Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories, The

By Abramson, Glenda (Ed.)
Oxford University Press, 1995, Paperback, 424 pp., ISBN: 019288039X, $18.95

War inevitably features often in these 33 stories that reflect, more than the literature of any other country, the social and political dilemmas of a multifarious culture.

Hebrew fiction has grown to embrace the modern world and to deal with subjects such as daily life in a small Jewish town, intellectual disillusionment, and the huge political changes with which Jewish writers have had to come to terms following the establishment of the State of Israel.

This anthology demonstrates the astonishing richness and diversity of Hebrew short fiction by including not only established authors of the stature of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Yehuda Amichai, and David Grossman, but also less well-known writers whose stories have not been published in translation before: Orly Castel-Bloom and Savyon Liebrecht among the younger women writers, Yitzhak Oren among the more experimental older generation. Glenda Abramson's informative introduction sets the scene for a powerful literary collection, the definitive anthology of a vibrant modern genre. Amazon.com