Israel in Translation

On this episode, Marcela revisits Batya Gur, who introduced the murder mystery into Hebrew literature. Gur’s highbrow mysteries are often set in closed communities that mirror issues in the greater Israeli society.

You can hear a previous podcast on her life and literary influence, as well as an excerpt from,Murder in Jerusalem, by following the link below.

Text

Murder on a Kibbutz. A communal Case. by Batya Gur. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Harper Perennial, 1994.

Previous Episode on Batya Gur

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/10/29/the-israeli-detective-novel-israel-in-translation/

This book catapulted Ari Shavit into the international spotlight. The book was a New York Times best seller and listed by the Times in its “100 Notable Books of 2013.” The Economist named it as one of the best books of 2013 and it received the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award in History from the Jewish Book Council. It also won the Natan Book Award.

Text

My Promised Land, by Ari Shavit. Spiegel & Grau, 2013.

On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Yaniv Iczkovits’s novelThe Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann by the Hand of her Sister Fanny. It is translated from the Hebrew by Orr Sharf.

The protagonist of this book is the titular character, Fanny Keismann, who leaves her home and her wonderful husband, a cheesemaker, and their beloved children, to find her sister’s husband. Adventures and misadventures ensue.

Text

The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits. Translated by Orr Sharf. Maclehose Press. Quercus, 2020.

Today, Marcela finishes the three-part series on Ayalet Tsabari’s wonderful memoir,The Art of Leaving, with her favorite thing: cooking! This episode unveils the secrets of Tsabari’s family kitchen. You’re going to want to take notes for this one!

Text

Ayelet Tsabari,The Art of Leaving. Harper Collins, 2019

In her introduction to Vaan Nguyen’s collection, Adriana X. Jacobs writes, “Nguyen’s poetry may circulate in the Anglophone literary market as part of an increasingly visible Vietnamese literary diaspora… And yet, introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting it entirely overshadow her work.”

Between 1977 and 1979, approximately 360 Vietnamese refugees entered Israel, and of that number, about half left for the United States or Europe. Those who stayed were able to apply for Israeli citizenship, take on jobs, start families, and continue with their lives.

Nguyen’s parents were among these refugees. She was born in Ashkelon, Israel in 1982, one of five daughters. The family moved around and eventually settled in Jaffa Dalet, a working-class—and largely immigrant and Arab—neighborhood that is part of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, “not the pastoral tourist part, but the section that is far from the sea,” Nguyen explains.

Text

The Truffle Eye,Vaan Nguyen. Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs. Zephyr Press; Nov. 2020

Previous Episode on Vaan Nguyen’s Work

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/04/26/sitting-with-strangeness-a-conversation-with-adriana-x-jacobs/

In her introduction to Vaan Nguyen’s collection, Adriana X. Jacobs writes, “Nguyen’s poetry may circulate in the Anglophone literary market as part of an increasingly visible Vietnamese literary diaspora… And yet, introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting it entirely overshadow her work.”

Between 1977 and 1979, approximately 360 Vietnamese refugees entered Israel, and of that number, about half left for the United States or Europe. Those who stayed were able to apply for Israeli citizenship, take on jobs, start families, and continue with their lives.

Nguyen’s parents were among these refugees. She was born in Ashkelon, Israel in 1982, one of five daughters. The family moved around and eventually settled in Jaffa Dalet, a working-class—and largely immigrant and Arab—neighborhood that is part of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, “not the pastoral tourist part, but the section that is far from the sea,” Nguyen explains.

Text

The Truffle Eye,Vaan Nguyen. Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs. Zephyr Press; Nov. 2020

Previous Episode on Vaan Nguyen’s Work

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/04/26/sitting-with-strangeness-a-conversation-with-adriana-x-jacobs/

Have you seen the Crazy House on HaYarkon Street in Tel Aviv? It’s a highrise that looks like pink cement, with some metallic puffed cream lobbed at the front of it? Or at least that’s how it seems to Marcela.

It used to look that way to the poet Lali Tsipi Michaeli, as well. Michaeli says “fear is what I felt as a child every time I drove with my parents in a car on Hayarkon Street. As the car was about to reach the “crazy house” (I called it the “scary”), I hid on the back seat floor and closed my eyes tightly. The house troubled the girl I was. Over the years it has become a Tel Aviv landscape and I have always had a certain aversion to it, a kind of traumatic childhood memory.”

Text

The Mad Houseby Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin. Adelaide Books, 2020.

Previous Episode with Lali Tsipi Michaeli

Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster takes the form of a report by the narrator, a young Israeli Holocaust scholar, written to his superior from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, and raises ethical questions about the struggle to cope with the memory of the Holocaust.

Text

Yishai Sarid.The Memory Monster. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. Restless Books, Sept. 2020.

School has begun, and once again children are learning how to read, encountering the alphabet for the first time. Hopefully it is a pleasant and magical time, but here is a story of a boy who feared his teacher, although he loved the alphabet.

It’s a chapter calledThe Alphabet and What Lies between the Lines, from Hayim Nahman Bialik’s unfinished Novella,Random Harvest.

Text

Random Harvest and other Novellas by Haim Nachman Bialik. Translated by David Patterson & Ezra Spicehandler. Toby Press, 2005.

As we labor under unbelievable pressures and uncertainties of the pandemic, especially women who have children at home, it might make us feel a little better to see that the writer Tehila Hakimi already envisioned what work in 2020 would be like back in 2018.

Here are some excerpts of her experimental, fragmentary text,COMPANY. It is addressed to a nameless “woman in a workspace”—that describes, head-on, the corporate work experience, its gendered dimensions, and its operative, emptied-out language.

The piece is translated by Maayan Eitan.

Text:

Company,by Tehila Hakimi (Resling Publishing House: The Lab Series for Contemporary Literature, 2018). English translation copyright 2019 by Maayan Eitan.