Documentation and Fiction in Hameiri's Accounts of the Great War.

Hameiri, Avigdor, 1887-1970; World War I; Poetry (Literary form); Literature; Great Madness, The (Book)

In her article "Documentation and Fiction in Hameiri's Accounts of the Great War" Tamar S. Drukker discusses the only surviving Hebrew-language docu-novel of the Great War, written by Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970), a Hungarian Jewish officer. His 1930 memoir The Great Madness is a war-time personal journal about his life at the Russian front. Many of the episodes described in The Great Madness receive a more styled treatment in Hameiri's wartime short stories which appeared in three collections during the 1920s. These stories are sometimes surreal, symbolic, and carefully crafted. Drukker's study of Hameiri's wartime life writing and his literary rendition of experience into stylized stories shed light on the purpose of his writing, the intended audience, and in particular Hameiri's choices -- linguistic, literary and ideological -- in choosing the medium for recounting and documenting in writing life experience in extreme conditions. Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]