Israel in Translation

What if, when you were in Kindergarten, your mother had given you a magic wand that allowed you to read people's minds? Well, that's just what happens in Orit Gidali's book, Nora the Mind Reader, which will bring to a close our month of illustrated children's books written by Israeli poets and writers.

Previous Episodes on Orit Gidali:

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/07/26/did-you-pack-it-yourself/

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/10/16/welcoming-in-the-ushpizin-poems-for-sukkot/

Text:

Nora The Mind Reader, by Orit Gidali, illustrated by Aya Gordon-Noy, translated by Annette Appel. Enchanged Lion Books, 2012.

Music:

יהודית רביץ - הילדה הכי יפה בגן

No Israeli childhood experience would be complete without Leah Goldberg. Her story "Room for Rent" was published in 1948 and is one of the most classic children's books available in Hebrew. Shmuel Katz's illustrations bring Goldberg's words to life in both the original and in Jessica Setbon's 2017 translation.

Leah Goldberg born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), in 1911, moved to Mandate Palestine in 1935. Well known during her lifetime as a poet, author, and translator, she is remembered as one of Israel's great authors and literary scholars. She earned a PhD in Semitic languages from Bonn University and helped found Hebrew University's Department of Comparative Literature, which she chaired until her death in 1970.

Previous Episodes on Leah Goldberg:

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/08/21/a-fairy-tale-by-leah-goldberg/

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/04/02/i-have-been-planted-with-the-pines-israel-in-translation/

Text:

Leah Goldberg, Room for Rent. Illustrated by Shmuel Katz, translated by Jessica Setbon. Gefen Publishing House, 2018.

Music:

Leah Goldberg: Le-mi She-ino Ma'amin, sung by Yehudit Ravitz

This month we continue our spotlight on beautifully written and illustrated Israeli children's books translated into English with The Heart Shaped Leaf, by Shira Geffen and illustrated by David Polonsky.

The story opens with eerily beautiful illustrations of a very rare day in Israel: an overcast sky dotted with yellow leaves; tree branches are bent in the wind, and a cobalt blue school building glows out of the gray. The book's main character Alona makes her way home from school.

Text:

The Heart Shaped Leaf, by Shira Geffen. Illustrated by David Polonsky. Green Bean Press. Green Bean Books

Some of Marcela's favorite children's books in Hebrew have been written by well known poets and illustrated by some of Israel's most talented graphic artists.

This episode features The Mermaid in the Bathtub, written by the poet, essayist and writer, Nurit Zarchi, and illustrated by Rutu Modan. Translated by Tal Goldfajn, and published by Restless Books.

Previous podcast on Rutu Modan:

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2015/08/20/rutu-modans-graphic-touch/

Previous podcasts on Nurit Zarchi:

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/05/22/nurit-zarchis-the-plague/

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2015/07/15/nurit-zarchis-baby-blues/

Text:

The Mermaid in the Bathtub by Nurit Zarchi. Illustrations by Rutu Modan. Translated by Tal Goldfajn. Yonder (Restless Books) 2019

Music:

Millie, "Mermaid in the Bathtub" from Miracle Milk

For the next few weeks, we will feature work published in The Ilanot Review's special collaborative issue with Granta Hebrew, focusing on new, up-and-coming writers. And so it is a pleasure to introduce the young writer Nano Shabtai, translated by Maya Klein.

Shabtai is already known in Hebrew arts and letters as a poet, dramatist and director. She was born in Jerusalem, to a large family, where she attended the High School of the Arts, majoring in theatre. She studied acting and directing at the Kibbutz College in Tel Aviv, and completed the screenwriting track at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School.

Since 2005 she has worked as a fiction reader for an Israeli publishing house, and as a book editor and reviewer. Her first book of poems, The Iron Girl, was published in 2006. She's published a collection of short stories, children stories and a few plays.

Text:

Corn by Nano Shabtai, translated by Maya Klein.

Many poems in Ronny Someck's The Milk Underground deal with being a father of girls—adolescent and teenaged, young women. They explore the fraught territory of daughter's bodies—body as dowry, body as a locus for pleasure and for betrayal, and the poems extend a fatherly embrace to the girls after their pained mother has broken off relations.

Previous Someck Episode

Text:

Ronny Someck, The Milk Underground, translated by Hana Inbar and Robert Manaster. White Pine Press, 2015.

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, served in the Israeli army, and travelled extensively throughout South East Asia, Europe and North America. In 1998 Ayelet moved to Vancouver, Canada, where she studied film and photography. She directed two documentary films, one of which won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival.

As an Israeli writer, she is unusual in that she usually writes in English, not Hebrew, though the essay we are featuring today called Barefoot and Enlightened was originally written in Hebrew.

Text:

Ayelet Tsabari. "Barefoot and Enlightened," translated by the author and Janice Weizman.

We're currently in the days of Sukkot, in which Jews everywhere dwell (or at least take their meals) in a temporary structure called a Sukkah to commemorate the forty years of wandering in the desert, and also because Sukkot is an agricultural festival as well, and in ancient times people lived in temporary shelters as they harvested.

One of the customs of Sukkot is inviting guests for meals into the Sukkah, close friends or needy strangers, as well as the supernatural —"Ushpizin" is Aramaic for "guests."

Today we'll hear poems that feature these ushpizin, from Orit Gidali's book, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. The Selected poems of Orit Gidali.

Previous Podcast

Text:

Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Select Poems of Orit Gidali. Translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas Press, 2016.

We are now in the days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which will take place next week. This week, Marcela reads from Amichai Chasson, whose poem America gives a portrait of the everyday reference that Yom Kippur serves in everyday life. The poem, as its title suggests, also illustrates the relationship between Israel and the United States. It is translated by Vivian Eden.

Like many international poets encountering America, Chasson has written his Walt Whitman in the supermarket poem, as well, titled Rami Levy in Talpiot, translated by Lisa Katz.

Text:

America by Amichai Chasson