Multicultural Containment and Aesthetic Education in Nakar-Sadi's Oxana

This article engages with the Israeli author Merav Nakar-Sadi's novel Oxana (2014), winner of the Sapir Prize for a literary debut, and reads it as an expression of aesthetic education whose aim is to create a multicultural capability by means of "training the imagination for epistemological performance." Oxana is written in the genre of parallel culture literature, which depicts minority cultures living in parallel with the hegemonic group and at its margins. The novel tells the story of the migrant workers in the State of Israel as part of the larger issue of the collective Israeli identity and the striving to become part of it.

The article concentrates on narrative techniques as aesthetic education, which is by definition socially involved and committed. It first examines the question of migrant labor within Israeli society and then moves on to analyze the representation of power relations between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The article concludes that beyond the question of the migrant laborers, the book Oxana also examines the question of Israeliness, or the Israeli collective and its borders.