At the turn of the 20th century, Hebrew was revived for literature by Joseph Brenner, whose hallmark was the tragic, uprooted settler. His works are remarkable not only for thei,- continuing influence on subsequent generations of Israeli writers, but jUso for their searching and pessimistic depictions of social interaction between ews and Arabs. In the 1920s and 1930s Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Agnon Lconfronted the breakdown of cultural cohesion among modem Jews in his writings. His works include A Guest for the Night, The Bridal Canopy, and Twenty-One Sto-! ties. Leah Goldberg infused the harsh realities of life into her poetry.

Just prior to the creation of the State of Israel, a new group of native Hebrew authors arose with a fresh style characterized by a concern for the landscape and the moment, exemplified by S. Yizhar’s Efrayim Returns to Alfalfa. Beginning in the late 1950s, writers such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua began to experiment with 1 psychological realism, allegory, and symbolism. In the 1960s new skepticism sur- faced in Israeli literature. Yehoshua, for example, wrote about tensions between j generations, Arabs and Jews, and Sephardim and Ashkenazim in his “Facing the Forests” and his collection of short stories Three Days and a Child, David Shahar has j been called the Proust of Hebrew literature for his The Palace of Shattered Vessels set in Jerusalem in the 1930s and ’40s. Ya’akov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, about Tel j Aviv in the 1970s, was perhaps the best Israeli novel of the decade.