Israel in Translation

Marcela has got a thriller for you! Three, by D. A. Mishani, is a page turner that tells the stories of three women: Orna, a divorced single-mother looking online for a new relationship; Emilia, a deeply religious Latvian immigrant on a spiritual search; and Ella, married and mother of three, returning to University to write her thesis. All of them will meet the same man. His name is Gil. And he won't tell the truth about himself.

Text:

D. A. Mishani. Three. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Europa Editions, August 18, 2020.

It may sound crazy, but A. B. Yehoshua has written a page-turner about an aging engineer in the early stages of dementia, which features descriptions of highway construction in great detail.

How on earth did he do this? Well, perhaps it is the honest grappling with what it feels like to be diagnosed with an illness that will eventually erase your personality and knowledge. And surely it is the context of the engineer's long and loving marriage to a pediatrician, a marriage that is full of humor, understanding, and honesty. And finally, it is the mystery of the secret military highway in the desert, and the textured relationships of two engineers on opposite ends of their career, an army general, and the people who inhabit the negev, whose secret lives are intertwined with the fate of the road.

Text:

A. B. Yehoshua, The Tunnel. Translated by Stuart Schoffman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 2020.

Previous Podcast on A. B. Yehoshua

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/07/22/a-b-yehoshuas-green-seas-and-yellow-continents/

With the world hit hard by the pandemic, Marcela has been taking consolation in nature, noting, as well, the benefits on the flora and fauna around us when we humans withdraw a little from the world and allow nature more space.

The March arrival of Meir Shalev's book, My Wild Garden. Notes from a Writer's Eden, in Joanna Chen's eloquent translation, could not have been more timely. A beautiful book, from the size and shape of the hard copy, to the feel of the paper. Even the font type is notable. Rafaella Shir's watercolor illustrations subtly draw out the descriptions, rather than compete with them.

Marcela reads her favorite passage, which is from the introduction of the book.

Text:

Meir Shalev, My Wild Garden. Notes from a Writer's Eden. Translated by Joanna Chen. Illustrated by Rafaella Shir. Shocken Books, March 31, 2020

Previous podcast on Meir Shalev

Miri Ben-Simhon was born into a Moroccan family, on the near bottom of the social scale. She grew up and remained in Jerusalem. Her poetry faces Mizrahi women's lives in Israel straight on.

The literary critic Yitzhak Laor once noted about Ben-Simhon's work and perspective, that "In the literary arena at the beginning of the 1980s, it took a lot of courage – not to speak about Mizrahim […] but as one."

Text:

Miri Ben-Simhon, The Absolute Reader, translated by Lisa Katz. Toad Press, 2020.

This week, Marcela examine Shimon Adaf's wrenching and linguistically innovative elegy to his sister, who died at the age of 43. Aviva-No is Adaf's third collection of poetry, and it won the 2010 Yehuda Amichai Prize.

It has been translated into English by Yael Segalovitz.

Text:

Aviva-No by Shimon Adaf. Translated by Yael Sigalovitz. Alice James Books, 2019.

On May 26 the novel Minor Detail, by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, appeared in Elisabeth Jaquette's English translation with New Directions Press. Originally published in Arabic in 2017, the novel centers around a brutal crime — the rape and murder of a young Bedouin girl, in the Negev in August, 1949, during the Israeli War of Independence, which is called in Arabic the Nakhba, or disaster. Decades later, a young woman in Ramallah becomes obsessed with the events surrounding the crime.

Marcela reads from the opening of the novel's second section, narrated by this woman.

Text:

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. New Directions Press, May 26, 2020.

On this episode, Marcela reads from Yair Assulin's searing novel that tells the journey of a young Israeli soldier at the breaking point, unable to continue carrying out his military service, yet terrified of the consequences of leaving the army.

Born in 1986, Yair Assulin studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Drive is the first of two novels he has written and for which he won Israel's Ministry of Culture Prize and the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. He has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for authors, writes a weekly column in the newspaper Haaretz and has been a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Yale.

Text:

Yair Assulin, The Drive. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New Vessel Press, 2020

This week is the last week of Ramadan, which began on April 23rd and will ends Saturday, May 23.

To acknowledge those who are fasting in isolation and heat, this episode features Mahmoud Darwish's aptly titled collection, In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon.

Text:

Mahmoud Darwish In the Presence of Absence. Translated by Sinan Antoon. Archipelago Books, 2012.

Marcela reads from Karen Alkalay-Gut's A Word in Edgewise: Ladies From the Bible Tell Their Tales, published by Simple Conundrum Press.

The bible devotes quite a bit of space to the minds of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — we know how they feel, what makes them angry or happy; we hear about their arguments with God. Through her poetry, Alkaly-Gut gives the matriarchs a voice.

Karen Alkalay-Gut, was born in London and is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. In addition to collections of poetry and literary scholarship, she writes lyrics for a rock group, Panic Ensemble, and her "Tel Aviv Diary" appears daily on http://www.karenalkalay-gut.com/diary

Text:

Karen Alkalay-Gut A Word in Edgewise: Ladies From the Bible Tell Their Tales

On this episode, Marcela reads from Sayed Kashua's fourth, and latest novel, Track Changes. The novel was published in December by Grove Press.

Kashua's protagonist is a nameless "I" who shares considerable biographical overlaps with the author. This suggests, perhaps even implies, the so-called truth of Kashua's first-person fiction. Yet his character, whose job is to transcribe others' memories onto the page, repeatedly reveals his elisions from and additions to strangers' memoirs-for-hire, often inserting his own memories as their own, thereby erasing his life in scattered pieces. The narrator's confessions are hardly reliable, making every level of his storytelling suspect, which Kashua further visually underscores by "track changes"-style crossed-out text.