ABSTRACT
In its initial stages Israeli society attempted to consolidate a cultural reality which contained its own distinctive behavioural modes and concordant language of signs. Immigrants who came from the Diaspora to Israel brought with them a wide diversity of behavioural conventions and in order to create a model acceptable to the majority of the population it was essential for both society and literature to consolidate a common language (in the widest sense of the term).1 Anyone who then attempted to come to grips with existing reality and to deform it in order to demonstrate both its lack of worth and the desirability of creating an alternative, had first to relate to the presumed reality prevalent among the expected readers.2 The attempt to deconstruct a model is based upon the assumption that in the reader’s world there is always an image that can be referred to-the best example is perhaps Mendele Mokher Seforim (1835-1917).3
