1 Being an Immigrant in One’s Homeland The reflection of narratives of immigration in contemporary Israeli literature Adia Mendelson-Maoz The Open University of Israel, adiamen@openu.ac.il The narrative of Jews’ immigration to the Land of Israel is a constitutive narrative in Israeli nationality. The Zionist enterprise, striving to build a haven for the Jews, used to form a positive view of immigration and assimilation, as expressed in a Hebrew word "Aliya" – a special word for describing Jews who immigrant to Israel. “Aliya” means ascent, rise or advancement, all of which are linked to the notion of people returning to their homeland. In reality, however, the immigration process was often the opposite of the optimistic ‘Aliya’ story. Most waves of immigration were a direct response to currents of anti-Semitism at the origin country, and most immigrants, once in Israel, were repressed and excluded. Often the immigrants suffered an incurable sorrow for their lost homes, friends and culture, unable to see the new land as their home. It this talk I present the discourse on immigration and homecoming - one of the controversial issues in the production of the national Zionist community. I examine the evolution of the discourse and read the novel of Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness within this discussion. The development of Modern Hebrew literature provides a dramatic example of the production of national imagination, whose construction involves, as Benedict Anderson (1983) had taught us, a writing and rewriting of historical memories and shared narratives that seek to shape the reader’s understanding of the nation and its identity. Indeed, since its resurrection at the end of the Nineteenth Century, Modern Hebrew literature has had a significant role in the consolidation of the Zionist enterprise, and the formation of a new national Jewish identity in The Land of Israel. The Jewish society in Israel in the last one hundred years is an immigrant's society, enjoying an enormous growth rate. At the end of the Ottoman regime (1918) the number of Jews in the land of Israel stood on 56,000. Over the 30 years of the British governance, the Jews' population rose by 11 times. 650,000 Jews lived in Israel in 1948,