Although the nuanced relations of the 'latent' and the 'uncovered' layers are attached through the essence of the Hebrew language, Ben-Dov illustrates that the greatness of a writer must withstand translation.

In its wake came self-declared autobiographic novels: The Pure Element of Time (Havalim) by Haim Be'er (1998), A Tale of Love and Darkness (Sippur al ahava vehoshekh) by Amos Oz (2002), My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner (Ha-davar haya kakha) by Meir Shalev (2009), and Spanish Charity (Hessed sefaradi) by A.B.

In Ben-Dov's discussion of Preliminaris and these others, she substantiates the two faces of this genre: a factual or semi-factual account tied in with a well designed written work.

Ben-Dov studies autobiographic writings that preceded the torrent of late 20th and early 21st century: Agnon's story "The Mark" (Hasiman), the full version of which was published in 1962, the two semi-autobiographic novels by Sami Michael Refuge (Hasut) and A Handful of Fog (Hofen shel arafel), published in the late 1970s, and the complex of Dahlia Ravikovitch's prose and poetry, from which the experience of orphanhood erupts.

Written Lives also contains scholarly discussions of writings that are not purely literary, such as the Baghdad Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew (Bebagdad etmol), which is the memoirs of the literature scholar Sasson Somekh (2004); Yosef Haim Brenner: A Biography (Yosef Hayyim Brenner: Sippur hayyim) by the historian Anita Shapira (2008); and Home (Habayta), a novel of the kibbutz by Assaf Inbari (2009).

Where the Heart is Drawn (Schocken, 2022) is divided into nine chapters, each contains one or several sections that deal with works of a writer or literary critic: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, A.B.

Yehoshua, Zeruya Shalev, Amos Oz, Haim Be'er, Dan Miron, Shmuel Avneri, Eliyahu Maidanik and Robert Alter.

War Lives: Revenge, Grief, and Conflict in Israeli Fiction, published by Syracuse University Press, (2024), is available on Amazon - https://a.co/d/hyNNO3D.

Close readings of ten Israeli novels, exploring how issues of loss and grief, vengeance, and defeat are reflected in fiction.