Questioning Boundaries of Language and the World: Ambivalence and Disillusionment in the Writings of Shimon Adaf

The article demonstrates that the writings of Shimon Adaf put into question fundamental conventions concerning the “Mizrahi” literature in Israel by creating a unique poetic language that comprises a unique diversity of genres and language games from different periods of Hebrew as well as from other languages. This diversity generates multivocity whose effects build up an enquiry into the boundaries of language as a key to the meaning of life. Adaf’s poetic devices are examined from a philosophical, linguistic, and cultural perspective that draws upon Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Bhabha so as to analyze the act of poetic language in terms of cultural criticism that Adaf offers through ambivalent portrayal of central themes in Israeli culture, with this ambivalence producing the effect of disillusionment.