Like a latter-day prophet of Israel, the distinguished Jerusalem-born novelist A.B. Yehoshua utters a variety of lamentations — mostly of a political nature — and explains that “it is the task of the intellectual to say what he thinks.” His biggest lament seems centered around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accuses of poisoning…
Tag: Israel
Nathan Shaham’s Rosendorf Quartet
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•Israeli author Nathan Shaham, who gave separate English and Hebrew readings from his 1987 novel The Rosendorf Quartet in Toronto recently, is amazed that the book has become a bestseller, won prestigious literary prizes, and been translated into several languages, including Chinese and Russian. “I never tried to have this book published abroad,” said the…
Biblical novel set in 1st century
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•Andrew Sanders, a resident of both Toronto and Haifa, is the author of a new work of historical fiction, Hanina My Son: A Novel of the First Century (Gefen, 2001), which has already appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. Hanina My Son is set during a time of fighting between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the…
Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers
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•Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
Troupe of Israeli characters trapped in low farce
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•Set in modern Israel, Orly Castel-Bloom’s latest novel Human Parts (translation by Dalyu Bilu, Key Porter Books) follows a troupe of characters around their ordinary lives as the nation struggles with an assortment of blights and curses that almost seem like divine punishments. In Castel-Bloom’s version of Israel, as in real life, there’s a grueling…
Appelfeld’s ‘Age of Wonders’
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•Addressing the question “Is it possible to write fiction about the Holocaust?”, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld told a large gathering in Toronto recently that man’s nature compels him “to express not only his joy but also his pain” and that concentration camp inmates sometimes sang songs that “were as mighty as the suffering from which…