These two anthologies, which together provide samples of Israeli writing from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, contain short stories from the older, immigrant generation S.Y.Agnon from Galicia (Poland), Haim Hazaz from the Ukraine, Aharon Megged from Poland, Benjamin Tammuz from Russia, Yehuda Amichai from Germany as well as writing from Sabra (Israeli-born) authors such as Moshe Shamir, Yoram Kaniuk or S.Yizhar and up to younger writers such as Aharon Appelfeld and A.B. Yehoshua, who are now quite well known outside of Israel for their prose fiction.

The stylistic range of these slim volumes — nine short stories in Israeli Stories, eight in Modern Hebrew Stories — reflects something of the complexity of the cultures from within which these writers write. For example, Yoram Kaniuk’s The Parched Earth (Israeli Stories) presents a view, through the eyes of an excited child for whom ’days were arranged like sliced bread, for meat, for cucumbers, for apples’, of the complex linguistic and ethnic worlds of Tel Aviv in the British Mandate (c.1918-1948) period (his father’s poetic Hebrew, Aunt Shlomit’s robust Russian, Yemenite Jewish women, British policemen, the nearby Arab village where he eats sesame seeds...). This ethnic richness is mirrored in the joyous, almost preciously worked lyricism of the prose.

Stylistically more tense, and disjointed to the point of incoherence is Yehuda Amichai’s story, Battle for the Hill (Israeli Stories), set during the 1956 Sinai campaign. This presents a startling blend of order and disorder, as flashing thoughts are bound in with comments on the immediate surroundings or on military tactics and it also makes use of superimposed times and places or surreal images to bring the situation to life (’Her eyes are as hard as metal screws. Once she wanted to rivet herself to the world with those eyes, but she didn’t succeed’). Amichai — one of Israel’s best known poets — addresses war from a different angle in The Times My Father Died (Modern Hebrew Stories), through the watchful eyes of a young son growing into an adult. The narrator tries to come to terms with the changes and ’deaths’ which he perceives in his father: his father’s ’deaths’ through Nazi persecution, his father’s bewilderment — so common to that generation of Central European Jews — at having fought on the side of the Germans in World War One, while having a son who signs up with the British in World War Two; and the more personal ’deaths’ — retreats, numbness, dead times — which the son learns to see in the father.

Amichai’s stories, like Yizhar’s The Prisoner and Benjamin Tammuz’s A Roll of Canvas (both in Israeli Stories) rewrite the traditional war story to show an oblique and nuanced relation to war, to militant forms of commitment (Tammuz’s almost shockingly gentle story of the encounter between a committed book-loving pacifist and a brash young Irgun* member) and to patriotism, generating some singular and complex styles: neither heroising, nor cynical but a tense and disturbing combination of involvement and alienation which is perhaps a prototype of the Israeli relation to Israel. The Prisoner, for example, set in the late summer of 1948, concerns the loss or disturbance of values brought about by life as a soldier. Into a simple story of the capture and interrogation of an Arab shepherd, Yizhar manages to weave both a sharp questioning of militarism and broader reflections on ethics and compromise, in a prose which takes off into internal monologue and surprising focused detail, plucking the moment (of decision, action, resistance) out of the present to turn it over for its full ethical and aesthetic value.

Alongside the experimentation of Kaniuk, Amichai or Yizhar, there is the solemn, simple tone of Megged’s The Name (Israeli Stories), a story about what it is for a Jew to carry a name, and the burden and hope invested in that name. A younger Israeli-born generation desires to choose a ’new’ (Hebrew) name for their child over ’a Ghetto name, ugly, horrible’; whereas the grandfather — representative of an older generation — wants the name to be that of a young grandson murdered by the Nazis, hoping to commemorate this slaughtered twelve year old through the passing down of his name. In its delicate depiction of these two experiential worlds, which despite ’belonging’ to the same family are separated by an unbridgeable distance, The Name is a moving story and one which resonates in many different areas: family alienation, generational rifts, the terrible task of mourning such a death. Some of the usual richness of Megged’s prose is foregone in this story, but shines out again in In the Attic (Modern Hebrew Stories), a story which explores a young boy’s apprehension of the sacred, of profanation and of the forbidden, through a simple tale of climbing into an abandoned loft above a synagogue one boiling Sabbath noon while all the village sleeps.

