“Ziona”- Based on a True Story

• In Event: Rethinking Childhood

Abstract

Israeli-Mizrahi children and YA Literature gives voice to Mizrahi identities, histories, cultures, experiences, and points of views. Yet for the most part this corpus lacks both visibility and acknowledgment (Glasner 2018 in Hebrew).
In the present paper we seek to further address this genre and the questions it raises by exploring the writings and life story of Rivka Ozery (1935-2024). Our primary materials include Ozery's literary inheritance and recorded interviews with her. We will analyse them by combining a literary reading and a socio-anthropological analysis.
Rivka Ozery, the third of ten brothers and sisters, was born in 1935 to a Yemeni family that lived in a one-room apartment in Kerem HaTeimanim neighbourhood at Tel Aviv. When Rivka was only 16 her family moved to Magdiel and she remained behind living alone but in “a room of one’s own”.
The short story "Tziona - Based on a True Story" is a story Rivka wrote when she was a 17-year-old girl. The story was written from the perspective of a child who looks in esteem and fear at the heroes of a Zionist underground group in Mandatory Palestine. This perspective, which years later was echoed in the memories of Rivka's own life as she narrated them in a recorded interview with her daughter, allows us a glimpse into the depth, richness and complexity of a Sabara Mizrahi childhood that developed here in the pre-state Israel reality but did not receive sufficient presence in the canonical literary corpus.
Ozery's work then allows us to suggest the existence of early Jewish Mizrahi-Israeli children and YA Literature that is still waiting to be published and acknowledged. As a case study, Ozery's work will also invite us to rethink common assumptions regarding the boundaries of children’s and YA literature, namely who is considered a writer, and the implications of this on the historical perspectives of the field.

Authors

• Lily Glasner, Kibbutzim College of Education AND Bar Ilan University

• Sigal Ozery Roitberg, Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts