The Search for Identity in Israeli Arab Fiction: Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-112
Author(s):  
Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Emile Habiby

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Exchanging Words

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Bilingual Reading ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Emile Habiby

This chapter juxtaposes the Arabic prose fiction of the Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996) and the Iraqi Jewish writer Samir Naqqash (1938–2004). Habiby was a major figure in the Israeli political and cultural landscapes as well as in Modern Arabic literature. Naqqash was the most important contemporary Jewish writer of Arabic, yet remains virtually unknown. As two native speakers of Arabic who wrote Arabic prose fiction in Israel, they offer an illuminating, if unorthodox, point of comparison. The chapter explores the poetics of misunderstanding in their fiction, elucidating how they thematize communicative failure as one means of contesting dominant historical narratives and undermining their faulty logic. It also offers the first comparative study of Habiby's critical reception in both Arabic and Hebrew, based on a bilingual reading of his masterpiece al-Mutasha'il (The Pessoptimist).

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