The last two decades of the twentieth century brought profound changes to Israel and opened it up to increasing outside influences. Throughout the 1980s, the country also experienced accelerated economic development and the establishment of a Western, capitalist society, a trend which was expedited by the influx of hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants in the early 1990s and symbolized by the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993. These developments, the addition of nearly one million workers and consumers to Israel’s economy, and the first real chance at peace with the entire Arab world, brought Israel much closer to...

I want to draw the emergence of romance in contemporary Israeli culture against a historical moment Gadi Taub describes so well in his study of a phenomenon he termed the Dispirited Rebellion.¹ Taub, who is also one of the writers I discuss in this book, published in 1997 a collection of essays in which he defined a new Israeli generation in what is essentially a post-national era. Taub’s thesis is important for understanding the state of mind of a generation of Israelis who were born after the triumphant war in 1967 and whose consciousness was forged in an increasingly safe,...

Since the romantic writers, like all other writers, were products of their age, I want to consider in this chapter some of the cultural aspects that distinguished the last decade or so of the twentieth century in Israel. Of these changes, one of the most significant was the rise of a new press. The creation and proliferation of new media outlets did not only express and record the profound changes Israel was undergoing. Because the romantic writers participated in these new media early in their careers, their journalistic beginnings render important insights into their more enduring works. This chapter looks...

Etgar Keret, who began writing as a young soldier in the early 1990s, was the most visible and prolific of the romantic writers. Keret sent his first stories to so-called lowbrow, popular media, such as the teenage weekly Maʿariv lanoʿar and the glossy women’s magazines At and La’isha, because, as he confessed tellingly, it was more important for him to be read by the many than evaluated by the few.¹ Whether Keret meant this in earnest or not, popular and critical acclaim swiftly followed the publication of his first anthology of short stories, Tsinorot (Pipelines), in 1992. Both the reading...

If Etgar Keret expressed some of the main anxieties of his generation and suggested romance as an interim or temporary solution for the confusion of his age, Gadi Taub, Uzi Weil, and Gafi Amir developed this solution further. They also explored Israel’s inexorable draw toward the urban, capitalist, and consumerist influences of the West which attended the age and loomed large over it. In fact, much of the confusion these writers evinced at the time stemmed from a gradual increase of these influences over life in a post-national Israel. But unlike popular culture in general (newspapers, television, popular literature), Taub,...

While the romantic writers poignantly expressed the spirit of their age, ultimately, their literary flight—their attempt to lift off the bumpy Israeli surface and soar into the comfort of a smooth Western sky—was short-lived. The breaking of the second Intifada in 2000 with its devastating effects on the country resurrected the reality of a Middle East that does not allow, at least not yet, the manufacture of a new Israeli way of life through imported narratives. Certainly not when a very immediate reality was cruelly tearing those narratives apart and announcing itself ever more loudly each time a...