תקציר
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.
| שפה מקורית | אנגלית |
|---|---|
| עמודים (מ-עד) | 42-56 |
| מספר עמודים | 15 |
| כתב עת | Social Identities |
| כרך | 20 |
| מספר גיליון | 1 |
| מזהי עצם דיגיטלי (DOIs) | |
| סטטוס פרסום | פורסם - ינו׳ 2014 |
הערה ביבליוגרפית
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.