More ideologically motivated is Haim Hazaz’s The Sermon (Israeli Stories), a tale of an ill-educated but passionate kibbutznik brandishing the power of the spoken word to his colleagues on the subject of the history of the Jews and the emergence of Zionism, a thought-provoking (and provoking tout court) argument laced with statements such as ’when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist’, or the history of the Jews as a history of ’begging for mercy’... If the committee meeting of a kibbutz is something of a pretext for a discourse on history and destiny in this tale, tensions at the Israel-Jordan border are also a mere backdrop in Moshe Shamir’s Next of Kin (Israeli Stories), a suspenseful action story, narrated for tension and atmosphere, whose real focus is love and betrayal.

The Modern Hebrew Stories anthology contains also what are now better known, more recent authors, Yehoshua and Appelfeld, as well as, in both anthologies, some predictably magnificent Agnon (see reviews of these authors in the Babel Guide).

The Modern Hebrew Stories anthology also contains Yizhar’s breathtaking story, The Runaway, a simple tale of cultivating a plot of land and of a horse bolting, but gripping for its extraordinary blend of sharp-focus description (’...a whole wide stretch of soil, a bit crumbly to the touch, perhaps like the good feel of a handful of warm soft-shelled nuts, which, when you lick them slightly, give off a tantalizing clayish smell like the coming of the first rain...’), of suggestive psychological or metaphysical states (’folks that have horses in their farmyard... go through life differently, have a different smell, and a different look in their eyes. Haven’t you noticed that?’), and then the multiple narrative points of view, sometimes directly addressing the reader, inviting questions and responding to them, sometimes unobtrusive, always dynamically working with the narrative.

Overall, the Joel Blocker’s anthology (Israeli Stories) is more involved with recognisably political issues in the broad sense — Jewish history, Jewish memory, war, the world of Jerusalem — although the inventiveness and critical edge of these writers certainly dispel any idea that Israeli literature is bound by narrowly patriotic, heroic or nostalgic discourses (as might well be expected of a new, embattled State relying on military prowess and Zionist conviction). A bolder selection is found in Modern Hebrew Stories which, at the later date of 1971 after the Six Day War, perhaps felt more confident to present stories where the material of contemporary Israel is allowed to take on surreal and fantastical shape and to travel on some stylistically more experimental journeys (often achieved by focusing the narrative through the eyes of a young boy — five out of the eight stories use this device)). Modern Hebrew Stories has the added advantage of being a dual-language text (with some vocabulary and good notes at the back), one of the few such texts available.

These anthologies illuminate the immensely rich resources which these writers draw upon — diverse geographical, religious, political and linguistic backgrounds — and display the accomplishment with which they condense these materials into the stringent form of the European short story (simplicity of line, economy of expression and so forth). Quite apart from considerations of content, the English language reader can feel the interweaving of styles and idioms in these tales: Haim Hazaz’s folktale of a shtetl good-for-nothing, Hidden Puddle, is peppered with colloquialisms and snatches of Ukrainian, Nissim Aloni’s story Shmeel about a young boy in the Sephardi slums of Tel Aviv introduces Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) syntax (both of these in Modern Hebrew Stories), the Hebrew of these writers yields to spoken styles working in a range of registers, and throughout one can feel the infusion of biblical cadences and quotations.

’The voices soared, passed out of the classroom, flitted over the bare hills to the left, congregated at sea, raced towards distant lands, circled in the skies of reverie, played football on the sandy lot...’ (Yoram Kaniuk The Parched Earth [Israeli Stories] p125)

’Further on, open to the sun and the dogs, sprawled the tents of the Bedouin. A flat horizon stretched out like white-hot tin. In the East two clusters of eucalyptus trees rustled in intimate conversation, their bases strewn as if with baubles. From the North and the West the isolated houses were suffused in idle sleep, bowed under weary branches. A seething silence’. (AharonMegged The Name [Israeli Stories] p126)

’She didn’t want to cry but the tears came. Her whole body shared them, her hands and her legs, her hair and her thighs, until her torso became heavy and only her face remained dry... Her blood cried like an infant. She had to calm it. Her body was like a cradle for her blood, but the more she rocked it the harder it cried...’ (Yehuda Amichai Battle for the Hill [Israeli Stories] p220)

’Ah, do you know what it means to run!... How all of a sudden you are in the open. All of a sudden you’re in it. Wide open, and everything is permitted. Wide open and you’re in it. All of you inside the possible, like... what shall I say... like someone plunging into the sea and he’s in it, surrounded and swallowed up by it. All of him becomes what the sea is... And it’s all the same to the sea — your caring or your not caring doesn’t affect it the least bit; it remains changeless, not even scratched, not even the faintest smile. But you care. Oh, yes, to you everything matters. Your heartbeats are now absolutely different’. (S.Yizhar The Runaway [Modern Hebrew Stories] p108)