War Lives: Revenge, Grief, and Conflict in Israeli Fiction

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.

Nitza Ben-Dov is a highly esteemed scholar of Israeli literature and was recently awarded the 2021 Israel Prize in Hebrew Literature in recognition of her work. She is the author of numerous articles and books and is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa.