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.

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.

Text:

Sayed Kashua, Track Changes. Translated by Mitch Ginsburg. Grove Press, 2019.

Previous Podcasts:

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2016/04/20/sayed-kashuas-farewell/

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/11/26/sayed-kashua-an-examination-of-arab-israeli-identity-israel-in-translation/

Marcela reads from Anat Zecharia’s poem, “One, Two, Three,” which recently appeared in an issue of The Ilanot Review, in collaboration with Granta Hebrew.

The poem’s title and subtitle refer to Uzi Hitman’s children song about three dwarfs who sit chatting behind a mountain. Anat is known as an outspoken poet who writes forthrightly about women's desires.

Her work has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for writers. She has published three collections of poetry — As Soon as Beautiful (2008), Due to Human Error (2012), and Palestina I (2016). Her new book, “Ever After,” won an ACUM literary award for 2019.

Text:

Anat Zecharia “One, Two, Three.” Translated by Lisa Katz and Maayan Eitan. The Ilanot Review

Music:

עוזי חיטמן - מאחורי ההר

Marcela highlights poetry from the latest issue of The Ilanot Review which, in collaboration with Granta Hebrew, published English translations of up and coming poets and writers, most of whom are featured for the very first time.

Text:

“And I Begin to Confess” by Salih Habib, translated by Christine Khoury Bishara. The Ilanot Review

“The Children I Will Never Have” by Liat Rosenblatt, translated by Jane Medved. The Ilanot Review

“Rivka Speaks” by Ori Ferster, translated by Marcela Sulak. The Ilanot Review

“I am the one who’s free” by Dareen Tatour, translated by Christine Khoury Bishara. The Ilanot Review

“Biotope” by Shira Stav, translated by Adriana X Jacobs. The Ilanot Review

This week Marcela reads from Nava Semel’s novel, Isra Ilse, an alternative history of the Jewish People in which there was no state of Israel, and no holocaust.

The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1, a detective story, opens in September 2001 when Liam Emanuel, an Israeli descendant of Noah, learns about and inherits Grand Island, which is downriver from Niagara Falls. He leaves Israel intending to reclaim this “Promised Land” in America. Shortly after he arrives in America Liam disappears. Simon T. Lenox, a Native American police investigator, tries to recover Israel’s “missing son.”

Text:

Nava Semel, Isra Ilse. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Mandel Vilar Press (October 17, 2016)

This week Marcela returns to focus on up and coming Israeli writers who have rarely or never before been translated into English, by featuring Ayala Ben Lulu. This story appears in the latest issue of The Ilanot Review, which was a collaboration with Granta Hebrew.

Ayala Ben Lulu is an Israeli poet, winner of the Teva prize for poetry. She holds a B.A. in psychology and an M.Sc. in history and philosophy of science and ideas.

Text:

Mona Lisa by Ayala Ben Lulu. Translated by Karen Marron. The Ilanot Review

This podcast is dedicated to marriage—all the engaged couples with cold feet, newly married couples, whose memories of the ceremony are still fresh, long-married couples who survived the wedding day.

We’ll be reading from and discussing the last book Ronit Matalon wrote before her death in 2017. It is called And the Bride Closed the Door, and it was awarded Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize the day before her death.

Previous Podcasts:

Bliss

The One Facing Us

The Sound of her Steps

Text:

And the Bride Closed the Door, by Ronit Matalon. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New Vessels Press, 2019.

The novel, The First Mrs. Rothschild, by Sara Aharoni, tells the story of the wife of Meir Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the banking dynasty, and is written in the form of a personal journal.

Sara Aharoni was born in Israel in 1953. She worked as a teacher, educator and school principal for twenty years. Together with her husband, Meir Aharoni, Sara wrote, edited and published a series of books about Israel, as well as six children’s books. She is the author of the bestselling Saltanat's Love, based on her mother’s life story and the novel Persian Silence.

Text:

The First Mrs. Rothschild, a novel by Sara Aharoni. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. Amazon Crossing, July 2019.

Today we read from the story The Shop on Main Street, written by Ladislav Grosman, a Slovak novelist and screenwriter.

The story is comical and tragic, and it asks the question—are we not our brother’s keeper? Who is our brother?

Text:

Shop on Main Street by Ladislav Grosman. Translated by Iris Urwin Lewitova. Karolinum Press, 2019.

Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the novel The Book of Disappearances unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event.

Text:

The Book of Disappearances by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon.

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

Rosh Hashanah begins on Sunday night—it is the beginning of the Jewish new year. And to usher it in, we read an excerpt from Etgar Keret’s short story, “Ladder,” published in his brand-new English language collection, “Fly Already.”

Text:

Fly Already, by Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, et. al. Riverhead Books, Sept. 2019.

Yesterday, Yonatan Berg’s first poetry collection appeared in Joanna Chen’s English translation, Frayed Light, published by the Wesleyan Poetry Series.

The poems in this collection gather all of these experiences—religion, settlements and the Palestinian neighbors they displace or live next to, military service—into heartfelt narrative poems.

Berg was born in 1981 in Jerusalem to a religious family and grew up in Psagot, a settlement in the West Bank. After serving in the military, Berg gave up the religious lifestyle. He now lives with his wife, the poet and essayist Geula Gertz in Jerusalem, with their young daughter.

Text:

Frayed Light by Yonatan Berg, translated by Joanna Chen. Wesleyan Poetry Series, Sept. 2019.

Previous Podcast Featuring Yonatan Berg

Israeli elections are just one day shy of a week away, and now might be a good opportunity to examine the use of stereotypes to shut down important conversations that we might have, as we elect the people who will represent us.

Today, Marcela reads a lyrical essay from a graduate student in poetry at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Her name is Hiba Ghannan, and this piece will appear in her thesis entitled “Leftovers.”

Text:

“My Essay on Stereotypes” by Hiba Ghannan

Yesterday something wonderful happened—Etgar Keret’s newest short story collection, Fly Already, appeared in the world, in English, translated by a ridiculously talented cast of translators.

This collection contains all the charm, the absurdities, the intelligence and surreal sense of Keret’s previous collections, but this time, most of the stories are somewhat longer.

Today, Marcela reads the shortest piece in the book, and the final story, Evolution of a Breakup.

Text:

Fly Already, by Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, et. al. Riverhead Books, Sept. 2019.

Today Marcela reads a story containing the writer Yossel Birstein’s two great loves: Buses and Shoes.

Birstein was born in Poland in 1920. Having moved to Melbourne, Australia and later to Israel, he changed languages, continents, countries, towns, as well as professions, more than once or twice. Not many people work both as a shepherd and a national archivist in their lives. He wrote most of his life in Yiddish and began to write Hebrew later.

“He didn't call himself a writer, but rather a craftsman,” Haim Be'er says about Yossel Birstein. Be'er continues: “We would be walking in Jerusalem and talking about our profession. He said that he had learned to sew from his father. That if a thread in a shoe tore, you had to start everything from scratch, because where would the knot be? If you make it on the upper part of the shoe, it will be visible, and if you make it on the sole, it will make walking uncomfortable. In his writing, he realized this ability to connect the threads without the stitch being visible.”

Text:

“Customer On the Way” from And So Is The Bus. Jerusalem Stories, translated by Margaret Birstein, Hana Inbar, and Robert Manaster. Dryad Press, 2015.

On this week's episode, Marcela excerpts from a fairy tale written by Leah Goldberg. She was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.

Text:

The Rose Garden (a Fairy Tale) by Leah Goldberg. Translated by Leanne Raday.

Naji Daher, a writer, poet, and playwright, was born in Nazareth and lives there. He works as a creative writing teacher and writes literature reviews. He has published more than fifty books, including six novels. Daher's works have been translated into Hebrew, English and other languages. He is the winner of the 2000 Prime Minister Prize.

Text:

“Nightly Lament” by Naji Daher. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark and published in The Short Story Project.

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. To Think: A River, her first book of poems in Hebrew, in translation from the original Russian, appeared in 2000. The most recent of three volumes written in Hebrew, Translucent, was published in 2017. She’s published seven collections in Russian.

In a 2003 interview with Lisa Katz, Singer notes:

I always emphasize that I haven't switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory. It seemed to happen one way, but then I remembered that the process actually began much earlier, when someone tried to translate a poem of mine [into Hebrew] and I didn't like the result and I started to write it myself and I saw that it was impossible to translate it as it was in the original, and not worthwhile, because what works in Russian doesn't work in Hebrew. Even if I have a raw translation in front of me I don't know exactly which way I'll go.

Text:

Poems by Gali-Dana Singer, translated by Lisa Katz

On Monday, the literary world lost one of its bright lights with the passing of Tuvia Ruebner. He was 95 years old, and passed in his home on Kibbutz Merhavia, where he had lived since arrival from Nazi occupied Bratislava as a teenager in 1942. He loved his home on the kibbutz so much that he even refusing Lea Goldberg’s invitation to move to Jerusalem and work with her at the Hebrew University.

Born in 1924 as Kurt Erich in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Ruebner grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family. Nazi race laws forced him to leave high school before graduating. In 1941 he immigrated to Israel with the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. His family members, who remained behind, were murdered at Auschwitz.

The poem “Postcard from Pressburg-Bratislava,” found in the volume “Late Beauty,” is his goodbye to his home town and its devastation during the war.

Text:

In the Illuminated Dark. Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. Translated and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back. Hebrew Union College Press, 2014.

Late Beauty. Translated by Lisa Katz and Shahar Bram. Zephyr Press, 2017.

Music:

Green Sun Again - Lyrics: Tuvia Rivner | Composer: Mooney Emerilio | Execution: Nathan Slur

Oh Aesthetics - Lyrics: Tuvia Rivner | Composer: Mooney Emerilio | Performer: Yigal Sadeh

Previous Ruebner Episodes:

In Transit: Poems by Tuvia Ruebner

The Cloudy Skies of Tuvia Ruebner

Israel Bar Kohav was born in Israel, the grandchild of Russian immigrants who were among the founders of the city of Tel Aviv. His ancestors took part in what is known as the Second Aliyah, an influential, ideological wave of immigration that took place between 1904 and 1914.

Bar Kohav himself grew up in Givatayim and Ramat Gan, in the greater Tel Aviv area, and his poem refer to these areas. One of the most predominant themes in his work is childhood. He’s written about this period in nearly each of his 11 books. The writing is not nostalgic or romantic, but often filled with the terror and anxiety of a child confronting uncontrollable and enigmatic forces.

Text:

Israel Bar Kohav on Poetry International Rotterdam.

Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s work attempts to capture, not just the mind at work, but also the spirit, the soul, as it becomes aware of itself as an entity both anchored in, and apart from, the body. Likewise, the body is often viewed as a physical object, one of many that occupy the world.

Lali Tsipi Michaeli was born in the Georgian republic and immigrated to Israel with her parents at the age of seven. She studied comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University, and returned to Georgia in the early 1990s as a Hebrew teacher for the Jewish Agency. From 2005-2007, she worked in Denmark, editing human rights texts. She currently teaches Hebrew language at Ben Gurion University.

Text:

Poems by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin and Alexa Christopher-Daniels in Poetry International Rotterdam

“Sketches of Tel Aviv” by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin. Mediterranean Poetry

The poetry of Adi Assis injects us with the distress that consumes his days and nights. His laments madden us as we find ourselves rare witness to circumstances usually hidden from view, and even more profoundly, to the hidden reaches of the poet's heart.

Podcast on Anat Levin’s poetry

Text:

Various poems by Adi Assis from Poetry International Rotterdam

It’s July—school and university are out for the summer; it’s hot. This month is often a strange mix of the ecstatic and the supremely boring. It’s a month that does not usually receive much praise or fanfare. It’s the perfect month to focus on poetry—that intensifier that makes the joy more joyful and the pain more painful, and the days just a little more delightfully strange and ripe.

Kicking off this month of poems will be Haya Esther, a woman born into an ultra orthodox household in Jerusalem, and who was fired from her job in a girl’s Haredi school after her first book of poems was published in 1983. She went on to write 18 volumes of poetry.

Text:

Three poems Haya Esther, translated by Linda Zisquit and Shira Twersky-Cassel Poetry International Rotterdam 

Ayat Abou Shmeiss is an Arab-speaker who writes in Hebrew in part because she was educated in that language, and in French, at a Christian school in Jaffa, and has been writing since she was a teen.

In her second book, her subjects include an examination of her life as the mother of one child, and as a student at the Open University, where she is now finishing a degree in political science. The poet has a clear grasp of her position. “I’m this and that” she said.

Text:

“My Identity Has Nothing to do with the Language in which I Write.” Tel Aviv Review of Books

Poems: Poetry International Rotterdam

We continue what we began in last week's episode, discussing the historian Flavius Josephus, focusing on his biography, “The Life.”

In terms of his future career and authorship, Flavius Josephus could not have arrived in this world at a better time or place. In the year 37—four years after Jesus was crucified—Josephus was born in Jerusalem as Yosef bar Mattathyahu in Aramaic or ben mattathias in Hebrew, the son of a priestly family on both sides. His mother could trace her ancestry to the royal Hasmoneans, the Maccabean family dynasts who had led the struggle for Jewish independence prior to the Roman conquest.

Text:

This edition of Josephus’s works was translated from the Greek original by William Whiston (1667-1752).

To mark the completion of the Shavuot holiday, this week Marcela reads from Josephus’s account of the giving of the Torah, in his volume “Jewish Antiquities.”

Text:

This edition of Josephus’s works was translated from the Greek original by William Whiston (1667-1752).

Arab Israeli women are one of the most underrepresented groups of writers in Israel and the world. It’s very difficult to find such work that's been translated into English. And so today, we spotlight the poetry of three such women.

I’m using Nathalie Handal’s anthology “The Poetry of Arab Women.”

Text:

“The Path of Affection” by Laila Allush, translated by Abdelwahab M Elmessiri.

“I Love in White Ink” by Siham Da’oud, translated by Helen Knox and Smadar Lavie.

“Interlaced Lines for the Same Moment” by Ghada el-Shafa’I, translated by Atef Abu-Seif with Nathalie Handal.

The fast of Ramadan ends next week. Here in Israel, lights are strung up all over the cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Akko, Jaffa, and many smaller towns and villages. Festive lanterns with beautiful designs in a variety of colors throw their light around. It is a season of heightened charity and prayer as well.

To mark the Eid Al Fitr holiday, we read poems by Sumaiya El-Sousy.

Sumaiya El-Sousy was born in Gaza City and works in a research center in Gaza. She’s published multiple collections of poetry.

Text:

“Voices” by Sumaiya El-Sousy, translated by Atef Abu-Seif, with Nathalie Handal, in The Poetry of Arab Women. A Contemporary Anthology. Ed. Nathalie Handal. Interlink Books, 2001.

“The City” by Sumaiya El-Sousy, in “The Angel of History and the Ghetto of Gaza by Leonard Schwartz in Counterpunch, June 15, 2009.

Music:

Le Trio Joubran – Majâz; Masar

Today we excerpt from the short story “The Plague” by Nurit Zarchi, translated by Yael Lotan, and found in the anthology Fifty Stories from Israel.

The story is set during the time of the 14th century great plague in Jerusalem, which killed a quarter of the city’s population. In this story, the monks who lived on the mountain, at a distance of an hour and a half outside of the city, would take turns, by drawing lots, to go into the city to help. The monk who was then sent to the city would return at night to sleep in an isolated hut in the monastery garden, so as not to infect his brethren. When he woke in the morning, he would ring a bell so that all would know that he was alive and ready to depart for the city. If the bell failed to ring, the monks would know that they would have to choose a new delegate.

The climax of this story occurs when Aaron, the foundling child, has drawn the lot to go into Jerusalem.

Nurit Zarchi, who often writes for children, set one of the conflicts in this story to be between protecting what you love and allowing your beloved child to risk danger and pain in order to grow.

Previous Episode on Nurit Zarchi: Baby Blues

Text:

Nurit Zarchi, “The Plague.” Translated by Yael Lotan. 50 Stories from Israel. Ed. Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Books. 2007.

Today we read an excerpt from Aharon Appelfeld’s novel, The Age of Wonders, published in Israel in 1978 and translated by Dalya Bilu in 1981.

A holocaust survivor himself, this novel is remarkable in that it skips over the war, and does not even use the word holocaust, as it chronicles the dissolution of an assimilated Austrian family, in a petit-bourgeois Jewish world, and the anti-semitism leading up to the war.

Told in two parts, the first part ends with a scene in the town’s synagogue, where all the Jews have been requested to assemble. The last sentence of the section is “By the next day we were on the cattle train hurtling south.” Book Two opens with the line, “Many years later, when everything was over.” In the interim, the narrator has somehow escaped to Palestine.

Previous Episodes on Aharon Appelfeld:

Ticho Café interview

The Story of a Life

Text:

Aharon Appelfeld. The Age of Wonders. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine, 1981

Yesterday and today we commemorate Yom Hazikaron —Memorial Day— in Israel.

In 1948 the poet Haim Gouri fought as a deputy company commander in the Palmach Negev Brigade and wrote a poem commemorating the fighters who accompanied the convoys and fell at Bab el Wad.

We read from it on today's episode.

Text:

Haim Gouri, “Bab El Wad,” translated by Vivian Eden

Music:

“Bab El Wad,” Haim Gouri, sung by Shoshana Damari, music by Shmuel Fershko

“Bab El Wad,” Haim Gouri, sung by Yafa Yarkoni

Before she died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, Anne Frank said: “Despite everything, I believe that people are, at heart, really good.”

In honor of Holocaust Memorial Day, host Marcela Sulak takes a fresh look at the young diarist whose words inspired the world.

Texts:

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. By Anne Frank. Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Translated by Susan Massotty. Bantam Books.

Music:

The Whole Story Soundtrack: Epilogue. Composed by Graeme Revell and Orchestrated by Tim Simonec.

This week we continue exploring Robert Alter’s translation of the Bible and sacred poetry by looking at The Song of Songs, which is traditionally read on the Shabbat of the intermediate days of Passover before the morning Torah reading, or on the morning of the seventh day.

Robert Alter’s historic one-man translation of the entire Hebrew Bible is like two worlds at once, the heavens and the earth, with the translation above and the commentary below. One can spend a lifetime in either of these worlds.

Text:

Robert Alter, Strong As Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel. A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company. 2015

This week and next, during Passover, we’ll be exploring Robert Alter's translation of the beginning of Exodus, the basis for the Passover story. Next week we’ll approach the Song of Songs, which is traditionally recited during the days of Passover.

Robert Alter’s historic one-man translation of the entire Hebrew Bible is like two worlds at once, the heavens and the earth, with the translation above and the commentary below. One can spend a lifetime in either of these worlds.

Text:

Robert Alter’s Bible: A Symposium By Ronald Hendel, Aviya Kushner, Shai Held, David Bentley Hart, Adele Berlin, Adam Kirsch. Jewish Review of Books, 2019. Winter 2019

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company.

Bracha Serri was born in 1942 in San’a, Yemen, and brought to Israel in a mass exodus of Jews from Yemen soon after the State was established. She often adopts the first person voice of a Yemenite woman, crushed between an oppressive patriarchal background and the discriminatory nature of her everyday life, as in the poem “Dish.”

Serri studied linguistics and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to her writing, Sari established her own publishing house, the Or HaGanuz publishing house. Her books are known for their innovative design. Her own poetry is intertextual, not only for its Biblical references, but for its dialogue with Yeminite culture, feminism, politics, as well as religion.

Text:

Bracha Serri, “Aliza Says,” translated by Rachel Zvia Back. The Defiant Muse. Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirly Kaufman, et al. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

Bracha Serri, “No More Important Men,” translated by Yaffah Berkovits Murciano, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, Indiana University Press, Number 11, Spring 5766/2006

Bracha Serri, “I am the Daughter of Lot,” “Jerusalem and San’a,” “To Hold the World,” trans. Yonina Borvick and Ammiel Alcalay & “Dish,” translated by Yaffah Berkovits Murciano, Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay, San Francisco: City Lights 1996.

Born in Umm Al-Fahm, Ayman Agbaria is a researcher, poet, playwright, social activist, and a senior lecturer in the department of leadership and policy in education at the University of Haifa.

Several of Agbaria's poems, written in Arabic, have been translated into Hebrew, and have been well received. Among the themes found in his poetry are the extreme alienation from the self that of living as a religious and linguistic minority in Israel can produce.

Text:

Ayman Agbaria, various poems at Poetry International Rotterdam

Today we commemorate the life of Ella Bat Tsion, who passed away a month ago. We begin the episode with the poem, “I waited with Endless Patience,” translated by Lisa Katz. It comes from her last book, After, which was published in 2000.

Text:

Ella Bat Tsion, “I waited with Endless Patience.” Translated by Lisa Katz. After published in 2000.

On this Purim, we turn to Robert Alter’s excellent new translation, Strong as Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel.

Robert Alter writes that the Book of Esther, unlike any other book of the Bible, seems to have been written primarily for entertainment. Alter notes:

“It has variously been described as a farce, a burlesque, a satire, a fairy tale, and a carnivalesque narrative, and it is often quite funny, with sly sexual comedy playing a significant role. The portrait of King Ahasuerus and the Persian court makes no pretense of serious correspondence to historical reality, as the original audience surely must have known. The Persian emperors were famous for their tolerance toward ethnic minorities—a policy clearly enunciated in the Cyrus Cylinder—and so Ahasuerus’s accepting Haman’s plan to massacre all the Jews of the realm is a manifest fantasy.”

Text:

Strong As Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel, A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company.

This week we feature an excerpt from Shani Boianjiu’s novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” published in 2012 in English.

The novel is told in a series of vignettes narrated by three young Israeli women – Lea, Avishag and Yael – following their high school years in a small northern village, through their enlistment in the Israeli Defence Force where they train marksmen, guard a border and man a checkpoint. The novel follows them into their twenties.

Text:

Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, Hogarth; First Edition (September 11, 2012)

In this week’s episode, we will consider Israeli Love poetry through the lens of Barbara Goldberg’s new book, Transformation: The Poetry of Translation, which has just come out this year, after winning the Valentin Krustev Award for Translation.

Goldberg calls her volume “a small anthology of Israeli poets writing on love and war.” Among the 62 poets represented, nearly all are alive and currently writing today. She says of them, that they “are men and women, old and young, natives of Israel and foreign born, secular and religious, straight and gay; each, in his or her individual way, represents Israel and reflects the diversity of its faces.”

Text:

Barbara Goldberg, Transformation: The Poetry of Translation. Poet’s Choice, 2019.

This week’s episode introduces a genre called “Auto-reality,” a term coined by Rana Werbin to describe her first book, Life Is Good. This book is a collection of excerpts from the author’s real-life journal, which she disassembled and reorganized to create a narrative of her choice.

Rana Werbin is an Israeli writer, editor, actor, and translator. The book is translated by Yardenne Greenspan and Maya Klein.

Text:

Rana Werbin, Life is Good. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan and Maya Klein. Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2012.

Aharon Appelfeld passed away just over a year ago. He was one of Israel’s most well known authors abroad, and one of the generation that came of age around the same time as the founding of the State of Israel.

Appelfeld would say that in order to be a serious writer you need to have a routine. For years his routine had been to write with a Biro pen on sheets of ordinary white paper in the café at Ticho House, in Jerusalem. It was there that Alain Elkann interviewed him for The Paris Review in 2014.

Text:

Aharon Appelfeld. “The Art of Fiction” Interviewed by Alain Elkann. The Paris Review ISSUE 210, FALL 2014

On this episode, we continue our focus on the new “Crisis” issue of The Ilanot Review, which came out this month, and which was edited by guest editor Adriana X. Jacobs, and our very own Marcela Shulak.

Marcela features some of her favorite poems, which listeners can read along—or explore other poems—at Ilanotreview.com

Text:

“Banruptcy Series” by Ron Dahan, translated by Nadavi Noked

“On the day of the blood” and “Unveiling the Metaphor” by Sharron Hass, translated by Tsipi Keller

On this episode, Marcela features some of her favorite poems from the recent poetry issue of The Ilanot Review, which has just gone live this week. Listeners can read along—or explore other poems—at Ilanotreview.com

Text:

“All Our Planes,” by Moshe Ben Yakir, translated by Joanna Chen

“The Anteaters” by Roy Chicky Arad, translated by Yavni Bar Yam

“Bread” by Yudit Shahar, translated by Aviya Kushner

This week, the podcast widens its focus and steps beyond our boundaries for a moment to acknowledge the civil war in Syria through the Arabic writings of Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts.

Haji is originally from the Kurdish town of Amouda, on the border of Turkey. The excerpted essay was written five and a half years ago, when the Syrian war was well into its second year.

Text:

A Note on Syrian Poetry & Autumn here is magical and vast, Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts. Words Without Borders.

A Tree Whose Name I don’t Know, by Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts. A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2017.

This podcast is not for the faint of heart — we’re featuring the poetry of Noam Partom this week, and this poetry calls out sexual predators and chides the poet for allowing men to define her sense of worth. Partom isn’t afraid to say what is largely left unsaid, out of politeness, out of the distasteful thing it is to name what we know exists but which we leave unsaid.

Text:

Noam Partom, “Chaim Nachman Bialik” translated by Danny Neyman & “Women’s Talk” translated by David Lockard and Danny Neyman

Music:

Songs from A Winter Funeral Soundtrack by Yonatan Canaan

This podcast is the second in our two-part long-good-bye to the extraordinary writer, Amos Oz, who passed away on Friday, Dec. 28.

Marcela provides a long excerpt from Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, translated by Jessica Cohen. The excerpt comes from the essay “Many Lights, Not one Light.”

Text: Amos Oz, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

When Nadia Adina Rose describes her art, she might also be describing her poetry. In her artist statement section of her website, she notes the importance of memory and childhood imagination in her work:

Reality is also the space of memory, which takes us back to our childhood – when we used to be free of the banal, limiting experience; when imagination and the feeling of surprise evoked by objects formed the basis of our perception. In childhood, everything is “as if”: the picture on the blanket cover comes alive; the bedsheet flows down like a waterfall; the pillows turn into a snowy mountain; the spiral of an electric cable becomes the reflection of the sun in water.

These transformations presuppose a certain duality in the world of things, which exists simultaneously on the mundane, everyday level – and on a playful, fanciful level, which corresponds to the structure of a fairy tale.

Text:

Nadia Adina Rose Website, artist statement and poems translated by Linda Zisquite and Irit Sela

Haaretz Review by Shlomit Cohen-Asif, translated by Lisa Katz, in Poetry International Rotterdam

This episode is dedicated to Amos Oz, who passed away on Friday, Dec. 28, after a short battle of cancer at the age of 79. We’ll feature his latest book, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, which was published in November in Jessica Cohen’s English translation.

Text:

Amos Oz, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Hedva Harechavi is an early feminist voice in contemporary Hebrew poetry, and, as you will hear, her work often combines the language of prayer and biblical texts with contemporary daily realities.

Her first book, Because He Is King, won the Rachel Newman Poetry Award and established her as a poet. Harechavi's eight subsequent poetry collections have won all the major Israeli prizes.

She was born on the kibbutz Degania, and lives in Jerusalem.

Text: Hedva Harechavi, “A Very Cheerful Girl” translated by Tsipi Keller in Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, SUNY 2008.

Hedva Harechavi, “All of Reality to Me” translated by Tsipi Keller, Asymptote Journal

This podcast is dedicated to anyone who has trouble finding shoes that fit—especially boots, during the Israeli rainy season! On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Raquel Chalfi’s poem German Boot, translated by Tsipi Keller.

Text:

German Boot” by Raquel Chalfi. Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Selected and translated by Tsipi Keller. SUNY Press, 2008.

Previous Chalfi podcast

Tonight is the fourth night of Hanukkah, and to celebrate, Marcela reads an abridgement from Mendele Mokher Serforim’s short story, “What is Chanukah?” It features two speakers, Shmuel, for whom a Hanukkah miracle occurred, and his friend Ignatz.

Text:

Mendele Mokher Serforim, “What is Chanukah?” translated by Herbert J. Levine and Reena Spicehandler in Jewish Fiction

Yitzi Hurwitz, “To Make the Darkness Itself Shine”

Music:

Maoz Tzur by Yosef Karduner

Al Hanissim by Yonina

Here’s a little love poem for you, by Ory Bernstein, who is responsible for some of the loveliest love poetry written in Hebrew. It’s from A One and Only Love, which was translated by Bernstein himself.

Text:

Ory Bernstein, A One and Only Love, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002.

Raquel Chalfi, Ory Bernstein, Shimon Adaf, Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel, Mosaic Press 2014.

Last week we heard the first part of this two-part podcast featuring Shimon Adaf in his and Lavie Tidhar’s 2016 multigenre collaboration Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction. This week we feature Lavie Tidhar.

The book is a dialogue about Adaf and Tidhar's approach to writing the fantastic, writing about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end.

What is especially exciting is that this book extends the conversation even into their own fiction--and the book ends with two new short stories – Tutim by Tidhar, and Third Attribute by Adaf – in which each appears as a character in the other’s tale.

Text:

Tidhar, Lavie & Shimon Adaf. Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction. Repeater Press, 2016.

Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar's new book, Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction, is a dialogue about their approach to writing the fantastic, writing about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end.

What is especially exciting is that this book extends the conversation even into their own fiction--and the book ends with two new short stories – Tutim by Tidhar, and Third Attribute by Adaf – in which each appears as a character in the other’s tale.

This week and next, Marcela reads selections from each of their dialogues and then their fiction.

Text:

Tidhar, Lavie & Shimon Adaf. Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction. Repeater Press, 2016.

Previous Episode (featuring Shimon Adaf)

Music:

Quetev Meriri - Shel Bney Tmuta

האצולה - צורך

האצולה - אהובתי

“Sabina Messeg is a rare nature poet”, writes author and literary scholar Ariel Hirshfeld. “The existence of streams, boulders and plants are fateful for her, which differentiates her from most Jewish poets writing in Hebrew. Messeg truly sees nature as the great Other in her life. Her poetry cautions us about its tremendous beauty, complete innocence and terrible fragility.”

Messeg is a particular kind of “nature poet,” though—in fact, she is considered the founder of Israeli eco-poetry. Marcela shares her love for the way Messeg’s flora act as main characters of her poems.

Text:

Poems from Sabine Messeg, Clil – a farm in Galilee in Mediterranean Poetry

On the Extraordinary Beauty of the Ordinary, in Poetry International Rotterdam

On this episode, Marcela reads poetry by Israeli-Arab poet Dareen Tatour, who was recently released after a nearly three and a half year legal battle resulting from her incarceration for incitement to violence and supporting terrorist organizations in social media posts. The incitement was specifically located in her poems, which were used as evidence in Tatour’s trials and hearings.

Text:

Poetry by Dareen Tatour, translated by Andrew Leber in Brooklyn Rail 

Jack Khoury, Haaretz,  (second poem)

Born in 1971 in St. Petersburg,  Alex Epstein moved to the Israeli city of Lod when he was eight years old. His short stories are sometimes as short as a single sentence, and have been described as examples of the “philosophical, or allegorical short-short story.” He has published three novels and eight collections of stories in Hebrew.

Text:

Blue Has No South by Alex Epstein, translated by Becka mara McKay, Clockroot Books, 2010.

Lunar Savings Time by Alex Epstein, translated by Becka Mara McKay, Clockroot Books, 2011.

A Children’s Story, An Almost Ordinary Love Story, and The Intelligent Mouse by Alex Epstein, translated by Yardenne Greenspan in The Guardian.

Music:

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 2 “Little Russian”

On this episode of Israel in Translation, Marcela reads three of the six parts of Sharron Hass’s long poem “Dinner With Joachim,” which appears in the most recent issue of the journal Two Lines. “Dinner with Joachim” is from the collection Daylight, which is a critical inquiry into light as the root of rational thought.

