The greatness of smallness: Amos Oz, Sherwood Anderson, and the American presence in Hebrew literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative reading of stories by Amos Oz and Sherwood Anderson to propose “smallness” – evoked by genre, setting, and literary devices – as a vital literary strategy structuring Oz’s works. Manifestations of smallness, fundamental to the twentieth-century American literary imagination, are indispensable in Oz’s stories. Paradoxically, both Oz’s literary modernism and his status as a “world author” can only be understood in the context of the small, the provincial, and the local that Anderson elevated to the status of great literature, suggesting that not only European literature but also (non-Jewish) American writing has influenced Hebrew literature