SOURCE: "Israeli Novelists," in the Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 17, Fall, 1980, pp. 66-77.

In the following essay, Gertz compares the fiction of the Palmah authors of the 1940s and '50s with that of the new generation of Israeli writers in the 1960s and '70s.

In Amos Kenan's Holocaust II (1975), written in part before, but completed after the Yom Kippur war, the refugees of a devastated Tel-Aviv live in an immense camp in a tropical region without sky, where there is no day or night, no bird or tree or nature, neither past nor future.

Yitzhak Ben-Ner's story 'After the Rain', which was published in the daily ha-Aretz (1977), also describes Tel-Aviv after destruction—a lawless city where roaming street gangs rule, while frightened solitary people wander through the streets because they are afraid to stay at home, for there, too, fear lurks. All hope for a sudden miracle—the...