ABSTRACT
Brenner's piece is an early herald of a wide corpus of prose fiction that started to appear in the 1920s in which kibbutz life and ideology were a central issue. The first decades of the kibbutz were marked by a consistent rise in its status as a leading, indispensable factor in the Israeli social and political milieu. This chapter explores the phenomenon of kibbutz representation in Hebrew prose fiction during the first three decades of the kibbutz from two angles. These are literature's attempt to establish a strong link between kibbutz ideology and the Israeli nation-building project, and the possibilities it provided for the expression of subversive misgivings regarding its exclusive position and its redemptive power. Collectivity in early kibbutz ideology was designed to apply to all aspects of life, including material, emotional, and intellectual issues. The totality of the collective experience is textually reproduced also through the use of a common style of literary composition and strategy of narration.
