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This chapter addresses how family crises are represented in Israeli literature written for young children. The foundation for the discussion is the assumption that the bulk of children’s literature bestows a false conception of “family” by obscuring its repressive, authoritarian aspects and accentuating the image of happiness, security, and belonging. However, this chapter points to a trend in Israeli literature observed since the 1980s: the publication of works for young children that seek to expose the repressive aspects of family life. In particular, they are stories based on the absence of intergenerational communication and the presence of emotional stress or even parental neglect. These stories present a sober, critical view of the high-powered traditional institution that, in children’s literature, is traditionally perceived as animagined, organic, almost-idyllic system, which in fact it is not. Even though the publication of such works in Israel coincides with similar trends worldwide, it is not a self-evident occurrence, given the character of Jewish-Hebrew culture, which sanctifies family life. This chapter discusses two works of children’s fiction, by Nurit Zarchi and Meir Shalev, that address the tension that arises between adult intimacy (husband and wife) and intergenerational intimacy (parents and children).

The present article investigates the reasons for J. L. Gordon's repeated assays into short prose, which lacked both the brilliance of past works and the impressive spaciousness of the modern novel. What was it that drove Gordon, a champion of poetry and an excellent practitioner thereof, to go back constantly to writing short fiction which was usually greeted with considerable reservation? In what follows I shall claim that short fiction served Gordon as a field of experiment and practice, something which its formal and thematic freedom enabled, and even encouraged. An examination of the interrelation between his early story "The End of Happiness Is Sadness" and his lengthy poems about the present reveals that the former served as a kind of poetic "exercise," a means of experimenting with important features which would later appear in his mature poetry. Consequently we may surmise that the supposedly great distance between Gordon's prose and poetry was in fact bridged by artistic principles derived from his experience in writing prose and then applied with great success in his poetry.