The New Tradition ― Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature

As cohesive Jewish communal life began to disintegrate in the late nineteenth century, a modern Hebraic secular cultural tradition emerged. This volume presents a selection of influential essays by Gershon Shaked, all of which explore the evolution of that new tradition, tracing its major processes and identifying central stages in the development of its new canonical master-texts.

Shaked’s first essays expand the discussion of Jewish secularism and consider the formative function of the Holocaust and other traumatic memories of persecution on the collective Jewish and Israeli mentality. The next essays provide a general overview of modern Hebrew literature in Israel and in the Diaspora—particularly in the United States. Each section focuses on prominent authors. In the case of poetry and drama, the Hebrew poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik and the major Hebrew playwright Mattityahu Shoham are highlighted. Two other sections are dedicated to Mendele Mokher Seforim and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, two major novelists of the New Tradition. The next section is dedicated to Joseph Hayyim Brenner, an immigrant in the Second Aliyah who also wrote of displaced strangers trying to set down roots in a foreign environment, and Yitzhak Shami, an "Arab-Jew" who wrote about the mentality and lifestyle of the oriental Jewish communities of Palestine and Syria. The last chapter analyzes the work of an "outsider," David Vogel. Although Vogel’s novel Hayyei nissu’im (Married Life) was written in Hebrew, its plot and characters are strongly reminiscent of the German-Jewish literary tradition.

In analyzing the cultural processes underlying Hebrew literature’s major achievements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these essays shed light upon the major concerns of this new and secular Hebrew tradition. Especially for the non-Hebrew reader, they will illuminate key aspects of modern Jewish culture.