Present and Past: Diaries as a Source for Autobiography

Rachel Yanait Ben Zvi came to Ottoman Palestine in 1908. In her memoir of her early years in Palestine, Anu Olim Yanait described the first Yom Kippur she observed in Jerusalem: How emotionally stirred she was by the small synagogues in the narrow streets. It is surprising to find a diary entry, written decades later, when she was engaged in writing her memoir which depicts the holy day in Jerusalem in the exact same words. Yanait used her present experiences to create the past. Diaries often figure in autobiographical writing, as a source, whether undeclared or quoted directly, sometimes as documentation of a past position, such as in Alison Bechdel’s graphic autobiography Fun Home, or in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life, both of whom study their adolescent diaries as a manifestation of their painful development in the path to expression and language. Autobiography is widely acknowledged as a genre not only of the past, but of the present in which it is being created and written. Diaries and letters bring a different dimension of the present to autobiographical writing. In Hebrew literature they often enable a now fluent author to meet with his or her early steps as a Hebrew writer and speaker, which can no longer be constructed from the position of an established author. This paper will study representative appearances and functions of synchronic life writings (such as letters and diaries) in retrospective life writings, such as contemporary Hebrew memoirs and autobiographies.