Abstract
The immigration of the Beta Israel community from Ethiopia to Israel during the 1980s and the 1990s posed a challenge to Israeli society in relation to its ability to know, understand, and absorb a Jewish community with differing religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. For the Beta Israel, immigrating to Israel created a rift between their dream of returning to Jerusalem, a dream that would only be fulfilled after a journey of suffering, and its realization - in which they became an inferior and excluded minority within Israel. This article discusses Hebrew Ethiopian-Israeli literature, focusing on the major narrative of homecoming - the Journey to Yerussalem. This literature, which is relatively new and small, brings the voice of two generations - those who immigrated to Israel as adults, and the younger generation who were small children during the journey. Presenting various texts, and focusing on Asterai by Omri Tegamlak Avera (2008a) I shall show how Ethiopian-Israeli literature constituted itself as a journey literature, contrasting the old generation with the younger generation's identity formation as it appears in the representation of this journey narrative, constructing a more complex, ambivalent approach to the concepts of immigration and absorption, homeland and diaspora.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 42-56 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Social Identities |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2014 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the Open University of Israel Research Fund [grant nos. 37088 and 37115]. All the literary excerpts in this article have been translated from Hebrew by Tamar Gerstenhaber.
Keywords
- Beta Israel
- Ethiopian-Israeli literature
- Hebrew literature
- immigration
- journey narrative