Other brews commonly available on tap are Carlsberg, Tuborg, and Heineken. Supermar- kets carry a small selection of liquor; note that Nesher "black beer" is a sweet, non- alcoholic malt brew. The official drinking age is 18. In Arab restaurants, if you ask for coffee with no specifications, you'll get a small cup of strong, sweet, Arabic coffee, sometimes referred to as turki . If you want something standard, ask in Hebrew for hafukh or fil- ter. Instant coffee coffee is Turkish coffee brewed in a cup; watch out for the sediment. THE ARTS LITERATURE. The compilation of the biblical narrative was followed by the age of the Mishnah and agada were compiled. This age also saw the growth of the piyyut . In the Middle Ages, Jewish poetry included MegiUat Antiohus and MegiUat Цапика , while narrative prose focused on demonological legends. The revival of Hebrew as a secular language in the 18th century brought a dras- tic shift in Hebrew literature. Josef Perl and Isaac Erter parodied Hasidic works in their writings. In Czarist Russia, Abraham Mapu wrote The Hypocrite, the first novel to portray modern Jewish social life in a fictional context. The generations that foUowed moved toward reaUsm, often employing Yiddish. At the turn of the 20th century, Hebrew was revived for Uterature by Joseph Bren- ner, whose hallmark character was the tragic, uprooted settler. His works are notable not only for their influence on later IsraeU writers, but also for their pessi- mistic views of interaction between Jews and Arabs. In the 1920s and 1930s Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon confronted the breakdown of cultural cohesion among modern Jews in .4 Guest for the Night and The Bridal Canopy. Just before the creation of the State of Israel, a group of native Hebrew authors rose to prominence. Their style, characterized by concern for the landscape and the moment, is exemplified in S. Yizhar's Efrayim Returns to Alfalfa. Beginning in the late 1950s, writers such as Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua began to experiment with psychological realism, allegory, and symboUsm. In the 1960s, new skepticism surfaced in Israeli Uterature. David Shahar was hailed as the Proust of Hebrew Uter- ature for his The Palace of Shattered Vessels, set in Jerusalem in the 1930s and 40s. Ya'akov Shabtai's Past Continuous, about Tel Aviv in the 1970s, is perhaps the best IsraeU novel of the decade. A stunning, though initially confusing, must- read is Arabesques, by Anton Shammas, an Arab Israeli writing in Hebrew. The poetry of Yehuda Amichai will ensure that you never look at Jerusalem stone in the same way again. Most major IsraeU works have been translated into EngUsh. An increasingly prominent genre of IsraeU Uterature focuses on the IsraeU-Pales- tinian conflict by way of fiction, nonfiction, or some combination thereof. Oz's In the Land of Israel is a series of interviews with native Israelis and West Bank Pales- tinians that documents the wide range of poUtical sentiment.