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January 2017 Vol. 54 No. 5


University Press of New England


The following review appeared in the January 2017 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.

Humanities
Language & Literature - African & Middle Eastern

54-2110
PJ5033
2016-4945 CIP
Hess, Tamar S. Self as nation: contemporary Hebrew autobiography. Brandeis, 2016. 213p index ISBN 9781611688795, $85.00; ISBN 9781611688801 pbk, $40.00; ISBN 9781611689662 ebook, $34.99.

Hess (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) studies how selected works written specifically as autobiography fit into a textual tradition that creates and examines self-identity within family, society, gender, and nation. In the first three chapters she studies works by Yoram Kaniuk, Natan Zach, Haim Be’er, Shimon Ballas, and Aharon Appelfeld in depth, and in the last chapter, “Gendered Margins,” she treats female writers, among them Esther Raab, Netiva Ben-Yehuda, and Judith Kafri. Hovering over the study are poet H. N. Bialik, Anton Shammas, Rachel Yannait Ben-Zvi, and Amos Oz (who famously wrote “everything is autobiographical,” quoted in the present volume), as are Western theorists of autobiography. Hess shows that motifs recur—redefinition vis-à-vis parents, Zionism (pioneering versus present), native versus nation, Israel versus diaspora, and Jewish texts (even Hebrew translations of non-Jewish works)—and he concludes that Israeli autobiography is drawn to “collective symbols and cultural tropes” and supplies “fresh definitions of what it means to be Israeli." Hess argues that Israeli autobiographies create a national image that is ultimately pluralistic and positive. Making a compelling argument for the importance of literary autobiographies for understanding Israeli culture and self-image, this book will be useful for readers familiar or becoming familiar with this literature.

--S. Ward, University of Wyoming

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.