We Are Broken Rhymes: The Politics of Trauma in Hebrew Literature

This book is a methodical, comprehensive work that locates and analyzes the presence of trauma in the language, poetics and politics of Israeli literature. It raises acute questions about the politics of literature, and of its moral authority; it focuses on the responsibility of the author within the literary text. The book investigates the literary processing of trauma embedded in the destruction of European Jewry, of the 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the war of 1973 as they appear in the works of S. Yizhar; Leah Goldberg; Avot Yeshurun; Nathan Alterman; Aharon Apelfeld; Dan Pagis; Erez Biton; Yitzhak Laor; Shimon Ballas; Haim Beer and Rivka Basman Ben-Haim. The book interrogates the author’s responsibility as it is presented to the reader through the representation of Israeli trauma in literary texts, and continues to discuss the responsibility of the fictional characters represented in these texts. It also analyzes the responsibility of the researcher as well as that of the reader as it  proposes an intricate discussion of the ways in which literature can deal with representations of trauma.