SOURCE: "Contemporary Israeli Literature: A New Stance," in Books Abroad, Vol. 46, No. 2, Spring, 1972, pp. 192-9:

In the following essay, Gillon surveys Israeli literature of the mid twentieth-century, focusing on the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and T. Carmi, and the short fiction and drama of Avraham B. Yehoshua.

During the fifties and sixties Israeli poetry produced more original talent than the novel and drama. While some of the outstanding older poets still continued to do significant work (like Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, Jonathan Ratosh), the chorus of younger poets rose to "sing and speak . . . in many sorts of music": lyrical, elegiac, intellectual, sardonic, melancholy, obsessed with the Holocaust, fiercely existentialist or absurdist, experimental, traditional, delicate, robust, an archic, and precise—indeed a veritable explosion of poetic creativity. The list of poets is too long for the scope of this article, which precludes a systematic survey of...