Old figures did not correspond with the narrative of a new beginning constituted by Hebrew literature in the Israeli nation building era. Thus, old men and women typically represented, in Hebrew literature, the terms of existence to be negated by a new Israeli identity. At the most, old people functioned, in specific genres,  as mediators of a certain knowledge of the past, searched by youngsters involved in a psychoanalytic quest narrative (as is the case in many so called second-generations-of-the-Holocaust literary works). The seminar will discuss this simplistic, functional attitude on the one hand, and alternative, more complicated narratives on the other. The latter will include the existential poetics of such authors as Yehoshua Kenaz and Yehudit Hendel, who equate their old characters with artistic being,   as well as contemporary works that examine the relations with the old in a life-prolongation era that lacks sufficient family resources for the support of old age. Recent literary pieces that deal with this subject will be examined in terms of their attempted - practical and poetic - bridging of the abyss that separates the old (in their heterotopic nursing homes) from the living.