I Am Your Dust

"Israel's cultural space is frequently studied as if it were synonymous with the Hebrew-Israeli one. But within the borders of Israel a fascinating culture was (and continues to be) created in many different languages other than Hebrew, reflecting its reality from angles that the makers of Hebrew-Israeli culture did not know and all-too-often lacked the tools to express. I Am Your Dust: Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948-1967 expands the boundaries of current studies of Israel's cultural history by presenting and analyzing Yiddish-Israeli prose written during the country's first two decades as an independent state. It offers a comprehensive study of that unique, and hitherto little understood, literature, a detailed historical documentation of the contexts of its production, and an eye-opening comparison of its themes to the more familiar outputs of Hebrew-Israeli prose. It constitutes the first socio-literary investigation of Yiddish-Israeli culture of that period"--