7 Fragments about Melancholy and Zionism.

ZIONISM & Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (Book); ZIONISM; ZARCHI, Nurit; JEWISH studies; MELANCHOLY; AUTHOR archives; HEBREW literature; CULTURAL history

The fragments present the case brought forth in the forthcoming Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (Indiana University Press, 2019). They present a case of critical Jewish melancholy in the first half of the twentieth century, preceding Israeli statehood in 1948. More specifically, the fragments examine briefly the writing of Israel Zarchi (1909–1947), an unjustly forgotten author who lived in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and his series of melancholic tales of Zionist pioneers. Zarchi is known today thanks to his daughter, the prize-winning author Nurit Zarchi, whose own voice frames the melancholic story I tell in those few pages. The research for this piece, and for the book as a whole, was based on newly unearthed and previously unpublished documents discovered in a Tel Aviv literary archive, and it sheds new light on the early history of modern Hebrew literature and the cultural history of pre-Israel Zionism. I chose to write in vignettes in order to capture the tone and broken structure of melancholy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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