Last year when he wrote about the passing of Israeli children’s author Devora Omer, Shmuel Rosner lamented that his children, who were unfamiliar with her work, are “missing out on the foundational tales that undergird a strong collective memory, which a country like ours needs in order to survive.” The sense that Israel needs a new collective memory informs Einat Wilf’s The Search for a Single Zionist Story, which appears in the April 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine.

Herself a former chair of the Knesset Education Committee, Wilf sums up this loss early on:

My generation celebrates an Israel that is diverse, fascinating, colorful, and messy; an Israel that acknowledges the many different views and perspectives of those who inhabit it. We do not want to return to a time when many were excluded in the name of unity. But we also mourn the loss of a grand, inspiring narrative.

The article by Wilf, a former member of the Knesset, is a review of two recent books: Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers, and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Though the structure of each book is different – Klein Halevi traces the divergent paths taken by a group of paratroopers from the Six-Day War, and Shavit presents Israel’s history as a series of discrete but epochal events – Wilf writes that both authors have attempted to write “a new story” of Zionism, “that has room for all its characters and inspires all who hear it.” She concludes, “both of them succeed.”

How did each author achieve his goal?

Klein Halevi is the weaver at his machine, painstakingly creating a single cloth and pattern from the wildly divergent lives of his protagonists. Detail after detail, almost without noticing, a magnificent tapestry emerges on the other side. It is a picture that encompasses everyone, Left and Right, religious and secular, capitalist and socialist—a pattern in which Israel is “the partial fulfillment and partial failure of the contradictory dreams” of his protagonists.
Shavit, in contrast, creates one Israel by breaking it apart and laying bare its constituent parts for all to see. Beautiful and ugly, proud and shameful, black and white, no grays whatsoever, they shine in the glaring sun. And as the reader closes the book and takes a step back, a picture of one Israel emerges. One Israel where all parts belong, all parts make sense, and all parts are necessary. One Israel that “offers the intensity of life on the edge.”

Using these disparate approaches both authors forged a new durable narrative to sustain Zionism through the “next one hundred years.”

[Photo: Maxwell Woolley / The Tower ]