In the late 1970s, almost thirty years after P. Lachower published his history of the first one hundred years of modern Hebrew literature (1780-1888), Gershon Shaked began writing the history of the next century of Hebrew literature (1880-1980). Rooted in the European encyclopedic tradition, Lachower’s literary history was part of the conscious Zionist effort to establish a Hebrew literary tradition where there was none before. Shaked’s monumental, five-volume work, Hebrew Fiction 1880-1980, on the other hand, is a little harder to explain.