Israeli literature in English

Nov. 19, 2004

A Trumpet in the Wadi
by Sami Michael


Book Description
Leading Israeli novelist Sami Michael shares his gift for navigating the cultural conflicts in modern Israel with A Trumpet in the Wadi, a novel that transcends its Middle Eastern setting with an honest and heartbreaking story of impossible love and the strength of family.

Set in the months preceding the 1982 Israeli-Arab conflict in Lebanon, this beautifully written tale is the coming-of-age story of two fatherless Christian Arab sisters, Huda and Mary, who live in the wadi -- the Arab quarter in the Jewish city of Haifa on the northern coast of Israel. An extraordinary bond of love and mutual respect unites the sisters -- polar opposites from their appearances to their tempers. Huda, the narrator of the story, is thin and withdrawn and, after abandoning her chance at marriage a few years back, has prematurely resigned herself to the monotonous life of an old maid. Her younger sister, Mary, is voluptuous, carnal, and perennially unemployed. Wrapped in the love of their sometimes bitter mother, their iconoclast grandfather, and the cheerful and omnipresent neighbor Jamilla, the sisters' lives change when a peculiar young Russian Jewish immigrant, Alex, moves into the upstairs flat. The melodies of the soulful trumpet player become the intoxicating theme music for Huda's unexpected reawakening -- and for Mary's dangerous foray into a love triangle with the heir of the local Muslim mob and her country cousin.

Michael's internationally acclaimed novel is a major achievement, illuminating the vast range of interlocking relationships between Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, men and women. A Trumpet in the Wadi is an honest, witty, and ultimately heartbreaking story -- one that draws on the conflicts in the Middle East, but one whose insights into love and family can cross all cultural and political boundaries.

From Publishers Weekly
Set in Haifa just before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, this spirited, bittersweet novel captures the Arab-Israeli conflict in microcosm. The seaside city is home to a family of Christian Arabs: irascible Elias, the patriarch; his busy daughter-in-law, Umm-Huda; and her fatherless daughters, the beautiful Mary and her older, deplorably still unwed sister Huda. Also living in their crowded building in the wadi, or Arab quarter, is newcomer Alex, short in stature but well-muscled, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who plays his trumpet soulfully in the building's rooftop shed. His music, patience and remarkable physique awaken the interest of reticent Huda, while Mary rejects the advances of Zuhair, the son of their shady Muslim landlord, for the security of plodding Wahid, her Muslim cousin. A trip taken by the two couples to the Red Sea resort of Eilat is an uproarious highlight, and a visit by Huda and Alex to a nursing home to see Alex's ailing but tyrannical mother is a striking set-piece. The translation is occasionally stiff, and Michael tends toward over-explanation, but the novel deals cleverly and humorously with complicated relationships. Against the tragic backdrop of current events, the willingness of Michael's characters to ignore the strictures of individual religious beliefs and to shun fanaticism, is refreshing, though perhaps increasingly hard to credit.

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Human Parts (Verba Mundi,)
by Orly Castel-Bloom, Dalya Bilu


From Publishers Weekly
Israeli writer Castel-Bloom invents a bitterly cold winter and an outbreak of the Saudian flu in this richly satiric if occasionally heavy-handed novel. Kati Beit-Halahmi, a desperately poor cleaning woman, gets a peek inside the glamorous media world when a news organization runs a feature on the plight of her family. The excitement of the experience makes her realize she can never return to her former life. Graphic artist Iris Ventura is a twice-spurned mother of three, also struggling financially. Determination is the common thread that links Kati and Iris as they fight to survive the unusually cold winter and keep food in their children's mouths. Denied adequate child support, Iris is kept financially afloat with occasional odd jobs from her unlikable asthmatic ex-boyfriend, Adir, who is himself distraught by his sister's death from the Saudian flu. Castel-Bloom's talent for creating complex female characters the reader instantly connects with is somewhat undermined by her tendency to draw all the male characters as flat and unsympathetic. Adir's new Ethiopian girlfriend, Tasaro, suffered much hardship to emigrate to Israel and wants nothing more than to marry her lover, but he continually rebuffs her proposals. "They'll tear us to pieces. They'll turn us into a 'mixed couple'... the black woman and the white man. When we walk down the street they'll say: Here come the dominoes.... You don't realize where you are.... Israeli society will snicker at our expense." Though predictable general pronouncements blunt the novel's effect, Castel-Bloom's insights into human weaknesses and self-interest are wickedly precise.

From Booklist
In Castel-Bloom's Israel, a bitter winter has people losing limbs to the cold as well as to violence, an epidemic dubbed "Saudi flu" proves deadly, and terrorism continues unabated. Individuals have their own problems. Kati Beit-Halahmi, a mother of four whose husband is disabled, revels in her status as the poster child for poverty; but when media attention wanes, she takes unusual measures to better herself. Iris Ventura, a divorced mother of three who needs a new washer and dental work, is helped unexpectedly by ex-lover Adir Bergson, who lives comfortably on an inheritance but dreams of immigrating to Canada. In understated prose, Castel-Bloom notes the existence of racial and ethnic discrimination, at least on the personal level, and highlights the problem of poverty while suggesting that more personal responsibility is needed. As their exhausted president goes from funeral to funeral for terrorist victims, and radio stations program music based on the number of newly dead, individual Israelis persevere--because what else can they do? Michele Leber

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A Tale of Love and Darkness
by Amos Oz, Nicholas de Lange

Book Description
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.

A story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.

The New Yorker magazine
had a big article on Amos Oz, you can read it through this link:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041108fa_fact


From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement-David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky-others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history.

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