ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1950s the Cameri Theatre of Tel-Aviv produced Nathan Shacham’s play They’ll Arrive Tomorrow [a synopsis of which is to be found at the end of the article]. Shacham was among a group of young Hebrew playwrights and authors who began writing in the 1940s and who, before and during the War of Independence of 1948, wrote about military actions, war and life during wartime. The group were dubbed “The Palmach Writers,” after the underground forces, the Palmach, (a Hebrew acronym for “striking forces”). Shacham himself served during the war as a press officer on the Southern Front. Moshe Shamir’s He Walked through the Fields (1948) and Yigal Mossensohn’s In the Wilderness of the Negev (1949) were plays of the same period which also depicted situations very similar to the contemporary reality. At the time they provoked a good deal of public interest, especially among the fighters themselves, who did not always like their stage image.
