SOURCE: "Afterword: A Problem of Horizons," in TriQuarterly, No. 39, Spring, 1977, pp. 326-38.

In the following essay, Alter views the tension between home and horizon—between the limits of the Israeli state and the expanse of the world—in contemporary Israeli literature.

It seems to me often that life in this tiny country is a powerful stimulant but that only the devout are satisfied with what they can obtain within Israel's borders. The Israelis are great travellers. They need the world.

—Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account

One of the most striking qualities of Israeli literature since the beginning of the 1960s and, increasingly, into the 1970s, is that it remains intensely, almost obsessively, national in its concerns while constantly pressing to address itself to universal issues and situations, perhaps to an international audience as well. This dialectic is inherently unstable, and of course its operation...