The confessions of a bad reader: Embodied selves, narrative strategies, and subversion in Israeli women's autobiography

This article reviews contemporary autobiographical writing in Israel. Israeli autobiographical texts take critical, moral stances that both challenge the Israeli collective and assert a deep, very personal commitment to that collective. Israeli autobiographers refigure expressive and narrative models as they expose the frames of reference that mainstream literature has learned to conceal. In contemporary Israeli autobiographies, a fractured embodied self has appeared in both women's and men's works, and the body often seems to unsettle power structures. This article is concerned with the gendered specificity with which this self is represented in women's autobiographical writing in Israel, and offers readings of Netiva Ben-Yehudas 1948-Bein hasfirot (1981), Judith Kafri's Kol hakayits halakhnu yehefim (1995), Nurith Gertz and Deborah Gertz's El mah she-namog (1997), and Nurith Zarchi's Mishakey bedidut (1999).