Israel in Translation

Nisim Aloni was born into a poor family in the South Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentine in 1926. He enlisted in the Notrut, a Jewish militia operating as an auxiliary police alongside the British, and he fought in the 1948 war.

Though Aloni is best known for his theater plays, he also wrote short stories. 'To Be a Baker,' translated by Tirza Sandbank, opens the anthology 50 Stories from Israel, compiled by Zisi Stavi and published in English in 2007. The book represents the first 50 years of Israeli statehood through 50 short stories neatly divided into three generations.

Told through the eyes of a child working in a bakery during his summer vacation, the story is sensuously and deliciously described, with a hint of the supernatural. Are the moans of the oven fires really the voices of the girls whose souls the 'Sultana' (the blind mother of the baker) has sacrificed for the money to build the bakery?

Text:

50 Stories from Israel. An Anthology. Edited by Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Ahronoth and Chemed Books (2007 & 2010).

Music:

The Telephone song - Hagashash Hachiver

Song of the Paletin - Nisim Aloni (music by Alex Kagan, words by Shimon Bar)

Nisim Aloni was born into a poor family in the South Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentine in 1926. He enlisted in the Notrut, a Jewish militia operating as an auxiliary police alongside the British, and he fought in the 1948 war.

Though Aloni is best known for his theater plays, he also wrote short stories. 'To Be a Baker,' translated by Tirza Sandbank, opens the anthology 50 Stories from Israel, compiled by Zisi Stavi and published in English in 2007. The book represents the first 50 years of Israeli statehood through 50 short stories neatly divided into three generations.

Told through the eyes of a child working in a bakery during his summer vacation, the story is sensuously and deliciously described, with a hint of the supernatural. Are the moans of the oven fires really the voices of the girls whose souls the 'Sultana' (the blind mother of the baker) has sacrificed for the money to build the bakery?

Text:

50 Stories from Israel. An Anthology. Edited by Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Ahronoth and Chemed Books (2007 & 2010).

Music:

The Telephone song - Hagashash Hachiver

Song of the Paletin - Nisim Aloni (music by Alex Kagan, words by Shimon Bar)

Poet, novelist, and playwright Shulamit Lapid was born in Tel Aviv in 1934. She is the mother of Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid. All of her novels, with one exception, feature female protagonists, and most address social issues and ethnic discrimination.

Shulamit Lapid’s novel Valley of Strength, turned into a film by Dan Wolman in 2010, depicts the first seven years of the Gai Oni agricultural settlement, later renamed 'Rosh Pina' or 'Corner Stone' after Psalm 118: 22: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone.”

Valley of Strength is one of the first 'Feminist' novels written in Hebrew. It follows Fania, a 16-year-old survivor of a pogrom in the Ukraine. She arrives in Jaffa with her uncle, her brother, and her baby daughter, the product of rape. She enters the male-dominated world of commerce and politics. Dressed as a man she travels alone and defends herself, even after her marriage of convenience to a widower with children.

Marcela Sulak reads from one of the opening scenes, when Fania first glimpses Gai Oni.

Text:

Shulamit Lapid, Valley of Strength. Translated Philip Simpson. Toby Press, 2009.

Music:

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach - Even Maasu

Israelis have not been writing detective fiction for very long; Batya Gur’s 1992 The Saturday Morning Murder: a psychoanalytic case was the first Israeli crime novel to reach a wide American Audience. In her 2005 obituary, the New York Times said she was “almost single-handedly responsible for making the detective novel a flourishing genre in Israeli letters.”

Breaking with the conventions of detective fiction, Gur’s novels are always set in closed societies: A psychoanalytic institute, a kibbutz, a literature department, or a television station. The community’s tensions, factions, and prejudices mirror Israel's own. To crack each case, the Moroccan-born detective Michael Ohayon has to immerse himself in these tight-knit worlds.

Host Marcela Sulak reads from Murder in Jerusalem, translated by Evan Fallenberg. The action begins in the studios of the national Television station, Channel One. The set designer has been found beneath a fallen pillar on the set of a film adaptation of Shai Agnon's Iddo and Eynam, and the witness to the crime has also died...

Text:

Batya Gur, Murder in Jerusalem. Translated Evan Fallenberg. Harper Books.

Further texts by Batya Gur, all published by Harper:

The Saturday Morning Murder: a psychoanalytic case.Literary Murder: a Critical CaseMurder Duet: a Musical CaseMurder on a Kibbutz: A Communal CaseBethlehem Road Murder

Music:

Alex Cannon - The Revealing; Murder Mystery Background

Poet, novelist, and playwright Shulamit Lapid was born in Tel Aviv in 1934. She is the mother of Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid. All of her novels, with one exception, feature female protagonists, and most address social issues and ethnic discrimination.

Shulamit Lapid’s novel Valley of Strength, turned into a film by Dan Wolman in 2010, depicts the first seven years of the Gai Oni agricultural settlement, later renamed 'Rosh Pina' or 'Corner Stone' after Psalm 118: 22: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone.”

Valley of Strength is one of the first 'Feminist' novels written in Hebrew. It follows Fania, a 16-year-old survivor of a pogrom in the Ukraine. She arrives in Jaffa with her uncle, her brother, and her baby daughter, the product of rape. She enters the male-dominated world of commerce and politics. Dressed as a man she travels alone and defends herself, even after her marriage of convenience to a widower with children.

Marcela Sulak reads from one of the opening scenes, when Fania first glimpses Gai Oni.

Text:

Shulamit Lapid, Valley of Strength. Translated Philip Simpson. Toby Press, 2009.

