Israeli literature in English

Oct. 22, 2004

We have many amazing books by Israeli writers that are being translated into English. I invite you to enjoy this part of Israeli culture and to take a look at this new list of translated books. We will keep you up to date on the books that are being translated by sending you an email with new lists as they become available. Enjoy Israel's beautiful culture.

The Liberated Bride
by A. B. Yehoshua, Hillel Halkin (Translator)


Book Description
Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often na?ve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

About the Author
Born in Jerusalem, A. B. Yehoshua is the widely acclaimed author of Mr. Mani and Open Heart. One of Israel's preeminent contemporary writers, he lives in Haifa.

From Publishers Weekly
As he has proved in acclaimed previous novels (Mr. Mani; Open Heart), Yehoshua is a keen observer of social and political realities, and a subtle writer capable of reflecting complex situations in events of daily life. Here, what at first appears to be a bittersweet comedy of domestic manners set in 1990s Israel morphs into a searching exploration of a politically divided society in which decent people, both Jews and Arabs, try to live peaceably with each other. To be sure, this is a small segment of Israeli society: the Israeli intelligentsia, represented by Professor Yochanan Rivlin and his wife, Hagit, a district judge, who live in Haifa, as well as educated Arabs in Galilee villages whose existence is circumscribed by the rules of occupation. Many mysteries shimmer beneath the narrative's surface. Underlying the affectionate domestic banter of Yochanan and Hagit is Yochanan's obsessive quest to discover what went wrong in the short marriage of their son and his wife, a quest complicated by a horrifying secret the sundered couple have vowed not to divulge. Meanwhile, an Arab graduate student of Yochanan's, whose wedding begins the narrative, seeks to earn her degree by translating the works of contemporary Arab poets collected by an Israeli scholar killed in a terrorist bombing. The threat of violence, while acknowledged by everyone, is not in the forefront of the plot, which is more concerned with the complacency of intelligent Israeli Jews in the face of the plight of their Arab neighbors. The grand achievement of this trenchant novel is its quietly provocative and deeply important consideration of how the desire for liberation of various kinds is inescapable in human nature. Although one character speaks in measured terms of "the abyss we are all about to fall into," it is the simple aspirations of ordinary people that illuminate the larger issues.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Someone To Run With
by David Grossman


Book Description
Earnest, awkward, and painfully shy, sixteen-year-old Assaf is having the worst summer of his life. With his big sister gone to America and his best friend suddenly the most popular kid in their class, Assaf worries away his days at a lowly summer job in Jerusalem city hall and spends his evenings alone, watching television and playing games on the Internet.
One morning, Assaf's routine is interrupted by an absurd assignment: to find the owner of a stray yellow lab. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Tamar, a talented young singer with a lonely, tempestuous soul, undertakes an equally unpromising mission: to rescue a teenage drug addict from the Jerusalem underworld . . . and, eventually, to find her dog.

From Publishers Weekly
Every once in a while, Grossman abandons his structurally intricate, morally complex novels of Israeli society, such as Be My Knife and See Under: Love, for lighter fare aimed at both adolescent and adult readers. But "lighter" is a relative term; like his previous adventure story The Zigzag Kid, this new novel drags its teenage protagonists through some heavy terrain. In this case, the milieu is the growing population of poor and drug-addicted runaways eking out a living on Jerusalem's streets. Assaf is an average Israeli teenage boy, shy and awkward, more comfortable with video games than with his schoolmates. His father arranges a do-nothing summer job for him with the City Sanitation Department, and he spends most of his time daydreaming about soccer until he is hitched up with a lost dog named Dinka and ordered to find its owner. Assaf learns, from the dog's retracing of its usual habits, that the owner's name is Tamar, a fellow teenager, but locating her quickly develops into something grander and more difficult-a knightly quest, on the order of a classic folk tale or hidden-door computer game, replete with guides (an elderly Greek nun, doped-up Russian immigrants), trolls (a vicious street gang), an evil king named Pesach and, of course, a princess to rescue. To Grossman's credit, Tamar is no typical lady-in-distress; she's on a quest of her own, to free her brother Shai from the clutches of the shady Pesach, a "manager" who exploits teenage street performers. To find him, she shaves her head and sings for spare change until she descends deep into the runaway world, perhaps too far to ever re-emerge. In Grossman's hands, this plot is both pleasingly familiar and made new through immersion in the details of Israeli life. Almog and Gurantz do a fine job translating the book's mix of teenage dialogue and lush description.

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Foiglman
by Aharon Megged, Marganit Weinberger-Rotman

Book Description
Zvi Arbel is an Israeli historian whose chosen field is Jewish history. His work is read by the Yiddish poet Foiglman, a Holocaust survivor who sends Arbel a volume of his own poetry. The relationship that springs up between the two men is one of ambivalence and fascination; the reserved Israeli historian alternatingly sympathetic and suspicious, affectionate and resentful, towards the enthusiastic but tormented poet. Despite his ambivalence, Arbel embarks on an effort to get Foiglman's poetry translated into Hebrew. As Foiglman begins to monopolize more and more of his time, the relationship drives a wedge between Arbel and his wife that leads to tragedy.
This intense novel balances biology and archeology, history and poetry in a compelling and poignant portrait of the confrontation of two intimately linked cultures: the Israeli, Hebrew-speaking, born to freedom and independence, and the 'Yid', the Jew whose language is Yiddish, who celebrates and mourns the vibrant, destroyed communities of pre-Holocaust Europe and wonders at the transformation of the people he once knew, now they have a land of their own.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* First published in Israel in 1987, this is the story of Shmuel Foiglman, a Holocaust survivor and a poet living in Paris, and Zvi Arbel, a history professor in Tel Aviv. Foiglman is dead, but flashbacks relate the relationship between the two, a relationship that drives Arbel's wife to commit suicide. Foiglman sends Arbel his poems, and they meet and become friends. Foiglman talks of the time he and his twin brother spent in the concentration camps and how they survived. Arbel talks about his wife, a biologist, and their marriage. Arbel explains his concept of Jewish history: "No other people have sanctified the memory of destructions and disasters as the Jewish people have, by commemorating them in fast days, memorial services, public assemblies, by composing lamentations, prayers, liturgical hymns, by designating days of mourning and grieving. Even our holidays and feasts are stamped with the memory of past destructions." Megged is one of the most important^B and gifted Israeli writers of our time. This novel, which explores the contrast between the lost world of European Jews and life in today's Tel Aviv, is haunting and unforgettable. George Cohen

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