Text:

Sharron Hass, “Dinner with Joachim” translated by Marcela Sulak. Two Lines 29

Mordechai Geldman’s work is often informed by his career as a psychotherapist. “My poetry comes from the inner void that meditation creates,” Geldman writes in his preface to his collected works.

Tsipi Keller, who translated Geldman's most recent collection, describes his poetic persona as “Routinely solitary, whether on foot or on his bike, Geldman is a tourist in his own town; Tel Aviv, especially his neighborhood near Kikar Milano, which plays an important role in the poems.”

Text:

Mordechai Geldman, Years I Walked at Your Side. Translated by Tsipi Keller. Excelsior Editions, 2018.

This episode originally aired Oct. 14th, 2015.

In this episode, host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from Yitzhak Gormezano Goren's Alexandrian Summer, his first novel to be translated into English. In this semi-autobiographical work, Robby, aged ten and accompanied by his parents, leaves his home in Alexandria in 1951 to rejoin his two brothers who had already moved to Israel.

In this extract, three generations of the family are sitting together in their home in Alexandria, reading a letter from Robby's brothers about what life is like in Israel. Robby's grandmother thinks it sounds a little primitive:

“They say that people work in construction in Palestine. Yes, even educated boys. A grandson of mine, putting his hand inside the cemento? Wy-di-mi-no!”

André Aciman says in his introduction to the novel, "Alexandrian Summer is a nostalgic, farewell portrait of a world that was fast expiring but still refused to see that history had written it off."

Text: Alexandrian Summer, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren. Translated Yardenne Greenspan. New Vessel Press, 2015.

Music: Dalida - Salma Ya Salama Farid Al Atrash - Wayak Umm Kulthoum - Enta Omri

It’s Sukkot—which lasts seven days in Israel and eight days outside of Israel. A sukkah is the temporary dwelling in which farmers would live during harvesting in ancient days. Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the sukkah and some choose to sleep there. During Sukkot, it is customary to read Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes, to remind us how fleeting life is, and that we should seek a deeper meaning besides the fulfillment of material goods.

No one knows for sure who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, but it has been traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Orit Gidali imagines king Solomon, Kohelet, as the author in the poem Kohelet.

Text:

Kohelet from Twenty Girls to Envy Me. New and Selected Poems of Orit Gidali. Translated Marcela Sulak. University of Texas Press, 2016.

Six Songs for Tamar by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Harold Schimmel, in Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems. Sheep Meadow Press.

Stop your sorrowing, suffering soul from Vulture in a Cage. Poems by Solomon Ibn Gavirol. translated by Raymond P. Sheindlin. Archipelago Press, 2017.

Music:

Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds

For this Yom Kippur, we read a section of S. Y. Agnon's Twofold translated by Jeffrey Saks.

Text:

Twofold, by S. Y. Agnon, trans. Jeffrey Saks, in The Outcast and Other Tales. Toby Press, 2017

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the ten days known as the Days of Awe. Today we feature works by Yehuda Amichai and Ibn Gavirol fitting of these Days of Repentance.

Text:

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015. Vulture in a Cage. Poems of Ibn Gavirol. Translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Archipelago Books, 2016

Music:

Exploring the Convoluted Singularity by OKAM vs ps

Next week, from Sunday night until Wednesday at sunset, we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year. This year, Marcela focuses on the figure of Isaac, son of Abraham, because the Torah readings for both days of the holiday focus on Sarah’s conceiving and giving birth to Isaac, Hagar’s banishment into the desert, and also on the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah.

Text:

Amir Gilboa, “Isaac,” translated by Arieh Sachs in The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, et. al. “Sarah Laughed Again,” and “Isaac in Reverse” from Twenty Girls to Envy Me. New and Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, translated by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas press, 2016. “Hagar” by Yocheved Bat-Miriam, translated by Zvi Jagendrof, in The Defiant Muse. Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirly Kaufman, et al. The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Avinu Malkeinu by Barbara Streisand Avinu Malkeinu (feat. Maria Katz) by Andrey Makarevich & Евгений Борец Avinu Malkeinu by Lior

Previous Rosh Hashanah Episodes:

2017 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/09/20/fear-and-glory-rosh-hashanahs-unetanneh-tokef/ 2016 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/09/28/hava-pinhas-cohen-poems-for-the-month-of-elul/ https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/10/05/poems-for-rosh-hashanah-and-yom-kippur/ 2015 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/16/blowers-to-the-shofar-souls-to-the-firing-line/ https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/09/free-admission-to-rosh-hashanah/ 2014 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/17/rivka-miriam-on-asking-forgiveness-israel-in-translation/ https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/24/haim-gouris-piyyut-for-rosh-hashanah-israel-in-translation/

Today we feature poems translated this past spring and summer by some of Marcela's translation seminar students at Bar-Ilan University. After studying and discussing various translation theories, and becoming familiar with different poetic traditions and styles, these graduate and undergraduate students chose a poet and translated their work.

The poems in this episode were translated by Aya Abu Riash, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Hiba Jiryis.

Text:

“Bigger Than All Words” by Nizzar Qabbani, translated by Aya Abu Riash

“The Big Billybong” by Roy “Chicky” Arad, translated by Yavni Bar-Yam

“A Prayer to the New Year” by Fadwa Tuqan, translated by Hiba Jiryis

This episode features a short story written by Sheikha Helawy, a Bedouin woman living in Jaffa. The story, published on the Short Story Project, was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Basma Ghalayini.

Helawy was born in the unmarked Bedouin village of El-Roi, on the outskirts of the city of Haifa. Helawy currently works as a supervisor and advisor at the Institute for Democratic Education in Israel. Her Arabic-language publications, published in Amman, Jordan, include two books of short stories, as well as a book of poetry. Her work has also been translated into French, German, and Hebrew.

Text:

Sheikah Helawy, “R.A. Looks for His Eyes,” translated from Arabic by Basma Ghalayini.

David Avidan was born in Tel Aviv where he lived and worked as a self-described “poet, painter, filmmaker, publicist, and playwright.” He studied literature and philosophy during a short stint at Hebrew University.

Avidan was often attacked by poetry critics who criticized him as being egocentric, chauvinistic, and technocratic. In an interview, he proclaimed: “My arena is the entire planet. Israel is but a small piece of land. I don’t work in Tel Aviv. I work from Tel Aviv.”

The poems read in today's episode are translated by Tsippi Keller, from the new collection Futureman.

Text:

David Avidan, Futureman translated by Tsippi Keller, introduced by Anat Weisman. Phoneme Media, 2017.

Roy Hasan was born in 1983 in Hadera, Israel and is the author of two collections of poetry – The Dogs that Barked in our Childhood were Muzzled (Tangiers, 2014) and Golden Lions (Tangiers, 2016). 

Michele Rosenthal translated several of Hasan's poems and says of Hasan, “He challenges the cultural gatekeepers to look beyond the traditional topics, tropes and metaphors toward a different, more inclusive version of Hebrew poetry that reflects the lived experience of those that have been traditionally left outside of the canon.”

Text:

Roy Hasan, If There’ll be Peace all the Arsim will Come, translated by Ron Makleff

Roy Hasan, “The State of Ashkenaz,” and “Four in the Morning,” translated by Michele Rosenthal

Music:

Yemen Blues - Tonight I'll Be Pretty Ft. Mariem Hassan

Natan Zach was born in 1930 in Berlin, and he immigrated to Haifa in 1936. He has had a great influence on the development of modern Hebrew poetry as editor and critic, as well as translator and poet. 

In an article from 1959, Zach favored ‘a “poetics of modesty”: simplicity in theme, syntax, and diction; understated rhetoric, avoidance of symbolistic intricacy, and flexible rhyme patterns; metrical and rhythmic structures that follow and reflect the flow of conversational language, refraining from lofty, elevated, cerebral, and flashy poetic devices and structures while employing irony in a subtle, distilled fashion; in short, an appealingly simple poetics without undue simplification.

Text:

Peter Cole: Hymns and Qualms. Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Adi Keissar, an Israeli poet of Yemenite descent, is the founder of the popular Ars Poetica, a project which initiated a new wave of Mizrahi poetry for the masses in the form of readings combined with Middle Eastern music and dancing. Keissar received the Bernstein Literary Award for her first book Black on Black (2014), and the Ministry of Culture Award for Young Poets in 2015. She is the editor of two Ars Poetica anthologies, and former editor of the Basta poetry section of the online journal Ha’okets. Her second collection of poetry, Loud Music, was published in 2016. Keissar’s poetry has been translated into eight languages and has been published in various anthologies, journals and newspapers. In autumn 2015, Ha’aretz named her the most influential of contemporary poets.

Text:

Adi Keissar reading “I’m the Mizrahi”

“I'm the Mizrahi”

Adi Keissar reading “For Those” with subtitles

“Black on Black” by Adi Keissar, translated by Ayelet Tsabari

“A Man sets himself on fire” by Adi Keissar, translated by Ayelet Tsabari

“Woman of her words” by Tamar Lafontaine

Music:

Wamid by Yemen Blues

Baraca by Yemen Blues

Yemen Blues by Yemen Blues

Today we focus on the work of a particular translator—Peter Cole. We've often featured Cole’s translations, but almost always his work from antiquity, particularly from The Dream of the Poem, and also his Arabic language translations of Taha Muhammad Ali. But Peter Cole also translates from the twenty and twenty-first centuries, and today we'll feature a selection from his anthology, Hymns and Qualms, New and Selected Poems and Translations.

Text:Peter Cole: Hymns and Qualms. New and Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

Asenath Barzani, from the Iraqi Kurdistan region, was the first known woman rabbi in Jewish history. Born in 1590, she was the daughter of the eminent Rabbi Shmuel b. Netanel Ha-Levi of Kurdistan. Her father, a scholar and mystic with a large following, aimed to rectify the plight of his brethren, namely, the dearth of educated leaders. He built a yeshiva in Mosul where he hoped to train young men who would become community leaders and scholars. Since he had no sons, he trained his daughter to be a learned scholar of the highest order.

After Asenath's father died, her husband technically became the head of the Yeshiva, but in fact it was Asenath who taught the students who had come for rabbinic training. But she also wrote poetry in Hebrew and was famous for it. Today we'll spotlight some of her poetry.

Text:

Asenath’s Petition, translated by Peter Cole in The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

The Kurdish Project

Music:

Kurdit by Reuven Yamin

On the shores of Israel's Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, and in Shemi Zarhin’s novel Some Day, it is a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. Zarhin's hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel's larger national story.

The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Young Shlomi, who develops a remarkable culinary talent, has fallen for Ella, the strange neighbor with suicidal tendencies; his little brother Hilik obsessively collects words in a notebook. In the wild, selfish but magical grown-up world that swirls around them, a mother with a poet's soul mourns the deaths of literary giants while her handsome husband cheats on her both at home and abroad.

Shemi Zarhin was born in Tiberias in 1961, and is a novelist, film director, and screenwriter who has created some of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning films in the history of Israeli cinema, including Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2003), Aviva My Love (2006), and The World is Funny (2012). He now teaches filmmaking at the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem. Some Day is his first novel and was a best-seller in Israel.

Text:

Some Day by Shemi Zarhin. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. New Vessel Press, 2013.

Music:

Etz Ha'Alon by Yehoram Gaon

Baladah LaChovesh by Yehoram Gaon

People are people. But sometimes it is difficult to maintain one’s humanity under dehumanizing conditions. On today’s episode, we share the work of one poet in Gaza whose poems and fragments open a tiny window into the Gaza strip, where only 5% of the water is potable, there is electricity for 5 hours a day, and only 55% of the population is employed. His name is Mosab, and he has created the Edward Said Library for Gaza.

“When a writer is motivated by empathy rather than sarcasm, his humor has the power to reach deep into the heart,” Omri Herzog noted in his 2012 Haaretz review of Yirmi Pinkus' second novel, Petty Business, which is a tale of two families, related by marriage, who are shop owners in 1980s Israel.

The content is daring and unusual—middle-aged, petit bourgeois families are not the usual protagonists of Israeli literature, but Pinkus, who is also a graphic artist known for his humor, delivers a strangely compelling story. Marcela reads a section from near the beginning, in Yardenne Greenspan and Evan Fallenberg’s new English translation.

Text: Petty Business by Yirmi Pinkus. Translated by Evan Fallenberg and Yardenne Greenspan. Syracuse University Press, 2017.

This episode features poems by Sheikha Helawy, a Bedouin-Israeli woman living in Jaffa, originally written in Arabic and in Hebrew and translated by Yosefa Raz.

Helawy was born in the unmarked Bedouin village of El-Roi, on the outskirts of the city of Haifa. Her village was destroyed in 1990 by the Israeli government. Helawy currently works as a supervisor and advisor at the Institute for Democratic Education in Israel. Her Arabic-language publications, published in Amman, Jordan, include two books of short stories, as well as a book of poetry. Her work has also been translated into French, German, and Hebrew.

Text: Four poems by Sheikha Helawy, translated by Yosefa Raz.

Music: Aman Demeysin by The Bridge Project

Moshe Sakal’s novel, The Diamond Setter, is part mystery, part family history, and part myth. The plot centers around a lost blue diamond known as Sabakh that is brought into the local diamond cutter’s shop. The story is told mainly from the point of view of shop owner’s nephew and assistant, Tom, who, with his boyfriend Honi, becomes romantically involved with a young man from Damascus who may or may not be connected to the diamond.

Text: Moshe Sakal, The Diamond Setter. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Other Press, March 2018.

This past Saturday night, we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot. And in honor of the festival, we read from Emuna Elon’s novel, If You Awaken Love, translated by David Hazony, and published by Toby Press in 2006.

Music:

Kululam - Chai

Rav Shlomo Carlebach - Pe'er Vekavod Notnim Lishmo

Text:

If You Awaken Love, Emuna Elon, translated by David Hazony, Toby Press, 2006

In honor of the holy month of Ramadan observed by Muslims worldwide, host Marcela Sulak reads an essay by Iman Jmal, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University. Jmal is from Jatt in northern Israel and she writes about preparing a Ramadan meal with her mother, the shopping for which they must travel through a checkpoint.

Music:

Approaching the Bridge – The Bridge Project

Notre Wagon – The Bridge Project

This week’s podcast features Ilana Kurshan’s memoir If All the Seas Were Ink. Originally written in English, the text translates the study of the Daf Yomi, or “Daily Page,” of the Talmud, into a life story. The Talmud is the main book of rabbinic teachings spanning about 600 years. It is the basis for all codes of Jewish law. The memoir begins in the wake of a painful divorce, when Ilana decides to begin this 7 ½ year long study, one page at a time.

More info on Bar Ilan's Writing Conference.

Text: Ilana Kurshan, If All The Seas Were Ink. A memoir. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

In this episode we read from David Grossman’s “Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel”, translated by Haim Watzman. The narrative that Grossman records are the words of Aouni Sbeit.

Text: David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire. Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Translated by Haim Watzman. Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux. 1993

Music: My White and Brown Land by The Bridge Project

In continuation of the celebrations surrounding Israel’s Independence Day, host Marcela Sulak reads from Amos Oz’s iconic description of the events surrounding the struggle for Israeli independence.

Text: Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated by Nicholas De Lange. Harcourt, Inc., 2003.

Music: Ofra Haza – Eli Eli (lyrics by Hannah Szenes) City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra – Hatikvah

This episode originally aired April 23, 2015.

Tonight marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. Moving past all the euphoria and towards attempts at wisdom, this episode will feature excerpts from the essay “The Meaning of Homeland” by Amos Oz, found in the collection “Under This Blazing Light,” translated by Nicholas de Lange.

Text: Amos Oz, “The Meaning of Homeland” in Under This Blazing Light translated by Nicholas de Lange, Syracuse University Press, 2995.

Music: Canvas (Instrumental Version) by Imogen Heap

Previous Independence Day Episode: A Night to Remember on the Road to Independence

In honor of Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel - host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Paul Celan, including his famous “Death Fugue.”

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitcz in 1920. The death of his parents in the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in a Romanian work camp are the defining forces in his poetry and use of language. Celan wrote in German. According to Pierre Joris, who translated Celan’s later poetry, he “harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through a “dismantling and rewelding” of German.”

Texts: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. W.W. Norton & Co. 2001 Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Press, 1995.

Music: Felix Mendelssohn - Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, op.35 no.1 Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.19 no.6 in G Minor Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.30 no.6 in F Sharp Minor

In honor of the seven (or eight) days of Passover, which began on Saturday night, we will continue reading the work of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, whose novel Jacob’s Ladder was featured two weeks ago for its reference to Palm Sunday.

This week features the essay “To Die a Modern Death,” which is often used as a text on bereavement in Israeli nursing schools. It is not an easy text, but it is a very important one for those caring for aging family members, especially during the holidays.

Text: “To Die a Modern Death” by Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Translated by Hannah Schlit. In Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1006.

In honor of the beginning of Passover this weekend, this week's episode features an excerpt from S.Y. Agnon’s story, “The Home,” which appears in Herbert Levine and Reena Spicehandler’s English translation in Jeffrey Saks’ series on Agnon, the only Hebrew-language writer to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Text: “The Home,” by S. Y. Agnon, translated by Herbert Levine and Reena Spicehandler, in The Outcast and Other Tales. Ed. and annotated by Jeffrey Saks. Toby Press, 2017.

In honor of Palm Sunday, this episode features an excerpt from Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's Jacob's Ladder. Born in Cairo in 1917, the author depicts life in Egypt between the two world wars in the novel, which was published in 1951, before she settled in Israel.

Here is an excerpt from the novel: Miss O’Brien had felt the child’s hand stiffen in hers, and Rachel’s unseemly interest in the beggar boy moved her. The child might be loved and spoiled, but she must be unbearably lonely if she cared for such a dirty little scamp. At first when everything in Egypt was strange, new, and often shocked her, Miss O’Brien had followed Alice’s instructions and the advice of other nurses that children must be kept away from all that smacked of native life, but now this seemed cruel to her.

Text: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, from Jacob’s Ladder in Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Ed. by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights, 1996.

This episode features segments from the book Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair, a collection of tales narrated in a series of stand-alone observations, usually no more than a single page, and often simply a paragraph, so that they resemble, in a way, the tenants of a house or the apartments of a neighborhood. Nicole Fares has translated it from the Arabic. Mahmoud Shukair was born in 1941 in Jerusalem and worked for many years as a teacher, journalist and editor-in-chief of the cultural magazines Al-Talia'a (The Vanguard) and Dafatir Thaqafiya (Cultural File). He was jailed twice by the Israeli authorities for his political remarks, and was deported to Lebanon in 1975, not returning to Jerusalem until 1993. He is the author of 45 books, six television series, and four plays, including Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cats. In 2011, he was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Prize for Freedom of Expression. He has spent his life between Beirut, Amman, and Prague and now lives in Jerusalem.

Here is an excerpt from "Neighbors": Her name is Suzanne. She’s a thin blonde from Marseille who rented a room in the Old City, where she shares a bathroom with her neighbors, a bathroom she uses once in the morning and again around midnight. Her window overlooks a house occupied by five settlers who appear on the porch every morning. She can see the top of the pale yellow wall not far from the house. (Suzanne loved this city from the moment she arrived last years.)

Text: Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair. Translated from the Arabic by Nicole Fares. Syracuse University Press, 2018.

In honor of the Purim custom of reading the Book of Esther, this episode features an excerpt from Ruth Calderon's short story "A Bride for One Night". It is the title story in her collection of Talmudic tales, published in Ilana Kushan's English translation in 2014. Calderon has a doctorate in Talmud from Hebrew University and was elected to the Israeli Knesset in January 2013. She is founder and former director of Elul Beit Midrash in Jerusalem and founder and chair of Alma: Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv.

The story opens with a Talmudic passage:

When Rav would visit the city of Darshish, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?” And when Rav Nachman would visit the city of Shachnetziv, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?”

Text: Ruth Calderon, A Bride for One Night. Talmudic Tales.

Translated by Ilana Kurshan. The Jewish Publication Society, 2014.

Music: משירי ארץ אהבתי“ (לאה גולדברג / דפנה אילת) בביצוע חוה אלברשטיין”

Ruby Namdar's second novel, "The Ruined House", appeared in its English translation in 2017. Set in New York, the book centers on an esteemed professor. It is uncannily timely in that it dovetails with the #MeToo movement and the close scrutiny that the film industry, media, sports, academia and politics are undergoing right now for their participation in systemic sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination.

Here is an excerpt form the novel:

Cohen specialized in elegantly naming his courses, which attracted students from every department and were always fully enrolled. It was more than just their names, though. His courses were well conceived and well rounded. For all their incisiveness, their main strength lay in the aesthetic harmony of their superbly formulated interpretative models, which were easy to understand and absorb. In general, “elegant” was the adjective most commonly applied to anything bearing the imprint of Professor Andrew P. Cohen.

Music: Demian by Tatran

Text: Ruby Namdar, The Ruined House. Translated by Hillel Halkin. Harper Collins, 2017.

This podcast is devoted to the poetry of the Jerusalem Light Rail. Each of the 23 stops of the Jerusalem Light Rail's red line features a poem, translated into Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Some of the poems depict bodies in a state of fatigue, as if coming home from work during a daily commute. And some of them are about travel, and the tiny details of it -- construed in a metaphysical as well as a physical sense. The beauty of the project is the insinuation that we travel via language, as well as via train, through landscapes, and through bodies, as in Samih Al-Qasim’s poem “Rain on the Newsstand,” translated from the Arabic by Idan Barir.

Here is "Rain on the Newsstand" by Samih Al-Qasim:

Sudden rain pouring on the morning papers rain, the ink flows from language to language the mannequin’s features fade away from the cover as does the face of an athlete proud of his trophy the eyeliner melts in an actress’ eyes the bloody red oozes and wounds open on the opinion page the small newsstand shuts its doors rain, on the last issue.

Music:

רכבת לצפון - אסף אמדורסקי רכבת לילה - משינה

Haim Gouri, the last poet of Israeli’s founding generation, died one week ago today. He wrote of the terrible sacrifice of war, and of memory and camaraderie.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1923, Gouri was a poet, novelist, documentary film maker, journalist, and the author of a book on the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann.

During World War II, Gouri joined the elite strike force of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force operating during Mandate Palestine, called the 'Palmach.' He was sent to Hungary to help holocaust survivors come to Palestine.

Gouri's first book of poetry, published in 1949, was heavily influenced by his experience in the Palmach during the war of 1948. His later books become more abstract.

Today's episode features poems from the volume Words in My Lovesick Blood, translated by Stanley Chyet.

This is an excerpt from the poem "Account":

And again, as always in the Land of Israel, the stones boil, earth gives no cover. And again my brothers call out from the depths.

Texts:

Haim Gouri, Words in My Lovesick Blood, translated, Stanley Chyet, Wayne State University, 1996. Poems translated by Linda Zisquit and T Carmi: Poetry International Rotterdam

Previous podcast: 

Author and playwright Nava Semel passed away in December 2017. Her novel "Paper Bride" paints a vivid portrait of British Palestine in the 1930s, seen through the eyes of an illiterate boy.

Here is an excerpt from the novel: And so, dear children, we repeat the question. What does your family do for the homeland? Herzl Fleisher stood up first, followed by other pupils, all of them describing how their fathers or their uncles or other people they knew were active in the defense of Jews in Palestine or had devoted their lives to building the country. But I hadn’t lied. My big brother Imri really did go to Poland to get married for the homeland.

Text: Paper Bride by Naveal Semel. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Hybrid Publishers, 2012.

Previous podcast: And The Rat Laughed: Remembering Writer Nava Semel

Music: שלמה ארצי – באיזשהו מקום

Peter Cole is a poet and translator who has recreated Spain's golden age of Jewish culture and adapted tenth-century Arabic-language poetry to 21st-century English so skillfully that the lines sing.

This episode features translations from Cole's new book Hymns and Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations, which features poems originally written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic, alongside Cole's new poetry.

Here is an excerpt from the poem "Blessed Are Those" by Avraham Ben Yitzhak, translated by Cole from the original Hebrew:

Blessed are those who sow and do not reap— they shall wander in extremity. Blessed are the generous whose glory in youth has enhanced the extravagant brightness of days— who shed their accoutrements at the crossroads.

Text:Hymns and Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Music:Etti Ankri – Mi Yitneni Etti Ankri –Avdei Zman Etti Ankri –Yefe Nof

Novelist and playwright, Nava Semel, passed away in December 2017. There are writers that you plan to read and never do, and then, when they pass away, you regret not having read them in their lifetime. Nava Semel is one of these writers.

Her work was the first to address the topic of the so-called “Second Generation”— children of Holocaust survivors. And The Rat Laughed is a five-part novel dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust and the influence of this harrowing chapter of human history; on humanity’s relationship with God; on the understanding of human nature; on the need to forget in order to survive; and on the need to remember, nonetheless.

Here is an excerpt from the novel:

If you were going to hand me over to strangers, why did you bring me into the world?

Where is “there”?

Who’s going to help me with my homework “there”?

Whose bed will I go to “there”?

And who will be with me “there”?

Who else will be “there”?

Why isn’t “there” here?

Text: “And The Rat Laughed” by Nava Semel. Translated by Miriam Shlesinger (Hybrid Publishers 2008)

Links: The Sound of Her Steps The One Facing Us: Ronit Matalon’s Family Album Tale of Two Friends: “Bliss” by Ronit Matalon In Memory of a Life: Aharon Appelfeld’s “The Story of a Life”

Music: שלמה ארצי – בגרמניה לפני המלחמה

The acclaimed and prolific Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld passed away last week at the age of 85, leaving behind 47 published works. This episode honors his legacy with excerpts from his memoir, entitled The Story of a Life.

Here is an excerpt from the memoir:

After the Sabbath meal, we take a stroll to the stream. Grandfather and Grandmother walk ahead, and we follow behind them. At night this branch of the river looks wider. The darkness sinks, and white skies open above us, flowing slowly. I stretch out my hands and feel the white flow coming straight into my palms. “Mother,” I say. “What is it, my love?” The words that I had sought to describe the sensation have slipped away from me. Since I don’t have words I sit there, open my eyes wide, and let the white night flow into me.

Music:

Little Bird (Instrumental) by Imogen Heap

Ronit Matalon's Bliss: A Novel revolves around two friends: Sarah, a politically active photographer, and Ofra, a selfless graduate student. The story is told in flashbacks as Ofra is summoned from Tel Aviv to a provincial township near Paris for a funeral. While there, Ofra, and we, the readers, learn about the collapse of Sarah's marriage.

Here is an excerpt from the novel: 

Sarah closed her eyes in surrender to the music. “It really is unlike anything else,” she said.

Michel and I exchanged glances. She was completely tone-deaf and couldn’t tell the difference between the theme song from the nightly news and Bruce Springsteen, a Hebrew folk song and the overture to Don Giovanni. She heard it all as one cacophonous mess.

“It’s because she has so much inner noise,” Michel explained.

On one of his previous visits a few years earlier, he had accepted an invitation to join her on a tour of Gaza and had endured Channel 2 and Army Radio the whole way.

Text: 

BLISS. By Ronit Matalon. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company, 2003.

Previous Podcasts: 

The Sound of Her StepsThe One Facing Us

Music:  How Deep Is The Ocean - Meredith D'Ambrosio It Might As Well Be Spring - Meredith D'Ambrosio Throw It Away - Abbey Lincoln Giant Steps - Meredith D'Ambrosio

We end 2017 with an infusion of religious, secular, biblical, and sensual registers and sensibilities as we enter the poetic world of Esther Ettinger, curated through the translations of Lisa Katz. The Jerusalem-born Ettinger is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, and a monograph on the Israeli poet Zelda. Text: “Elisha,” translated by Vivian Eden,” “Dynasty” translated by Lisa Katz, “History II,”and “When I Brought You,” translated by Rona May-Ron. See also: Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers, edited by Miriyam Glazer. SUYNY Press, 2000. Music: כל יום מתחילה שנה – עפרה חזה Axcik Girl – The Bridge Project בית הבובות – שנה חדשה

Host Marcela Sulak reads from a folkloric-infused story by the Jerusalem-born writer Dan Banaya-Seri, in which a simple Jewish man uses his minimal understanding of Christmas to try to make sense of his marital obligations.

Text:

“Birds of the Shade,” by Dan Banaya-Seri. Translated by Betsy Rosenberg. In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing. Ed. Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books. 1996.

Music: 

Silent Night by George Martinos

Birds Chirping by Alexander

In honor of the beginning of Hanukkah, host Marcella Sulak reads Etgar Keret’s story “Childish Things”, translated by Sondra Silverston, which takes place during the holiday.

Excerpt:

When Lev heard that he couldn’t burn the curtain, he burst into tears and claimed that in kindergarten, they said that every day you have to light a curtain and eat eight jelly doughnuts. My wife still tried to argue that the only things that gets lit are candles and the exact number of jelly doughnuts to be eaten isn’t specified in the holiday manual. But her flimsy arguments shattered on the armor of our pyromaniac son’s terrifying determination.

Text: “Childish Things” by Etgar Keret. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Tablet Magazine.

Music: Al Hanisim by Izhar Cohen Banu Hosheh Legaresh by LeHakat HaKesher HaVirtuali Ma’oz Tzur by Yosef Karduner

In Yehudit Hendel's story "The Dancer", the narrator talks about life, death, and God with a barefoot man dancing in a park.

Hendel was born in Warsaw in 1926 to a Hasidic family. In 1930, her family immigrated to Israel, and her first stories were published in 1942. She emerged as one of the first female voices in Hebrew literature after Israel's independence in 1948.

Text: “The Dancer” by Yehudit Hendel, translated by Miriam Schlusselberg

Tuvia Ruebner is a poet who was born was born in multi-ethnic Bratislava, Slovakia in 1924 and received permission to enter British Mandate Palestine in 1941. To this day, he translates his work into German, and all of it has been published in Germany. In Hebrew, he is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry, two photograph albums, and a monograph on the poetry of his close friend, writer-scholar Lea Goldberg, as well as other literary criticism and translations.

Text:

Tuvia Ruebner, Late Beauty. Translated by Lisa Katz and Shahar Bram. Zephyr Press, 2017.

Previous episode of "Israel in Translation" featuring poems by Tuvia Ruebner.

Tamar Merin is a writer, critic, and literary scholar. In her story “What Are You Looking At?”, the prosaic act of a mother and son going for ice cream becomes an exploration of the anxiety of immigration, the shock of living in a new land.

Text: “What are you Looking At?” by Tamar Merin. Translated by Ari Leiberman.

Sharon Hass's poems draw on mythical images and on philosophy, reflecting her academic background. Many of her pieces dance on the border between reality, legend and dream, while frequently alluding to figures known from ancient mythology and world literature.

Music: Lonely Arcade Man – Diamond Estate The Video Within – Diamond Estate

Text: Poems by Sharron Hass, translations by Amalia Ziv, Vivian Eden, Lisa Katz.

Set in a Tel Aviv apartment building, Eshkol Nevo’s newest novel, Three Floors Up, examines a society in crisis, through the turmoils, secrets, unreliable confessions, and problematic decisions of the building’s residents.

On the first floor, Arnon, a tormented retired officer who fought in the First Intifada, confesses to an army friend how his obsession with his daughter’s safety led him to lose control and put his marriage in peril. Above Arnon lives Hani, whose husband travels the world for work while she stays at home with their two children, increasingly isolated and unstable. On the top floor lives a former judge, Devora. Retired and eager to start a new life, she joins a social movement, tries to reconnect with her estranged son, and falls in love with a man who isn’t what he seems.

Text: Three Floors Up. Sondra Silverston. Otherpress, Oct. 2017.

Eshkol Nevo’s Homesick Episode

In April, we kicked off a series of conversations with translators of texts featured on this podcast. Today, host Marcella Sulak interviews Michael Kramer for the second installment. He teaches in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. He has authored and edited numerous books and essays on Jewish and American literature and has also translated S. Y. Agnon’s “And The Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.”

Previous episodes: Sitting with Strangeness: A Conversation with Adriana X. Jacobs on Translating theIsraeli-Vietnamese Poet Van Nguyen And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight

Poet, writer, and editor Ya’ara Shehori was awarded the Fulbright International Writing Program and is, as we speak, participating in the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. This means that part of her latest novel, “Aquarium,” has been translated into English by Maayan Eitan.

Interview with Ya’ara Shehori

Tomorrow is the last day of the 2017 high holiday season, which began with Rosh Hashanah and ends with sukkot and Simchat Torah. This year, host Marcela Sulak wraps up the holidays with a selection of poetry from various poets.

Text: “On the Eve of the Holiday,” by Hava Pinhas-Cohen, translated by Sharon Hart-Green, in “Bridging the Divide.” Syracuse University Press, 2015.

“The Illustrated Bible,” by Meir Wieseltier, translated by Shirley Kaufman with the author, in “The Flower of Anarchy: Selected Poems.” University of California Press, 2003.

Music: Dunet by The Bridge Project

This past Shabbat was also Yom Kippur, which is the writer Etgar Keret’s favorite holiday. This week, host Marcela Sulak reads his piece, “Swede Dreams,” originally published in The Tablet, and which you can find in his memoir, “The Seven Good Years,” translated by Sondra Sondra Silverston. It is about Keret’s 2009 visit to Sweden, just before Yom Kippur.

Here is an excerpt:

The Swedes listened and were fascinated. The thought of a day on which no motorized vehicles drive through the cities, people walk around without their wallets and all the stores are closed, a day on which there are no TV broadcasts or even updates on websites–all sounded to them like an innovative Naomi Klein concept and not like an ancient Jewish holiday.

Text: Etgar Keret, “Swede Dreams,” in “The Seven Good Years: A Memoir.” Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, and Anthony Berris. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.

Host Marcela Sulak's daughter, Amalia, gives her top three children's book recommendations for the holidays.

Today’s episode is about the story behind the prayer we most usually associate with Rosh Hashanah, “Unetanneh Tokef.” We don’t know who wrote the poem, although it’s attributed to an 11th century sage who lived in Germany. Modern scholars say the prayer is much older than originally believed, perhaps as early as the 8th century. Host Marcela Sulak explains the legend behind this piece of liturgy from the high holiday services and reads the prayer for the new year.

Music: “ונתנה תוקף” by סא”ל שי אברמסון & המקהלה והתזמורת הפילהרמונית אס.אף.ווי

Text: Unetanneh Tokef (Wikipedia)

Eli Eliahu is a poet who lives in Ramat-Gan. Recently, his work has begun to be translated and published into English. Eliahu’s work can be playful and fanciful, but it is also socially engaged. He has described his poetry as “a documentation of the struggle of the individual against [the] background” of “a very stressed, crowded, violent and noisy country.” Eliahu has published two highly praised books in Hebrew, “I, and Not an Angel” (2008) and “City and Fears” (2011). He is the recipient of the 2014 Levi Eshkol Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize and writes for Haaretz on poetry and culture. Host Marcela Sulak reads six of his poems on today’s episode.

Music: The Joy Of Lina (Farha) by Ihsan Al Munzer Cacha Merakdim Beisrael by Hanna Ahroni

Text: All works by Eli Eliahu “Crossroads” and “Simple Thing,” translated by Kenneth Haworth “Alibi,” translated by Adriana X. Jacobs “Recommendation,” “On How I am Like a Pencil,” and “Under the Ground”

This week, host Marcela Sulak features Israeli poetry from the current issue of a special international journal based in Israel called The Ilanot Review. Each issue is themed, and the current issue is called “Letters.” It covers all aspects of letters, from the alphabet, to the epistolary. The Ilanot Review is edited by alumni and faculty from the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University publishes an expanse of writers in English translation and in English originals.

Music: Avdei Zman by Etti Ankri

Text: Yonathan Berg, “To My Mother,” translated by Joanna Chen Vaan Nguyen, “Metropolitan Pieces,” translated by Adriana X. Jacobs Avraham Sutzkever, Two Poems, translated by Maia Evrona Tahel Frosh, “This is What Happened,” translated by Yosefa Raz Rafi Weichert, “Odyssey,” translated by Karen Alkalay Gut

The Jewish month of Elul began last week, a month of repentance before the High Holidays. This seems a fitting time to read an excerpt of the 11th century Jewish-Spanish poet Solomon Ibn Gavirol’s magnificent poem, “A Crown for the King,” translated by David R. Slavitt. The theme of this poem is human frailty and proclivity to sin, and it focuses on humanity’s place in the world, the operation of free will, and repentance.

Here is an excerpt:

You live, but not in time, for you are time itself. You live, but not by breathing in and breathing out, for you are breath itself. You live, but not with a soul, for you are the source of souls. You live, but not with the life of man that is like vanity and ends      in the ravening of worms and moths. You live, and he who finds you out as you gather him into      your eternal bliss “will eat and live forever.”

Music: Sezufat Semes/Lesoni Bonanta – Shlomo ibn Gabirol “Avicebrón”

Text: Psalm 27 “Solomon Ibn Gabirol, A Crown for the King.” Translated by David R. Slavitt. Oxford University Press, 1998.

These hot weeks of summer, host Marcela Sulak will be suggesting some good beach reading, such as Ofir Touche Gafla’s novel The World of the End, translated by Mitch Ginsburg, and published in English 2015. The book won the 2005 Geffen Award for the best fantasy/science fiction novel of the year and the 2006 Kugel Award for Hebrew literature. Gafla teaches creative writing in the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem.

Music:A Musical Joke K522 by Mozart

Text: Gafla, Ofir Touché. The World of the End. Translated by Mitch Ginsburg. Tom Doherty Associates, 2015.

On today's episode, we’re listening to pieces from Roy "Chicky" Arad. In addition to writing poetry and novels, painting, editing, journalism and activism, Chicky is also a singer and musician. His works are usually political. In 2001, during the peak of Intifadah, he was amongst the founders of the “Rave Against Occupation” assembly, which organized protest-parties of Arab and Israeli youth against the 1967 occupation.

Music:Look at the sky by Roy Arad Sputnik In Love Karaoke Version by Roy Arad

Text: Roy Chicky Arad: Poetry and Literature

Adi Sorek is the author of Sometimes You Lose People (which won the 2013 Goldberg Prize), Internal Tourism, Seven Matrons, Spaces, and new novel, Nathan. Her work is described as subtle and musical, a study in a possibility of lingering in intermediate zones and looking at the tiny details that comprise the reality of being and the fabric of the personal, familial, and public. Host Marcela Sulak reads two pieces of Sorek’s work on today’s episode.

Music: Missing You by The Bridge Project Ocean sounds by mysoundeffect.com

Host Marcela Sulak reads a long poem by Yehezkel Kedmi, called "My People, Knowledge, and Me," translated by Ammiel Alcalay. Kedmi was born in Jerusalem and spent much of his youth and adult life on the streets. He is an autodidact, expanding his range of interests while working as a night watchman at Hebrew University.

Text: Yehezkel Kedmi, “My People, Knowledge, and Me,” translated by Ammiel Alcalay in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1996.

Yael Dayan’s memoir, Transitions: Close Up, translated by Maya Klein, is about losses and regrets, with fine focus on the detailed physical world. Dayan is the oldest child of the late Moshe Dayan, the moody and enigmatic hero of the Six Days’ War, revered as the symbol of the national and military rebirth of the Jewish people, yet reviled as Defense Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur War for Israel’s failures. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the preface and a favorite passage on today’s episode.

Text: Transitions: Close Up by Yael Dayan, translated by Maya Klein. Mosaic Press, Nov. 2016.

Host Marcella Sulak participated in a collaboration with a young, talented poet in Gaza. The collaboration was sponsored by the Peace Factory. Today’s episode is about Israel’s impact on a particular literary endeavor in Gaza. Marcela says, “We felt it was important to get to know one another as people and as poets, not just as ideological issues.” 

Music: My White and Brown Land by The Bridge Project

Daniel Oz’s collection of flash fables, Further Up the Path, is charming for the way they make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. These pieces of prose poetry blend two frames of reference, creating a new world. Host Marcel Sulak reads six poems from Oz on today’s episode.

Text: “Further up the Path” by Daniel Oz, translated by Jessica Cohen.

Music: Stream Noise recorded by Caroline Ford A New World by SS Music Productions 10 Different Voices One Song by The Bridge Project

Eshkol Nevo’s first novel, Homesick, is the engrossing, interwoven story of an apartment community, told from about 8 different first-person perspectives, and a third-person omniscient narrator, as well. The novel was awarded the Book Publishers Association Gold Prize (2005), among other prizes. it was translated by Sondra Silverstein and published in English in 2009. Host Marcela Sulak reads two passages from Homesick on today’s episode.

Text: Homesick by Nevo Eshkol. Translated by Sondra Silverstein. Vintage Books,2009

Music: The Night Brings The Morning by The Bridge Project Nikriz Peşrev by Derya Türkan

Celebrated Israeli author and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon wrote his first novella And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight over 100 years ago. It has been translated for the first time into English by Michael Kramer and is newly published with Toby Press. Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening of this folktale that still bears lessons for us in the modern era. 

Text: And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, by S. Y. Agnon, translated by Michael Kramer. Toby Press, 2017.

Music: Yiddish Hora - A Heymish Freylekhs - The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble Sha, Sha, Di Shviger Kumt - The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble

Part memoir, part fairy tale, and part political commentary and history, Emile Habibi’s Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale opens on a moonless night in the summer of 1983, on a boulder off the shore of what was once al-Zeeb, a Palestinian village north of Akko. The narrator glimpses a mysterious female figure who saves him from death, and in the story that follows, he tries to discover who she is. He calls her 'Saraya,' the flesh-and-blood beloved of his childhood, the daughter his uncle Ibrahim adopted, who shares a name with a fairy tale heroine who was captured by an ogre. Host Marcela Sulak reads three excerpts from Habibi's novel on today's episode.

Text: Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale, by Emile Habibi. Translated by Peter Theroux. Ibis Editions, 2006.

Music: Philip Glass - Island Philip Glass - Closing Philip Glass - Metamorphosis Two

In this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads two pieces from award-winning poet Meir Wieseltier's collection The Flower of Anarchy. His works in this collection, translated by Shirley Kaufman with the author, cover 40 years of history and yet maintain their power over time. Shaped by his early experiences of war and conflict, Wieseltier's voice is bold and unflinching.

Text: The Flowers of Anarchy, Selected Poems by Meir Wieseltier. Translated by Shirley Kaufman with the author. University of California Press, 1997.

Music: Faran Ensemble Musica Judia - The Best Nigun Ever

In honor of the holy month of Ramadan observed by Muslims worldwide, host Marcela Sulak reads an essay by Iman Jmal, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University. Jmal is from Jatt in northern Israel and she writes about preparing a Ramadan meal with her mother, the shopping for which they must travel through a checkpoint.

Here is an excerpt from her story "The Meal":

"When I call upon the soldiers and say that Mom forgot her ID, they get angry. One soldier says "Then go back home and find your mom's ID and she will stay with us until you come again and show us that she is really an Israeli citizen!" My stomach would digest anything in the world but not this sentence. We argue with them for a while and say that they could check on the computer, investigate mom's ID number that she recited to them with a great Hebrew accent, but it is all in vain."

Music: Approaching the Bridge - The Bridge Project Notre Wagon - The Bridge Project

This week Jews celebrate Shavuot, the celebration of harvest and receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. To commemorate the festival, host Marcela Sulak reads from Israeli author Michal Govrin's novel The Name in Barbara Harshav's translation. Shavuot is a corollary to Passover, when Jews begin counting the seven weeks of Omer. In the story, that tradition is mentioned as its main character Amalia, a weaver and daughter of Holocaust survivors, takes refuge in an ultra-orthodox seminary. 

Here is an excerpt from Govrin's novel:

"Sometimes it seems as if nothing had ever happened, as if everything were only a vision going off, evaporating in silence, swept away beyond the border of the end of the Counting, mixing us up together in a wind bellowing from the jaw of the shofar, confusing us in an impeccable unity. As if everything is already so far away from what will be done perhaps at the dawn of hte Shavuot, movements of leaving that will suddenly hasten, binding the pages, lifting the Torah curtain. Going..."

Text: The Name, Michael Govrin. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Riverhead Books,1998.

Music: Csardas - Vittorio Monti

Dorit Rabinyan's All the Rivers is about a Israeli women and Palestinian man who meet in New York. An immediate best seller in Israel, the novel was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by Ha’aretz newspaper and won the Bernstein Award for Literature. In January 2016, the Israeli Ministry of Education banned the book from high school curriculum.

Marcela reads parts of this novel, including this excerpt from :

"“Here’s the thing about me.” He put his right hand on his chest like I had done. “There are three things I don’t know how to do.” “Only three? That’s not bad.” “Three things a man should know.” “Should?” “Yes. A man should know how to drive, and I don’t. I’ve never driven.” “Walla?” I said, expressing my surprise. He grinned as he had on the previous times I’d used Arabic words like walla or achla. I held up my thumb, starting to count his flaws: “You don’t drive.” “I don’t know how to shoot a gun.” Unintentionally, my thumb and finger formed a childish pistol. “Yes . . .” “And swimming. I can’t swim.” He saw my face fall. “I was born and raised in Hebron,” he said as if by way of apology. “There’s no sea there.”"

Text: All The Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Penguin Random House, 2017.

Music: Medjool live on the roof Jimi Hendrix - 12 String Blues

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads poems written by Batsheva Dori-Carlier from her debut collection Soul Search, which won the 2015 Helicon Ramy Ditzanny Prize for emerging authors. Batsheva Dori-Carlier was born in Jerusalem to parents who left Iraq in the 1950s. For 18 years, she worked as a macrobiotics teacher, chef and consultant in Israel, Belgium, Germany and England. Critics say her poetry "lifts life situations into the realm of art.”

Here is an excerpt from Neve Shalom, about an intentional community jointly established by Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa:

"Under an olive tree in Neve Shalom it’s impossible to write “olive tree” without murdering some dove it’s impossible to write “Neve Shalom” without entering into a war. It’s impossible to say “I saw a prickly pear bush this morning on the way to meditation” without quarreling with the thorns that words send beyond their stone walls, ours, whose olive tree is this and why is each leaf so significant, stuck in my mouth like the bitter word of the war that I didn’t start and I can’t end."

In the episode, Batsheva Dori-Carlier also sings a rendition of an Um Kultum.

Text: All poems by Batsheva Dori-Carlier, translated by Lisa Katz, from Poetry International

Music: Umm Kulthum - Enta Omry Umm Kulthum - Alf Leila

For this upcoming Lag B'Omer, the Jewish holiday of light celebrated by lighting bonfires, Marcela reads work by poet Agi Mishol. Here's a glimpse of his very own Lag B'Omer bonfire:

"You piss on my love as if it were a bonfire, extinguishing it ember by ember with the arrogance of the perfect crime..."

One of Israel's most popular living poets, Agi Mishol's work has been described thus by literary scholar Dan Miron:

"In contemporary Israeli poetry, intense, white flames appear against the dark, burning background, whose smoke is greater than the fire… Agi Mishol’s poetry is one of the brightest of these flames."

Texts: “Sermon at Latrun” translated by Joanna Chen “Wax Flowers” translated by Joanna Chen

Further Reading: Look There, translated by Lisa Katz, Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN, 2006

Music: Rivka Zohar - Rabi Akivah (lyrics by Dahlia Ravikovitch) Maya Mishol - Rakavet Tachana

This episode originally aired on May 25, 2016.

This episode originally aired on April 23, 2015. 

This is how Amos Oz, in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, describes what happened the night the UN voted to establish a Jewish state:

"... my father said to me as we wandered there, on the night of November 29, 1947, me riding on his shoulders among rings of dancers and merrymakers, not as though he was asking me but as though he knew and was hammering in what he knew with nails: Just you look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won’t forget this night to your dying day and you’ll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we’re long gone."

As we celebrate Israel's birthday, host Marcela Sulak reads from Oz's iconic description of the events surrounding the struggle for Israeli independence.

