Our Lives Are But Stories

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Our Lives Are But Stories explores the crucial role of personal storytelling in the lives of a unique generation of women--Jewish women who left the Muslim country of Tunisia to settle in the newly created Israeli state. To this day, the older generation of Tunisian Israelis continues to rely on storytelling as a form of education, entertainment, and socialization. But for women this art has taken on new dimensions, especially as they seek to impart their values to the young. Here Esther Schely-Newman expertly interweaves the personal accounts of the private lives of four Tunisian-Israeli women to analyze the rich complexities of communication. She considers how various approaches to narration reflect storytelling as a cultural phenomenon and highlights the need to understand stories in the contexts in which they are told.

A rich analysis of how four Tunisian-Israeli women tell the stories of their lives, and a look at the implications for our own understanding of stories and the behavior of communication.
Esther Schely-Newman's fascinating book approaches the narrative in terms of its primordial form - focusing on the almost personal and yet very collective writing of a group of Tunisian-born women who immigrated to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s...[She] writes with impressive scholarly integrity.--Haaretz