ABSTRACT
From the first decade of the twentieth century, and particularly in the period between the two world wars, an extraordinary development occurred which can have few if any parallels in world literature. In the space of two or three decades, Hebrew literature uprooted itself from Europe and transferred itself bodily to Palestine or to use the term most frequently encountered, Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. It is important to recall :hat the term Eretz Yisrael reflects most accurately the image in the mind of most of these writers, in order to understand the processes involved. This extraordinary shift involved the transference of literature from a society in Eastern Europe comprising many millions of inhabitants to an extremely sparse Jewish population which in 1914 numbered scarcely 85,000 souls, a figure which was further reduced during the deprivation of the war years to less than 60,000 in 1918. The transition, not surprisingly, was neither smooth nor easily accomplished. The transference of the centre of Hebrew creativity from a solid base in terms of the size and social stratification of a closely knit and long established community to the flimsy and precarious structure of a numerically tiny population, much of it of comparatively recent vintage, gave rise to considerable stress.