Text: Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated by Nicholas De Lange. Harcourt, Inc., 2003.

Music: Ofra Haza - Eli Eli (lyrics by Hannah Szenes) City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra - Hatikvah

On this episode, host Marcela Sulak interviews Adriana X. Jacobs about her work translating Vietnamese-Israeli author Vaan Nguyen. Jacobs is an Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and recipient of a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of The Truffle Eye, Nguyen's debut collection. Sulak and Jacobs discuss Vaan Nguyen's unique life story, the relationship between translator and writer, and Radiohead.

Here is an excerpt from Jacobs' translation of the poem Mekong River:

"Tonight I moved between three beds like I was sailing on the Mekong and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates Under an endless moment looking under the left tit I have a hole and you fill it with other men. Notes of Tiger beer on your body."

Text: “Culture Stain” & “Word Mound”: Drunken Boat “Mekong River”: Gulf Coast “Packing Poem,” Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, edited by Lauren McClung, Cathy Linh Che, and Ocean Vuong, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2017.

Music: Jinsang - Genesis Creep - Radiohead - Brooklyn Duo feat. Escher Quartet Cover Exit Music (For a film) - Radiohead Ru con - Anbu Thanh

Host Marcela Sulak breaks 'Israel in Translation' custom by devoting this episode to Nell Zink's English language novel, Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats. Nell Zink, an American, began a correspondence with Avner Shats after she moved to Israel in 1997. Zink was unable to read Shats' Hebrew, but she resolved to write a book that would mirror his remarkable style. For fifteen years, Shats was the only reader of her literary output. Zink once said, "Avner and I just began writing for each other. The first thing I wrote for him was a novel called Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats. It never crossed my mind anyone else would ever read my writing."

Here is an excerpt from Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats:

"Mary and I went down to the old port to look at Mr. Pickwick. The old port of Tel Aviv, with its dusty cats, scabby dogs, flaking concrete, deep and opaque berths for ghost ships, etc, is surely worthy of treatment in pose-poetry, that bastard child of television. The style of montage, of snapshots succeeding each other, is similar to the way an inexpensive documentary, where the tripod is carried from place to place while the camera is turned off, might be perceived by someone who is not really paying attention. Certain parties I have attended present themselves to my memory with the benefit of similar editing techniques."

Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink’s faux-translation of Shats’s 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ("Sailing Towards the Sunset"). Work by Avner Shats was previously featured on the show.

Text: "Private Novelist," by Nell Zink. Harper Collins Publishers, 2016.

Music: Homeward Bound Instrumental - Simon and Garfunkel The Boxer (Instrumental Cover) - Whalebone

Jews ushered in 8 days of Passover with the Seder on Monday night. The holiday has often been misunderstood throughout the non-Jewish world. On this episode, host Marcela Sulak reads excerpts from S.Y. Agnon's story The Tale of Little Rabbi Gadiel, a bizarre account of Jewish blood libel occurring around Passover. The story is translated by Evelyn Abel and is from the Agnon collection Forevermore & Other Stories, edited by Jeffrey Saks.

Here is an excerpt from The Tale of Little Rabbi Gadiel:

"One day several of the wickedest men of the nations of the world who were envious of Rabbi Gadiel's father came together and said: 'How long will this Jew usurp us and rob us of our livelihood? The time has come to remove him from this world.' One said to the other.' But for fear of the authorities we would swallow him alive.' And one stood and said 'These Jews' Passover is approaching; come let us take a corpse and put it in this Jew's house and say, 'One of ours he killed, for his Matzot he killed, to bake him in blood he killed,' and we will go and call the judges of the town and the elders of the community, and they will arrest him with iron chains and lead him out to be executed, and we will have our revenge on him, and moreover we will have his wealth and divide it amongst ourselves. "

Text: "The Tale of Little Rabbi Gadiel," by S.Y Agnon, translated by Evelyn Abel, Forevermore & Other Stories. Edited by Jeffrey Saks. The Toby Press, 2016.

Music: Itzhak Perlman - Nigun Leonid Kogan - Nigun

Currently out of school for the Pesach holiday, Israel in Translation host Marcela Sulak's daughter Amalia dishes out some reading recommendations to her fellow younger lovers of literature. She clearly knows a good story when she reads one; enjoy!

On this episode, Marcela reads two poems by Israeli poet Almog Behar, called Take this poem and copy it and A Poem for the Jailhouse Prisoners in preparation for Passover. Bahar has published books of poetry, a collection of short stories and a novel. In 2005, he won the Haaretz Short Story Competition for his story; Ana Min Al-Yahoud (I am one of the Jews).

Here is an excerpt from Take this poem and copy it:

"Take this poem and copy it a thousand times and distribute it to people on the city's main street. And say to them I wrote this poem this is a poem I wrote this is a poem I wrote this I wrote this poem I wrote this I wrote this I wrote. Take this poem and put it in an envelope and send it to your heart's desire and include a short letter with it. And before you send it change its title and at the end add rhymes of your own. Sweeten the bitter and enrich the spare and bridge the cracked and simplify the clumsy and enliven the dead and square the truth. A person could take many poems and make them his."

Almog Behar was born in Netanya, into a family of Arabic-speaking Jews, in 1978 and lives in Jerusalem. He studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Text: Almog Behar, Take This Poem and Copy It. Various translators.

Music: Naseer Shamma - Baghdad Night

On this episode, Marcela reads from a collection of S.Y. Agnon's work including folk stories and midrashic tales. It's called Forevermore & Other Stories, and is edited and annotated by Jeffrey Saks, and illustrated by Yosl Bergner. There is an area in Jerusalem known by the Arabic name Abu Tor, meaning "father of the ox."

Here is an excerpt from the story "The Father of the Ox" about the origins of Abu Tor:

"Once upon a time there was an old man in Jerusalem. An old, old man he was, yet as innocent as a child. Now this old man had neither child nor wife, but he had a little house and he had a field and he had an ox. This ox had ample strength and a tender heart. He felt sorry for his owner and used to serve him like a slave serves his master. He would plough his field for him and fetch him up water from the spring; and when it was necessary the old man would hang a basket with money round his neck and would tell him, go to the market and fetch me my food. And the old man wanted for nothing with him. I can only hope that we, too, may never lack for anything either rin this world or the world to come. And the neighbors used to call the old man Abu-Tor, or Father of the Ox, all because of the ox he had."

Text: Forevermore & Other Stories. Sy. Y. Agnon. Edited and Annotated by Jeffrey Saks. Illustrated by Yosl Bergner. Toby Press, 2016

Music: Naseer Shamma - The Moon Fades

On this episode, Marcela reads from Author and poet Hagit Grossman's newest book in Benjamin Balint's English translation, Trembling of the City. The collection consists mostly of intimate portraits of inhabitants of the city, particularly women.

Here is an excerpt from her poem "Sophia":

"All morning she has stolen clothes and given them to the poor. This is what Sophia knows how to do. She being, herself, a very poor woman. She steals clothes from charity shops, but can't stand the bounty in her own closet. She has a conscience. She has a good opinion of herself. She gives them to poor women left out in the cold. She always dreamed of being Robin Hood."

Grossman has been featured on Israel in Translation once before.

Text: Hagit Grossman, Trembling of the City, translated by Benjamin Balint. Shearsman Books, 2016.

Music:Questlove - Goodbye Isaac Mos Def - Respiration Trixcis - Meandering Thoughts

All of Israel celebrated Purim on Sunday, and Monday in Jerusalem. In honor of the festival, host Marcela Sulak reads Raquel Chalfi's work from the recently published collection Reality Crumbs, translated by Tzippi Keller.

Here is an excerpt from her poem "Reckless Love," Blues:

"I was a little reckless, he was a little reckless in a cheap cafe on the eve of Purim, everyone around us with the face to the TV up on the wall. He broadcast to me on a high frequency. I wanted to broadcast low-low but it came out high. I was a little reckless, he was a little reckless."

For information about Chalfi, listen to when she was featured on the podcast once before in 2015. 

Text: Reality Crumbs by Raquel Chalfi. SUNY Press, 2015.

Music:7 Years - Lukas Graham - Violin cover by Daniel Jang Lost Boy - Ruth B - Violin cover by Daniel Jang

Jews everywhere are celebrating Purim this Saturday night, the story of which took place in the ancient Persian Empire. On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads from the essay "Journey to the Land of Israel" by the Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad. The highly controversial essay is based on his two-week long trip to see Israel in 1963.

This is the intro to “Journey to the Land of Israel”:

"Jewish rule in the land of Palestine is a guardianship state and not another kind of government. It is the rule of the Children of Israel’s new guardians in the Promised Land, not the rule of the inhabitants of Palestine over Palestine. The first contradiction arising from the existence of Israel is this: that a people, a tribe, a religious community, or the surviving remnants of the twelve tribes—whatever designation you prefer—throughout history, traditions, and myths suffered homelessness and exile, and nurtured many dreams in their hearts until they finally settled, in a way, in answer to such hopes and in a land neither especially promising nor 'promised.'"

Jalal Al-e Ahmad was born to a religious family in Tehran in 1923. A teacher all his life, he joined the Communist Tudeh Party in 1943. His body of work includes short stories, notably the collection An Exchange of Visits and novels including By the Pen, The School Principal, and A Stone on a Grave. Al-e Ahmad was married to the novelist and translator Simin Daneshvar; the couple had no children. He died in 1969. The book was translated by the Jerusalem-based Samuel Thrope.

Text: The Israeli Republic by Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Restless Books, 2017.

Music:Mohammad Reza Shajarian - Entezar آلبوم کامل رندان مست ـ محمدرضا شجریان

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads poems written by Miri ben Simhon and translated by Lisa Katz. Ben Simhon was born January 13, 1950, in Marseille, France. She was the youngest of three children of Moroccan parents from Fez, born on the family's way to the new state of Israel. In April of that year, the family arrived by boat and was settled in a Jerusalem transit camp. In 1955 the children and their mother moved to permanent housing in the Katamonim neighborhood in the western part of the city, home to many poor immigrants. Her four collections of poetry demonstrates a tremendous grasp of social reality and human power relations.

This is an excerpt from “Girl from the Slums (A Longitudinal Slice)”:

"A dark girl with acne Aliza Alfandari in a place meant for others washes clothes as one who does God’s bidding afterwards she’ll scrub the floor arrange flowers in a vase. Her blouse matches her skirt. She doesn’t care about the spots on her face and covers them with make-up. Her virtues don’t depend on this at all. She fulfills her duties carefully and knows very well who’s right and who isn’t. Sometimes she explodes, but only for good reason, when you consider the fact that so many people don’t know how to behave."

Miri ben Simhon died in 1996, in an auto accident. 

Text: All poems by Miri ben Simhon, translated by Lisa Katz, Poetry International Rotterdam 

Music: Reflection - Thomas Ben Tov Iche - Liebe Articulation - Thomas Ben Tov

On this week's episode, host Marcela reads from Emile Habibi’s picaresque novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessopitmist, translated by Salma K Jayyussi and Trevor LeGassick. The Secret Life of Saeed spans twenty years and two wars (1948 and 1967) and is an account of the life of the Palestinian Arab population which remained in the State of Israel after the mass exodus following each war. Saeed is a comic hero, the luckless fool, who has been compared to Voltaire’s Candide and Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk.

This is an exerpt from “Research on the Origins of the Pessoptimists”:

"When I alighted from the donkey, I found that I was taller than the military governor. I felt much relieved at being bigger than him without the help of the donkey’s legs. So I settled comfortably into a chair in the school they had converted into the governor’s headquarters. The blackboards were being used as Ping-Pong tables. There I sat, at ease, thanking God for making me taller than the military governor without the help of the donkey’s legs. That’s the way our family is and why we bear the name Pessoptimist."

Habibi's poetry was also featured on the podcast in September 2014. 

Text: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, by Emile Habiby, translated by Salma K Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick. Interlink Books, 2003.

Music:Le Trio Joubran - Majâz Le Trio Joubran - Masar

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak takes us on a small excursion to Musrara, a neighborhood in Jerusalem, with poems by Liat Kaplan as our guide. Musrara was founded by upper class Christian Arabs in the late 19th century when people began to live outside the Old City of Jerusalem. During the War of Independence, the residents fled or were expelled. The neighborhood - inhabited by new olim from North Africa -was frequently exposed to snipers until 1967. In 1971, a second generation of Mizrahi Jews founded the Israeli Black Panther movement in the town. Today, the neighborhood is a symbol for the city's complexity and home to a vibrant cultural center.

This is an exerpt from Kaplan's poem On What is Outside the Photograph:

"When photographed, Mussrara is almost composed of the sum of her details, various types of enclosures: asbestos, containers, radiance among leaves, cages, barriers, plants, walls, trees, bushes. Doors, partitions, trapped sun rays, fences and cracks, ramparts, balconies, roofs. Cactuses. And more details: laundry, construction refuse, scaffoldings. Outside the photograph it has no existence. Now, while we look there is no existence outside the photograph."

Liat Kaplan was born on a Kibbutz and currently lives in Tel Aviv. She is the author of six collections of poetry, and her work has been widely anthologized. She frequently collaborates with painters, photographers, and composers. Kaplan has also worked as poetry editor for the Bialik Institute, Helicon, Pardes, Am Oved, and Carmel Publishers. She has worked as director, teacher, and workshop instructor at the Helicon School of poetry.

Text: Reading on Kaplan's poetry About Musrara

Music:Ibrahim Maalouf - Illusions Ibrahim Maalouf - Movement Ibrahim Maalouf - Verdict Between Waters and Waters, Ittai Rosenbaum and Liat Kaplan

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads a selection of Avner Shat's short story, "Figs," which was published in his first book, Printed Circuits in 1994.  Here is an excerpt from the story:

"The years went by, and not a single daughter came to the world. The women were getting older, fewer babies were born, and I was the last girl born here. There is no girl younger than me in the village, no sister nor niece, and today I shall marry a man, and no one is really sure whether to be happy or sad, for no one ever heard of such a thing, not even the army and the other people who came with it, those who wear no uniforms and walk around the village asking silly questions, those who erected a tent like nomads, with bizarre instruments in it, so my aunt says, where they cure people by pricking them or feeding them bitter hard beans, and request you to do odd things and movements and to answer questions about drawings, and even those knowledgeable people have never heard of a wonder such as ours, a place where only males are born."

Text: “Figs” by Avner Shats 

Music:Bill Frisell - Gone Just Like a Train

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads selections of poet Tal Nitzán's book At the End of Sleep. It's an anthology of her poems, translated from the Hebrew by Tal Nitzán, Vivian Eden, Irit Sela, Aliza Raz, and Rachel Tzvia Back. Here is an excerpt from her poem "In the Time of Cholera":

"Facing one another we turn our backs to the world’s calamities. Behind our closed eyes and curtains, both heat and war erupted at once. The heat will calm down first, the faint breeze won’t bring back the boys who have been shot, won’t cool down the wrath of the living. Even if it tarry, the fire will come, many waters won’t quench, etc. Our arms as well can only reach our own bodies: We are a small crowd incited to bite, to cling to each other, to barricade ourselves in bed while in the ozone above us, a mocking smile cracks wide open."

Nitzan’s poems are often concerned with the discrepancies between the domestic and internal world, and the injustice of the exterior world in which the most private bodies are placed. In June 2015 we featured the work of the poet Tal Nitzán. You can find a link to that podcast here.

Text: At the End of Sleep, An Anthology, by Tal Nitzán. Translated by Tal Nitzán, Vivian Eden, Irit Sela, Aliza Raz, and Rachel Tzavia Back. Restless Books, 2014.

