The lecture deals with the very up-to-date Israeli literature as an expression of the nowadays Israeli society. Thus the identity matter is not anymore a question of a one-way wishful ideology, that strives to avoid the past as an elementary basis of a collective memory. It is rather a multicultural matter, dealing with ethnic authenticity, and proposing to the mainstream Israeli European culture an alternative: the acceptance of the Other and his story/history as an essential part of a multicultural society in the process of self-construction.
The narrative of Aharon Appelfeld, consisting on a triple transmission of the past souvenirs, the trauma of being uprooted and disintegrated on the margins of a new society, leading, step by step, to an adjustment and a possibility of a reconstructed identity, is a very interesting example of the narrative of Israeli society as a whole, a society of immigrants. It is Appelfeld’s reception that marks the beginning of a new attitude concerning mainly Oriental as well as Arabic writers.
