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; displacement as a shared fate of Jews and Arabs; school and classroom experiences; Mizraḥiwomen between Levantine patriarchy and Western liberalism; and languages of the diaspora versus Hebrew.
Ilana Rosen holds the S.Y. Agnon Chair of Contemporary Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University (BGU). She studies the documentary literature of Jews and Israelis about the Holocaust, immigration to Israel, and memories of life in various diasporas. Her first (Ph.D.) study, Sister in Sorrow (Wayne State University Press, 2008)—about women survivors of the Holocaust—won the 2009 American Folklore Society AFS Award, named after Elli Köngäs-Maranda, for women’s studies. She is the author of six research books and a memoir about her childhood in Jerusalem.
