Literary Notes: Some of Israel's greatest living writers were born in the 1930s. Many of them lived in Jerusalem at the start of the Arab-Israeli War, which followed the foundation of Israel in 1948. Constant themes are the conflict between the religious life of Judaism and the life of the modern secular Jew; and the contradiction of Jerusalem as the holy, eternal city of God and Jerusalem as the man-made, political city of human conflict.
A B Yehoshua deals with these issues in his novel, The Lover (1977), which describes a husband's attempt to trace his wife's lover, who disappeared during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The husband finds the man living within a community of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and attempts to persuade him to rejoin the modern secular reality of life in the city. In Amos Oz's novel, My Michael (1968), the tension between violence and spiritual yearning in Jerusalem leads to strains within a Jewish couple's marriage as they become more aware of both the threat and the hope offered by the city's Arab population. Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was one of the country's most admired and most successful writers. The author of more than 75 books, Amichai's works have been published around the world. While also much admired for his love poems, it was his ability to capture the dynamics of Israel's inner tensions and historical evolution that proved to be his most enduring contribution to Hebrew literature.