It might be agreeable for once to turn from the headlines, from the tragedies and the madnesses and the multitude of apparently insoluble quandaries that bedevil Israel —bedevil is surely the word, for there must be some dedicated demon whose assignment is Israel, whose vocation is mayhem, and who is compelled never to take even the shortest vacation in Miami Beach —to think of one of the more astonishing aspects of Israeli history, which is how vital and prodigious a literature has evolved along with and been woven into its history. Considering how small the population of Israel is, how brief the time during which it ’s had a real identity, and even a language of its own, it’s brought forth a remarkable number of major poets and fiction writers.

Poets including Hayyim Bialik, Yehuda Amichai, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Yona Wallach, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Aharon Shabtai (to mention only the best known outside the country), and  novelists (to name again only the most internationally noted) S.Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshoa, and Meir Shalev —all have produced works significant not only for the audiences in their own country, but for many of the literate cultures of the world. And this doesn ’t count the writers who work in Arabic, like Mahmoud Darwish, Emil Habibi, or Anton Shammas, nor the perspicacious political commentators like Amos Elon; the philosophers, of whom Avashai Margalit is the best known in the United States, the filmmakers and wide range of scholars. Not only are the numbers startling, so is the variety and originality of so many of the books that have been written over the almost ceaselessly dire decades of the Israeli adventure.

And just as noteworthy is how clear-eyed, courageous, and generally optimistic the work of most of these writers has been. Even at their most torn by the difficult realities of their country ’s struggles, even at their most tragically aware, they’ve manifested in their work a ground note of joy about the existence of their country, an irrepressible, almost ecstatic delight in embodying the complexities of a nation inventing itself in a tumultuous and often vindictive world.

At the same time there’s something terribly sad about how the policies of the Israeli political order have often, or usually, been at odds with this expansive and affirmative vision. The governments of Israel for the last generations, with the exception of Yitzhak Rabin ’s, can best be described as lacking anything like the generous moral imagination of its writers. There have instead been a series of spasmodic, reflexive, often impatient and irritable, sometimes frankly cruel and almost inevitably self-defeating reactions to the threats the country has had to face. The poets and writers themselves have responded to this paradox in some cases with explosive rage, as when Aharon Shabtai entitled a book of poetry J’Accuse—a cry of indignation that took to task the inhumanity of the country’s policies towards the Palestinians—and sometimes with anguish, most poignantly when the son of David Grossman was killed, the day after Israel had agreed to a cease-fire in the latest Lebanese conflict, but had illegally extended its actions that extra, futile twenty-four hours.

I suppose the most compelling question now is how long the Israeli artists can maintain their positive outlook in the face of so much unrelenting venom on the part of the country ’s enemies and so little inventiveness from its own politicians. Shabtai for one certainly seems to have all but given up, and some of the other writers I ’ve spoken to have begun to express a note of weariness, exasperation and despair I ’ve never heard before. Whether this will darken their vision, and deplete the energy of their work, is a terrible question to have to ask. But then most questions about Israel are.