Music:Big Lazy - Amnesia Big Lazy - Elephant Walk

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak returns to the work of Ibn Gabirol, one of the outstanding figures during the Jewish Golden Age in Moorish Spain. She reads a new edition of his work called Vulture in a Cage, published in 2016 by Archipeligo Books. The translation by Raymond P. Scheindlin interestingly adheres to Gabirol's original rhyme scheme and rhythm of the Hebrew. Here is an excerpt from one of his poems depicting the relationship between God and the speaker as an erotic relationship:

"Greetings to you, red-cheeked friend, greetings to you from the girl with the pomegranate brow. Run to meet her—your beloved— hurry out to rescue her! Charge, like David, valiant king when he took Rabbah, the city.” He: “Why, my beauty, why just now do you choose to rouse my love, set your lovely voice to ringing like a priest’s robe hung with bells? When the time for loving comes, then you’ll see me hurrying. Then I will come down to you as on Mount Hermon drips the dew."

Born in Málaga in about 1022, Ibn Gabirol joined an intellectual circle of other Cordoban refugees. Protected by Gabirol's patron, whom Gabirol immortalized in poems of loving praise, the poet became famous for his religious hymns in Hebrew. At the time, the customary language of Andalusian literature was Arabic. At 16, he could rightly boast of being world famous.

You can access Marcela's first episode on Ibn Gabirol here.

Text: Vulture in a Cage. Poems by Solomon Ibn Gavirol, translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Archipeligo Books, 2016.

Music:מוכיח רע, סחרוף ברי-- השפתות אדומי רוח שפל לך דודי שלום לך יחידה מה

On this week's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Maya Tevet Dayan. Published in both Rachel Tzvia Back's translation and forthcoming translation by Ayelet Rose, they are Dayan's first poems to appear in English. Born in Tel Aviv, Maya Tevet Dayan grew up in Hod Hasharon and received her Ph.D at Tel Aviv University. Dayan's landscapes, covering childhood to adulthood and parenting, are characterized by attention to time and space. Here is a segment from her poem, Tides.

"Through all the births, through all the women who birthed one another until you were born, This pre-historic fear has now passed on o you, the fear that must never be named. Forming ripples in the dark. You're in the living room, in the empty moon, in abandonment, the child moves in her sleep, the dog is circling the kennel. If ever there was a critical time to caress a dog, that time is now."

Text:

“Sister” and “Hallow’s Eve” in Modern Poetry in Translation, summer issue 2016. Translator: Rachel Tzvia Back Other poems translated by Ayelet Rose Gottlieb for the Hebrew library in Berlin Magazine for poetry and literature.

Music:Megazord - The Megazord Galit Wolf - Hana canaan bederech habait Yehudit Rabich - Shir lala sham בורדו - גשם יורד קורין אלאל - שיר לשירה

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads the work of Yonatan Berg. He is youngest recipient ever to win the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, and his work has only begun to be published in Joanna Chen’s English translation. As Chen points out, Yonatan Berg’s poetry strides the lines that divide this country in so many ways, with honesty and compassion.

"On Sabbath afternoon the air is quiet. We stroll towards the Sephardi synagogue, the hills filled with afternoon and beyond, the Dead Sea shimmers, burning with salt, thick with death. Rabbi Avi Sasson stands before us, his voice filling the curves of the stone with psalms. We sit down. Summer switches off and we give ourselves to the same cave where praises cover the decay of our lives – our parents arguing, journeys through Ramallah, the idea that around us hangs a permanent, burning growl of injustice: the shifting of Israel and Palestine’s tectonic plates."

Yonatan Berg was born in 1981 in Jerusalem to a religious family and grew up in Psagot, a settlement in the West Bank. He served in the Israeli Defense Force and was engaged in the active combat that many of his poems witness.

Text: “After a Night in the Alley of Worshipers” & “Unity,” translated by Joanna Chen, in Lunch Ticket “The Mothers,” translated by Joanna Chen, in Contemporary Works in Translation. Oomph Press

Music:הניגון של הרב שמואל בצלאל אלטהויז Shlomo Carlebach - The Krakow Nigun Shlomo Carlebach - Eso Einai 

Producer: Ariella Plachta Technical producer: Tammy Goldenberg

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads Between Life and Death, the final novel of Yoram Kaniuk, who died in 2013. The celebrated book is a type of auto-fiction in which real life and memoir blend with style and language and humor. It's a stream of consciousness journey that takes place when the narrator, also named Yoram Kaniuk, lies in coma after surgery.

"After these things—after disease and after death and after pain and after laughter and after betrayal and after old age and after grace and love and after a foolish son the heaviness of his mother and a woman of valor who stayed with me in beauty in the abyss—after all that I woke up into a half sleep and stayed there four months. And it was bad and it was good and it was sad and it was lost and it was a miracle and it was what it was and it wasn’t what it wasn’t and it could have been and I recalled it was night. A night sealed up in its night. I spent it in bad dreams and woke up dazed with sleep, I was healthy, in my house at 13 Bilu Street, and suddenly I recalled that at night I’d dreamed of screwdrivers. I had no need of a screwdriver and so I didn’t search and I didn’t find it, but in the place where the screwdriver could have been if there had been one, I found an old map of Tel Aviv, and since the map was already there, I left it and went to drink coffee and I ate a croissant they call corasson here and returned home, to the map, and thought of looking for the street where I lived."

Kaniuk's work was featured on a previous episode, which can be found here.

Text: Between Life and Death by Yoram Kaniuk. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Restless Books, September 2016

Music:Arik Einstein - White City שלישיית קצה השדה - ערב בא Benny Berman & Aharon Shabtai - Life 1959

This week we're broadcasting a timely re-run of a past episode. As Christians all over the world celebrate Christmas, we travel to the Galilee through the eyes of the novelist Anton Shammas, a native of the Galilee. 

In honor of Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus, host Marcela Sulak reads three excerpts from Shammas' novel Arabesques, which has been called, “a history of its author’s youth and the memoir of a family and a fabled region - Galilee.” One of the most striking features of the novel is how the life of Jesus and the miracles of Nazareth are woven into the fabric of daily life. All this against the backdrop of Christmas songs sung by Fairuz, one of the most respected and admired Lebanese singers alive.

Text: Arabesques, by Anton Shammas. Translated by Vivien Eden. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Music:I Believe - lyrics by Ervin Drake, Irvin Graham, Jimmy Shirl and Al Stillman in 1953. Sung by Fairuz. Talj Talja [Snow, Snow] - Fairuz Silent Night - Fairuz

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Hadas Gilad, all translated by Lisa Katz. Hadas Gilad was born in Tel Aviv in 1975. She has published one book of poems, "Each and Every Light," and has translated the poetry of Lalla, a 14th century Hindu mystical poet from Kashmir.

"His lips - a soft gate Yes a hedgerow And I was drawn between them to roar within To be close to his voice To reside like this: In the darkness of the cave To hear the taps of swallowed saliva To hear the birth of each syllable To hear the shouts of joy."

Sociologist and Jungian Analyst Guy Perl notes the influence of Lalla on Gilad's poetry. He says that both poets "attempt to remove the illusion that reality is separate from nature [or] God..." However, he adds, "Gilad doesn't seek to rise above the illusion of reality, but rather to live completely connected to it, revealing its transcendent aspects..."

Text: Tamir Greengerb. “Ode” and “My Grandma Rachel, Age 15” in Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. SUNY Press, 2008.

Music: Rahul Sharma - Maqam-E-Navaa (Sufyana Musiqi)

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads poems about death and dying by Tamir Greenberg, translated by Tzippi Keller and found in Keller's anthology, Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Here is an exerpt from Greenberg's poem My Grandma Rachel, Age 15:

"'Soon, my shadow will strike a small pile of snow, and then I’ll turn fifteen.' 'Sheets,' says the nurse impatiently. 'A pile of sheets.' 'Marius, my love, will come to meet me near the fence of the high-school for girls in Bucharest.' Grandma laughs. I was there already years ago. It was before my shadow refused to freeze on a small pile of snow, and when my love kissed me, his sweet kiss blossomed into my body like a rose petal, and later, in my father’s wine cellars, in the dim wine cellar, Marius threw me to the floor, and when he tore my virginity my right hand truck the tap of a barrel and wine oozed onto the filthy floor.'

Tamir Greenberg was born in Tel Aviv in 1959, and heads the Architecture Department at Shenkar College. Also a playwright, his work has been staged at Habima - Israel's national theater. He has also published two collections of poems: Self Portrait with Quantum and a Dead Cat, and The Thirsty Soul.

Text: Tamir Greengerb. “Ode” and “My Grandma Rachel, Age 15” in Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. SUNY Press, 2008.

Music:Pure Imagination - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dance Me to the End - Leonard Cohen Purple Rain - Prince

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads from David Grossman's newest work, A Horse Walks Into a Bar, which came out in Jessica Cohen's English Translation last month with Jonathan Cape Books in London. The exerpt from the short novel is set in a comedy club in Netanya:

"But until midnight… we will raise the roof with jokes and impersonations, with a medley of my shows from the past twenty years, as unannounced in the advertisements, ‘cause it’s not like anyone was going to spend a shekel to promote this gig except with an ad the size of a postage stamp in the Netanya free weekly. F**kers didn’t even stick a poster on a tree trunk. Saving your pennies, eh, Yoav? God bless you, you’re a good man. Picasso the lost Rottweiler got more screen time than I did on the telegraph poles around here. I checked, I went past every single pole in the industrial zone. Respect, Picasso, you kicked ass, and I wouldn’t be in any hurry to come home if I were you. Take it from me, the best way to be appreciated somewhere is to not be there, you get me? Wasn’t that the idea behind God’s whole Holocaust initiative? Isn’t that rally what’s behind the whole concept of death?” The audience is swept along with him. “Really, you tell me, Netanya—don’t you think it’s insane what goes through people’s minds when they put up notices about their lost pets? 'Lost: golden hamster with a limp in one leg, suffers from cataracts, gluten sensitivity, and almond-milk allergy.' Hellooooo! What is your problem? I’ll tell you right now where he is without even looking: your hamster’s at the nursing home!”

Text: David Grossman, A Horse Walks Into a Bar. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Jonathan ape, London, November 2016.

Music:Yame B'zoret - Matti Caspi Savannah - Medjool Hine Hine - Matti Caspi

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads from Annna Herman's books "Unicorn" and "The Book of Simple Medicines." They are translated by Adriana X. Jacobs, who finds that "In Herman's work, the comfort of rhyme and meter provide a meaningful contrast to the uncomfortable and disquieting tales and images that Herman composes."

"At the end of the blocked path, at the edge of a thick forest, There's a house caught between two flickering flames. Like Red Riding Hood I walk through the dim forest, To my grandmother's house, and the snow falls again. I walk up to the edge of the dead end, to the edge of pain, And under each and every step fear lurks like a wolf. In the gap between the closed window and the shifting drape Churns the story that lives in this house and was sketched On a metal box I once bought - a colorful, peeling case - Telling the tale of the girl with the red cape."

About her own writing, Anna Herman has said "My difficulty is in the possibility of my goal, for example, to use words to express a moan: Mmh-mmh-mmh." Herman has also published a third book, "Hameuchad."

Texts: Poems by Anna Herman, translated by Adriana X Jacobs, from Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:The Sleeping Beauty - Tchaikovsky Little Red Riding Hood - Amanda Seyfried Mhm - Ram Orion

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads from the opening of Yael Neeman's 2011 lyrical memoir about life on kibbutz Yehiam in the Galil. It's called "We Were The Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz," and it came out in October of this year in Sondra Silverston's English translation:

"And they were really the best years of our lives, dipped in gold, precisely because we lived in below-zero temperatures in the blazing heat of an eternal sun. We greeted each new day with eagerness and curiosity. We were wide awake in the morning and wide awake at night. We skipped and ran from place to place, our hands stiky with pine tree resin and fig milk. We were so close to each other, all day and all night. Yet we knew nothing about ourselves."

Yael Neeman was born in Kibbutz Yehiam. She is the internationally bestselling author of two novels, "Orange Tuesday" and "Rumors about Love," as well as a collection of stories, The Option. Neeman was awarded the Prime Minister' Prize for Hebrew Writers in 2015.

Texts: Yael Neeman, "We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz." Translated by Sondra Silverston. Poems and Songs translated by Jessica Cohen. The Overlook Press; 1 edition (October 25, 2016)

Music:Shuv Yotze Ha'Zemer - Hagevatron Yam Ha'Shibolim - Hagevatron Emek Sheli - Hagevatron

On today's episode, resident storyteller Marcela Sulak reads from Yoram Kaniuk's story "The Beautiful Life of Clara Shiato," translated by Ruvik Danieli and found in the anthology 50 Stories from Israel. Clara raises three children in Greece with a man who escaped from persecutions in Turkey, suffers through the second world war in hiding, and finds passage to Israel after the war to live an impoverished life in Tel Aviv:

"She always remembered the hidden fear. When Clara Shiato was twelve years of age, she stood by the window and hung curtains. Before the clowns passed by, on their way to the circus, she saw Shmuel Abuman with his brother. He raised his eyes and saw Clara, and then a strange fear filled her, and her eyes, those bright eyes, grew dark, and she felt as if the blood had drained from her face."

Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930, joined the Palmach at age 17, and published over thirty books. He married a Christian woman and successfully petitioned Israeli courts that his religion be changed from Jewish to no religion, making Kaniuk considered a Jew by nationality but not religion. The verb lehitkaniuk was coined thereafter in reference to this process.

Texts: Yoram Kaniuk, "The Beautiful Life of Clara Shiato," translated by Ruvik Danieli. 50 Stories from Israel. An Anthology. Edited by Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 2007.

Music:Ravel Kaddisch - Yehudi Menuhin Beethoven - Yehudi Menuhin

On today's episode, resident literature guru Marcela Sulak reads from the recently published novel Judas by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange. Perhaps Israel's best-known author, Oz explores the titular apostle alongside Israeli historical narrative told through sensitive young student Shmuel Ash, an elderly man Gershom Wald, and his daughter-in-law Abravanel. Here is an excerpt from his novel:

"Perhaps it really was preferable for what you did here to happen—for tens of thousands to to to the slaughter and for hundreds of thousand to go into exile. The Jews here are actually a single big refugee camp, and so are the Arabs. And now the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the threat of their vengeance. That way apparently you’re all much better off. Both peoples are consumed by hatred and poison, and they  both emerged from the war obsessed with vengeance and soaked in self-righteousness."

Texts: Judas, by Amos Oz. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. Nov. 8, 2016

Music:Ruchi Tlifat - Daoud and Saleh al Kuwaiti Ezra Aharon - Taksim Oud Maqam Bayati 

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Yudit Shahar. Born and raised in the HaTikvah neighborhood of Tel Aviv, she is a special education teacher and mother of two children. She is best known for her concern with economic justice and now lives in Petach Tikvah, Israel.  Here is an excerpt from her poem "Brightness":

"In the house which was really a shack, in the laundry room, on my fingertips, the sourish smell of work clothes as I look in your pocket for sweet dates that have been forgotten. Brightness, you wanted, and you used to raise the antenna the highest in the neighborhood so it could catch disappearing broadcasts from the expanse of the Mediterranean, as far as Izmir and Istanbul."

Texts: Waxwing. Translated by Aviya Kushner.

Music:From the album Meditations - C Lanzbom Erev shel shoshanim Neharot Neharot - Betty Olivero

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Samih al-Qasim. A Druze resident of the village of Rameh in northern Israel, al-Qasim was best known for his nationalist poetry, in which he passionately defended the rights and identity of Israel's Arab minority. Here is an excerpt from his poem "Regardless":

"We are equal—in bread, roses, love, and sin, in desiring the wheat stalk that begot a song. We are equal, the people of my land, And I love you without election, without ballot, without adjustment. I love you by consensus, without question, without argument."

This is part of a "flock poem" - a format in which a series of small poems is written around a theme. Marcela reads more of al-Qasim's flock poetry, and explains the format in more detail.

Texts: All Faces But Mine: The Poetry of Samih Al-Qasim. Translated by Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:Le Trio Joubran - L'Obstinée II; Majâz; Masar

Host Marcela Sulak reads Hebrew poetry from Medieval Spain to mark the Jewish holidays of Sukkot and Simchat Torah. The latter celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of public Torah readings, and the beginning of a new cycle. Thus the reading at the morning service for Simchat Torah is from "Genesis." Here is the end of Yosef Ibn Avitor's poem on the creation of the universe, "Hymn for the New year":

"Who hurls ruin upon the strong lest in cruelty they lash out? Who casts fright across the lion before the Ethiopian gnat? Who brings over the scorpion terror of the spider’s poison? Who sends fear of swallows into the falcon’s eyes? Who established the world’s foundations and set them beneath the skies?"

