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Sinister tales written since the early 20th century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S. Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction. Gothic Matters
Part I. A Spectralized Past
1. Always Already Gothic: S. Y. Agnon's European Tales of Terror
2. Maternal Macabre: Feminine Subjectivity at the Edge of the Shtetl in Dvora Baron and Ya'akov Shteinberg
3. After the Nightmare of the Holocaust: Gothic Temporalities in Leah Goldberg and Edgar Allan Poe
Part II. Haunted Nation
4. Dark Jerusalem: Amos Oz's Anxious Literary Cartography between 1948 and 1967
5. Historiographic Perversions: Echoes of
Otranto in A. B. Yehoshua's
Mr. Mani 6. A Séance for the Self: Memory, Nonmemory, and the Reorientation of History in Almog Behar and Toni Morrison
Coda. "Here Are Our Monsters": Hebrew Horror from the Political to Pop
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Karen Grumberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of
Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature.
Summary
Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S. Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture.
