ABSTRACT
This chapter represents a dialogue of sorts between the writings of novelist Ronit Matalon, the daughter of Egyptian Jewish immigrants to Israel, and those of essayist Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, whose works give voice to the experiences and desires of the immigrant generation. Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, mentioned in Chapter 6, was born in Egypt in 1917. She lived in the United States for ten years, during which time she completed a degree in journalism at Columbia University, and published her first novel, Jacob’s Ladder, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman depicting a Jewish girl growing up in interwar Egypt.1 Kahanoff moved to Israel in 1954, where she began to work as freelance journalist for the English language press, as well as writing sociological reports for the Jewish Agency. In 1959, as noted in the previous chapter, she published a cycle of four essays, “A Generation of Levantines,” that appeared in Hebrew translation in the Israeli literary and cultural journal Keshet.
