Guy Ehrlich Publishes His First Book: The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel
November 11, 2024
The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel explores the literary work of Israeli author Yehudit Hendel (1921-2014) and offers a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind monograph about the author and her writings. This book won the Bahat Prize for Best Original Scholarly Book Manuscript in Hebrew and was published by Haifa University Press and Pardes (September 2024). It revisits and expands Hendel’s oeuvre, utilizing her previously unexplored literary estate to unveil her forgotten early corpus and recast Hendel as a key figure in the historiography and canon. As the only recognized woman author of “the 1948 generation,” whose works focused mainly on the margins of Israeli society, she was labeled as an “other” already in her early years. Despite remaining an active and respected writer, her unique and subversive works – embracing a “poetics of melancholia,” blurring the lines between “biography” and “fiction,” and resisting hegemonic models of bereavement and loss in Israeli culture – kept her on the margins of the literary canon. Drawing on essays, early drafts of published works, biographical materials, and an early shelved novella, this book rethinks the dichotomy between “early” and “late” in Hendel’s oeuvre and offers a new portrayal of her as a harbinger of later poetic trends and shifts in Hebrew literature, including the “new wave” authors of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist wave of the 1990s, and the contemporary rise of autofiction and memoirs.
