born on 1881 in a poor family at Novi Mlini, Russia. He became famous for his zealous works and criticisms of Zionism. He is notable for writing realistic portrayals of life stories especially among Jewish characters. One of his celebrated novels, Breakdown and Bereavement, depicts the lives of young Jewish pioneers under Ottoman rule in Palestine before the World War I. In search for spiritual identity and confirmation, Hefetz, the hero of the novel, meets sufferings and tragedies of life. Brenner was murdered in Jaffa during the Arab riots on May of 1921.
Another famous literary figure in the field of poetry is Rachel Blewstein, or simply called Ra'hel. She was born on September 20, 1890 in Russia and immigrated to Palestine where her works flourished. Her poems were set into songs that made them more popular to the entire Israeli population. Many of her works were written in Hebrew but some were translated in English. Some of her poems were placed in the famous poetry collection Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra'hel. On April 16, 1931, at the age of 40, Rachel died and was buried on a grave near the Sea of Galilee.
Dubbed to be as Israel's greatest contemporary poet, Yehuda Amichai, is notable for his works on the day-to-day encounters of people dealing with the ironic imagery of life and death. He was born on 1924 and died in 2000 at the age of 76 because of cancer.
Nobel is a very prestigious award-giving body that recognizes exceptional people representing their various fields. In 1966, one of the Israel's pride Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was given a Nobel Prize for Literature. The general theme of his literary works centers on the Jewish culture and history involving their struggle towards adapting their beliefs and customs to the contemporary time.
Being Israel's first Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, surfaced as a prominent literary name for his insightful features of narration that centers on the life and culture of Jewish people as they struggle to the demands and pressures of the modern times. He was born on July 17, 1888 in Galicia, now Ukraine. His most famous work is The Bridal Canopy (1931) which is an epic about the 19th century foundation of Galician Judaism. He died on February 17, 1970, receiving many commemorations and tributes from his country, Israel.
Other renowned modern prose writers are David Grossman, AB Yehoshua and Amos Oz. Oz is famous for his essays that contain political and literary tones. His famous work My Michael (1968) was translated to 30 languages, adapted to a movie and named as one of the 100 best novels of the 21st century. It talks about the misery of love and marriage of a young woman during the gloomy days of Jerusalem in the 1950s. He was born on May 4, 1939. AB Yehoshua, on the other hand, is famous for his work, The Lover, that depicts the story of a man's obsessive hunt for his wife's lover during Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Aside from the wonderful sceneries in the tour to Israel like Tel Aviv Beaches and the historical sites seen when tourists travel Holy Land, literature is another honour of the land. The experience of seeing the culture through man's ingenious creation, that is literature, is indeed a great reward to have. Tour to Israel and the feel of its literature is truly the nation's pride.
