Ghosts of Oslo: Disjointed Time and Anticipation in the Contemporary Israeli Novel

Abstract: In this article I identify a trend in the mainstream of Israeli literature of the second decade of the twenty-first century, namely, nostalgia for a lost anticipation for the future signaled in the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestinians in the early 1990s. I focus on five novels published in the years 2014–15, by some of the most central and successful novelists in Israel, that express the way the Israeli cultural elite is haunted by the specter of the lost future implied in the vision of the Oslo Accords. The novels are: A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (2014); All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan (2014); Judas by Amos Oz (2014); The Extra by A. B. Yehoshua (2014); and The Third by Yishai Sarid (2015). These novels try to relive a lost anticipation for the future by looking back to the past.