Popular literature in hebrew as a marker of anti-sabra culture

Culture planning should perhaps not be judged in terms of absolute failure or success. Yet the degree of its effectiveness could be measured by the symbolic profit it offers to the collective. In this paper, I test these notions with the help of peripheral popular literature that sprang up in pre-state Israel but reached the peak of its success in Israel between 1950 and 1960. Though largely ignored, in both senses of the word, this popular literature seems to have undermined the ideological basis of the '‘elitist’' mobilized mainstream. Many of its agents remained obscure and hid behind pseudonyms, but its role in forcing the mainstream to stratify and, consequently, to participate in the '‘democratization’' of literature is far from negligible. This essay presents parts of a project in progress on the socio-cultural aspects of this peripheral literary production and its agents, comprising interviews with small-time publishers and translators of popular literature in the 1950s-1960s.