Music:

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach - Even Maasu

Israelis have not been writing detective fiction for very long; Batya Gur’s 1992 The Saturday Morning Murder: a psychoanalytic case was the first Israeli crime novel to reach a wide American Audience. In her 2005 obituary, the New York Times said she was “almost single-handedly responsible for making the detective novel a flourishing genre in Israeli letters.”

Breaking with the conventions of detective fiction, Gur’s novels are always set in closed societies: A psychoanalytic institute, a kibbutz, a literature department, or a television station. The community’s tensions, factions, and prejudices mirror Israel's own. To crack each case, the Moroccan-born detective Michael Ohayon has to immerse himself in these tight-knit worlds.

Host Marcela Sulak reads from Murder in Jerusalem, translated by Evan Fallenberg. The action begins in the studios of the national Television station, Channel One. The set designer has been found beneath a fallen pillar on the set of a film adaptation of Shai Agnon's Iddo and Eynam, and the witness to the crime has also died...

Text:

Batya Gur, Murder in Jerusalem. Translated Evan Fallenberg. Harper Books.

Further texts by Batya Gur, all published by Harper:

The Saturday Morning Murder: a psychoanalytic case.
Literary Murder: a Critical Case
Murder Duet: a Musical Case
Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case
Bethlehem Road Murder

Music:

Alex Cannon - The Revealing; Murder Mystery Background

Assaf Gavron's novel The Hilltop follows the lifespan of an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank which, as in a fairytale, comes into being ostensibly to satisfy a woman and child's innocent longing for salad greens.

The narrative follows two orphaned brothers who find themselves on the settlement for different reasons, and geographically we're taken from Ma’aleh Hermesch C to Tel Aviv, New York City, and Miami. We move in and out of government agencies and meetings, and at protests we find ourselves on both sides of the proposed separation wall. Ironically, the only thing both sides can agree upon is that the fence should not go up.

Assaf displays a deep understanding of what motivates peoples and societies. “Longing is the engine of the world,” one character says, and the book portrays the varieties of human longing with dexterity and humor.

Texts:

The Hilltop, by Assaf Gavron. Translated by Steven Cohen. Scribner (Nov. 2014).

Further reading:

Almost Dead, by Assaf Gavron. Translated by Assaf Gavron & James Lever. Harper (2006).

Tel Aviv Noir, edited by Assaf Gavron & Etgar Keret. Akashic (Oct. 2014)

Music:

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

The Mouth and Foot - Shluck Beton; Candy Store

Assaf Gavron's novel The Hilltop follows the lifespan of an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank which, as in a fairytale, comes into being ostensibly to satisfy a woman and child's innocent longing for salad greens.

The narrative follows two orphaned brothers who find themselves on the settlement for different reasons, and geographically we're taken from Ma’aleh Hermesch C to Tel Aviv, New York City, and Miami. We move in and out of government agencies and meetings, and at protests we find ourselves on both sides of the proposed separation wall. Ironically, the only thing both sides can agree upon is that the fence should not go up.

Assaf displays a deep understanding of what motivates peoples and societies. “Longing is the engine of the world,” one character says, and the book portrays the varieties of human longing with dexterity and humor.

Texts:

The Hilltop, by Assaf Gavron. Translated by Steven Cohen. Scribner (Nov. 2014).

Further reading:

Almost Dead, by Assaf Gavron. Translated by Assaf Gavron & James Lever. Harper (2006).

Tel Aviv Noir, edited by Assaf Gavron & Etgar Keret. Akashic (Oct. 2014)

Music:

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

The Mouth and Foot - Shluck Beton; Candy Store

Born in Saffuriyya in the Galilee, Taha Muhammad Ali settled in Nazareth after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. There, he owned a souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation, which became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. Host Marcela Sulak tells Ali's charming fairytale about how his craft was tested by a visitor who came daily to his shop, and had to be bribed with an olive-wood camel to hear Ali's latest poem.

Ali’s poetry is written in literary Arabic, "grounded in the vernacular, and rooted in local custom." He writes long ballads about his lost home, his lost love, and the frustrations and complexities of Palestinian life. Even his invectives are full of self irony, and a gentleness of spirit found only in those of great integrity.

Marcela ends by reading his most quoted passages, from the poem 'Twigs':

"And so/ it has taken me/ all of sixty years/ to understand / that water is the finest drink, / and bread the most delicious food, / and that art is worthless/ unless it plants/ a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.”

Texts:

So What Taha Muhammad Ali. New and Selectd Poems 1971-2005. Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi & Gavriel Levin. Bloodaxe Books, 2007.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, by Adina Hoffman. Yale University Press, 2009.

Music:

Umm Kulthum

Born in Saffuriyya in the Galilee, Taha Muhammad Ali settled in Nazareth after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. There, he owned a souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation, which became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. Host Marcela Sulak tells Ali's charming fairytale about how his craft was tested by a visitor who came daily to his shop, and had to be bribed with an olive-wood camel to hear Ali's latest poem.

Ali’s poetry is written in literary Arabic, "grounded in the vernacular, and rooted in local custom." He writes long ballads about his lost home, his lost love, and the frustrations and complexities of Palestinian life. Even his invectives are full of self irony, and a gentleness of spirit found only in those of great integrity.

Marcela ends by reading his most quoted passages, from the poem 'Twigs':

"And so/ it has taken me/ all of sixty years/ to understand / that water is the finest drink, / and bread the most delicious food, / and that art is worthless/ unless it plants/ a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.”

Texts:

So What Taha Muhammad Ali. New and Selectd Poems 1971-2005. Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi & Gavriel Levin. Bloodaxe Books, 2007.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, by Adina Hoffman. Yale University Press, 2009.

Music:

Umm Kulthum