SOURCE: "New Israeli Writing," in Commentary, Vol. 65, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 64-7.

In the following essay, Mintz evaluates the "dual urge toward nostalgia and apocalypse" in contemporary Israeli fiction.

The state of Israel was conceived by force of a messianic vision, but its existence has been maintained by order, sacrifice, and the rational setting of priorities—and this in the face of another, more ominous vision held by its neighbors. Life under such mixed conditions of ordinariness and dread might well seem cribbed and predetermined, and it is understandable that Israelis would search for various ways of becoming released from it. In Israel's literature, that search has often taken one of two forms, a looking back to happier times, and a reaching forward toward some new vision of an end, either individual or collective, in which the anxieties of history will be dissolved. Indeed, ever since the pioneer period...