Marcela also reads Yehuda Halevi's poem "Where Will I Find You," an ofan written for the Simchat Torah morning service. Halevi is considered to be one of the greatest Hebrew poets. He lived in both Muslim and Christian Spain before rejecting its culture of Jewish-Arab hybridization and leaving for the Holy Land in 1140.

Texts: The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492. Translated, Edited, and Introduced by Peter Cole. Princeton University Press, 2007. "Where Will I Find You" by Yehuda Halevi.

Music:Etti Ankri - Mi Yitneni; Avdei Zman; Yefe Nof (all from the album Songs of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi)

Tonight the fast of Yom Kippur ended, so this episode centers on the theme of Yom Kippur. Host Marcela Sulak reads selected poems from Yehuda Amichai's long series Jerusalem, 1967, as well as a section from his long, narrative poem The Last Travels of Benjamin of Tudela, which begins:

"On Yom Kippur, in tennis shoes, you ran. And with Holy Holy Holy, you jumped up high, higher than anyone, nearly up to the angels on the ceiling. And in the circling of Simchat Torah you circled seven times and seven, and arrived breathless. Like pumping iron, you thrust up the Scrolls of the Law, in the Raising Up with both trembling arms so that all could see what was written, and the strength of your arms."

Texts: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited by Robert Alter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015.

Music:Maz Bruch - Kol Nidre Itzhak Perlman & Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot - Kol Nidre

In honor of the Jewish new year - Rosh Hashanah - and the upcoming day of atonement - Yom Kippur - host Marcela reads poems on these themes by some of Israel's most exciting poets. She reads "Origin of the World" by the controversial and provocative young poet Noam Partom, which begins like this:

"I hereby close the gates between my legs till further notice For an unlimited period, due to maintenance. No bearers of first fruit will come No pilgrims will make pilgrimage No prayers made under the empty skies, Not a single butchered sheep is to be offered as a sacrifice Upon my tortured holy altar. The origin of the world was found to be rotten. All men are corrupt. All sexual activity – an abomination."

The podcast also features the poetry of Alex Ben-Ari, a computer engineer who moved to Israel from the Soviet Union when he was three. Plus Marcela reads "A Heart-to-Heart Prayer" by "wordman" David Avidan, a poet who died in 1995 after a long career that had a legendary, liberating influence on the form and content of contemporary Israeli poetry.

Text: Poetry International Rotterdam: "I Ask Forgiveness"; "The Most Important Thing in the World"; "Origin of the World"; "A Heart-to-Heart Prayer"

Music:Michal Tal - Asif Eldad Zitrin - Dai Im Ze Hila Ruach - Ari’e Tatran - My Soul Ghost

As we are in the month of Elul - a month of preparation for the major Jewish holidays - host Marcela Sulak dedicates this week's podcast to poems that give a female insight into the holidays to come: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. All the poems are by Hava Pinhas-Cohen, here is an excerpt from "Follow the Arrow":

"Now in Jerusalem, the Ashkenazi Jews are reciting the Selichot prayers. The Sephardi Jews began three weeks ago, chanting El Malei. Only the lines I left in the margins of pages I keep in drawers confirm that the weeping is long, and that it repeats itself like a Mizrachi song, without resolution, without mercy."

For more information about the fascinating Hava Pinhas-Cohen, listen to our previous podcast "Poetry that bridges the divide."

Text: The Selected Poems of Hava Pinhas-Cohen: Bridging The Divide. Bilingual Edition. Edited and Translated by Sharon Hart-Green. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:Freha Bat Yosef - Face Us In Mercy Matti Caspi - Hine Hine Hagevatron - Unetaneh Tokef Barimatango - Adio Kerida

Last week Muslims celebrated the holiday of Eid al-Adha, which remembers how Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son to God. Muslims believe Abraham's son to be Ishmael (not Isaac, as mentioned in the Bible). In honor of this festival, host Marcela Sulak reads two poems by Mahmoud Darwish. Here is the beginning of "Ismael's Oud":

"A mare dances on two strings—that’s how Ismael’s fingers listen to his blood. The villages scatter like poppies in the rhythm. There’s neither night there nor day. Divine tarab touches us. All points rush towards the elemental Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Everything will begin anew."

["Tarab" is an Arabic term for experiencing ecstasy in music]

Darwish is considered the Palestinian national poet. He was born in a village in the Galilee in 1942. He and his family fled to Lebanon in 1948, and his village was destroyed by the Israeli army. Returning to the newly formed state of Israel a year later, Darwish remained there until 1970, when he left to study at the University of Moscow, before moving to Egypt and Lebanon. When he joined the PLO in 1973, he was banned from reentering Israel. He settled in Ramallah in 1995 and passed away in 2008. Darwish wrote over 20 books of poetry and nonfiction, first publishing in Al Jadid, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, eventually becoming its editor.

Text: Mahmoud Darwish, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Translated by Jeffrey Sacks. Archipelago Books, 2006.

Music:Abdelkarim Dali - Ibrahim El Khalil Le Trio Joubran - Roubama Le Trio Joubran - Hawana Nasser Shamma - From Great Masters of the Oud

Not all literature published in Hebrew in Israel is written by Israelis. Today, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Annabelle Farmelant, an American poet born and raised in Boston who writes in Hebrew. She was living in Tel Aviv when her books appeared with Kiryat Sefer in Jerusalem in 1960 and 1961. Not surprisingly, much of Farmelant's poetry focuses on language and identity. Here is her poem "Builder":

"Though you swam in the sea, you're not like a fish, though you took off in flight, you're not like a bird— The towers of Babel you built wrecked over the man dwelling in the poet's wings. The eagle is proud, the dove is weak and he gropes without a chisel or a brush for the light in the dark."

Farmelant claims that Hebrew came naturally to her as the language of her poetry. However, the Hebraic world of East European Jewish immigrants, among which Farmelant studied, was male dominated. So her only model as a female Hebrew-language poet was Rachel. Sometimes Farmelant appropriated the Greek lyric poet Sappho as a "poetic mother," as Marcela demonstrates in this week's podcast.

Text: Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant. Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs and Yosefa Raz. Edited by Schachar Pinsker. Wayne State University Press, 2016.

Music:Joni Mitchell (instrumentals) - Blue; Little Green Instrumental; I Had A King HaGevatron - Shneinu Meoto Hakfar Susanne Sundfør - The Brothel; Reincarnation

Meir Wieseltier is one of Israel's foremost poets. A winner of the Bialik Prize and the Israel Prize, he has published 13 collections of poetry. In honor of the month of Elul, in which, among religious Jews, the "shofar" horn is blown each day, host Marcela Sulak read's Wieseltier's poem "Wisdom."

"The whole of my wisdom contracts to the bulk of a fly on a bright window-pane, what were mountains and vales are but a scratch on glass."

Marcela reads several other poems by Wieseltier, which tackle life's painful realities, searching for values in the midst of chaos. Wieseltier was born in Moscow in 1941, and immigrated to Israel when he was a child. He grew up in Netanya and, in 1955, moved to Tel Aviv where he has lived ever since.

Text: Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, Tzipi Keller, SUNY Press 2008.

Further reading:Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:Zohar Argov - Lihiot Adam Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, Op.30 no.1 in E flat Major Ernest Bloch - From Jewish Life (Part 3) Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, Op.19 no.6 in G Minor Ernest Bloch - From Jewish Life (Part 2)

The Secret Book of Kings, the fifth of Yochi Brandes' six novels, appeared last week in English translation. It's the first of the best-selling writer's novels to be translated into English. Brandes retells the stories of the House of Saul and of the northern Kingdom of Israel, stories that were artfully concealed by the House of David and the scribes of the southern Kingdom of Judah. Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from the first part of the novel, narrated by the child Shelomoam.

"The Judeans refuse to accept the superiority and leadership of the tribe of Joseph. Sometimes they use force against us, like when Caleb ben Jephunneh tried to rebel against Joshua, and at other times they use stories."

"Stories?" I asked with wonder. "But stories aren’t weapons."

Mother answered with a grave expression on her face that stories are more dangerous than swords. Swords can only harm those standing right in front of them, while stories determine who will live and who will die in future generations.

Brandes was born in Haifa to a family of Hasidic rabbis. She taught Bible and Judaism for many years. She has been awarded the Book Publishers Association's Platinum Book Prizes for seven of her books, including the Hebrew edition of The Secret Book of Kings.

Text: The Secret Book of Kings, by Yochi Brandes. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. St. Martin’s Press, August 23, 2016.

Music: Michael Levy - Reconstructed Ancient Egyptian Melody Peter Pringle - The Lyre Of Meggido Chilly Gonzales - Train Of Thought

Producer: Laragh Widdess Technical producer: Alex Benish

Yiftach Atir’s novel, The English Teacher, is newly appeared in English translation this year. Host Marcela Sulak reads some excerpts from the book, including Atir's opening note:

"The book you are holding in your hands is the true story of what never happened. This is the story of a Mossad operative. She and others like her operate alone for extended periods of time, deep in enemy countries. Unlike their front-line soldier counterparts, these secret soldiers are armed with nothing but a foreign passport, a fake identity, extensive training, and inexplicable courage."

Atir was born in 1949 on a kibbutz in the south of Israel. As a young military officer, he participated in Operation Entebbe as well as other, still-classified, military and intelligence operations. The English Teacher is the third of his four novels.

Text: The English Teacher by Yiftach Atir. Translated by Philip Simpson. Penguin Books, 2016.

Music: Rami Fortis - Shkiata Shel HaZricha Alberto Iglesias - "George Smiley" (from Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy OST) Dick Hyman - Theme from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Host Marcela Sulak reads the short story "Mosquito" by Roy Chen. Set in Tel Aviv on the city's "White Night," it follows an author and his girlfriend as they make their way to an evening of literary readings at a local café-bookstore:

"Tel Aviv grinned like a little girl with tooth decay while she puffed on a pipe held in the corner of her mouth. Cars honked, ice cream dribbled, dogs peed on sycamore trees. City flags flew atop balconies. Fireworks were launched into the sky from the beach, lighting up all the air-conditioners, antennas, and solar water heaters that clung to the buildings like leeches."

Chen's "author," who is supposed to be reading his work at the event, has been on edge from the start. Inside the claustrophobic café he must endure bad poetry and even worse conversation... until he loses his patience.

Text: "Mosquito" by Roy Chen, translated by Jessica Cohen in World Literature Today, Vol.89, No.3/4. May-August 2015.

Music: The Dave Brubeck Quartet - For All We Know; Southern Scene; King For A Day

"This is the chronicle of the city of Buczacz, which I have written in my pain and anguish so that our descendants should know that our city was full of Torah, wisdom, love, piety, life, grace, kindness, and charity."

So begins Shai Agnon's epic story cycle entitled A City in Its Fullness - a literary memorial to the city of his birth, now called Buchach in Western Ukraine. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Agnon's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature (Agnon is the only Hebrew language writer ever to receive the prize), and in honor of the upcoming Jewish fast of Tisha b’Av, host Marcela Sulak reads from a story in this cycle called "Pisces." It's about a householder called Fishl Karp, a portly man who loves food and gets distracted on his way to the synagogue one morning:

"He met a fisherman with his net coming from the Strypa. He was stooped under the weight of the net, and the net was shaking itself and its bearer. Fishl looked and saw a fish quivering there in the net. In all his days, Fishl had never seen such a large fish. When his eyes settled down after seeing the new sight, his soul began to quiver with desire to enjoy a meal made from the fish. So great was his appetite that he didn’t ask how such a stupendous fish had found its way into the waters that do not produce large fish. What did Fishl say when he saw the fish? He said, 'The Leviathan knows that Fishl Karp loves large fish and sent him what he loves.'"

Hear more about Agnon's life and work in our previous podcast "Only Yesterday."

Text: "Pisces." Translated by Jeffrey M. Green in A City in Its Fullness by S. Y. Agnon. Edited by Alan Mintz and Jeffrey Saks. Toby Press, 2016.

Music: The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble - Doyna And Sirba Populara; Sweet Home Bukovina; Mazltov; A Hora Mit Tsibeles

Shai Agnon is the only Hebrew-language writer to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Agnon being awarded the prize, Toby Press has been releasing Agnon's work in English translation. Today, host Marcela Sulak reads from Agnon's introduction to the "Book of the State," one of his little-known political satires.

"... The State is a metaphysical concept rendered into something physical which feigns meta-physicality. When you attempt to approach it as a meta-physical entity it slips back into physicality; if one considers it in physical terms it suddenly reverts into meta-physicality."

In this introduction, we see the role Agnon envisioned for himself as someone standing at the crossroads - a traditional figure between eastern European traditional Orthodoxy and modern Israeli life.

Text: "Introduction," translated by Sara Daniel, in The Orange Peel and Other Satires. S. Y. Agnon. With annotations and a foreword by Jeffrey Saks. Toby Press, 2015.

Music: Avishai Cohen Trio - Dreaming; Beyond; Variations in G Minor

It's summer holiday season, and most of us will probably be asked when we arrive at the airport, "Did you pack it yourself?" - referring, of course, to our luggage. Israeli poet Orit Gidali answers her interrogation like this:

"Of all the questions to ask: Did you pack it yourself? Yes, by myself. It was hard, I said, but it is harder to fear that it will never come. I am not beautiful, you see, and the heart is the size of a fist."

Today's podcast features the newly-released collection, Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, translated and introduced by none other than our host Marcela Sulak. Gidali's poetry appears to focus on domestic issues like airport questions and Shabbat preparations, but Marcela explains that she's actually reworking the geopolitical on an individual scale. Gidali has published three collections of poetry, as well as a children's book.

Text: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, translated by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas Press, 2016.

Music: Eshet Chayil (Traditional) Keren Peles - Shir LeAsaf Philip Glass - Metamorphosis 1

Today, host Marcela Sulak reads the work of Tel Aviv-based poet Tahel Frosh. Her debut poetry collection, from which these poems have been chosen, was published in 2014. Translator Adriana Jacobs calls it one of the most urgent and political books of poetry published in recent years. Here is an excerpt from "The Mountains of Spain":

"All of this is so impossible that it holds back thoughts of love and lust and my will to breathe the air after rain so much that I’ll lose myself in a book called Cocaine Nights and get mad when I read about people with money, so much money that they retire to the mountains of Spain and sunbathe in fancy villas at the age of thirty-eight."

Frosh’s stunningly crafted poems, which include a number of prose poems, offer a critique of Israel’s free-market economy, the housing crisis, and globalization through the perspective of Israel’s working class. She has degrees in law and psychology, and is currently working on a doctorate in literature. She co-edited the anthology Avodat Gilui ("Unveiling Work") and is a member of the art and social justice collective Cultural Guerrilla.

Texts: “The Mountains of Spain,” and “Accountant,” translated by Adriana X Jacobs in World Literature Today.

Music: Tahel Frosh - Shirey Zman Maya Belzitsman & Matan Efrat - Yafa Kalevana (orig. by Evyatar Banai) Tahel Frosh - Shir Tshuka

Host Marcela Sulak reads from the novel Death of a Monk by Israeli novelist and playwright Alon Hilu. It's an innovative retelling of the 1840 Damascus Affair, a blood libel against the Jewish community of Damascus, from the perspective of Aslan Farhi, a young Damascene Jew who ends up being at the center of the blood libel accusations.

"My happy friend, while I impart the these words to you, and as you record them with your industrious fingers and with expression in your large brown eyes, I would ask your indulgence in reviving for a few moments the former, innocent image of Aslan, the image of a hollow-cheeked youth, whose days were as roses, plagued by persecution at the hands of members of his household."

Published in 2006, Death of a Monk won the President’s Prize for debut novel. Hilu's second novel, The House of Rajani, was published in English in 2010.

Text: Death of a Monk by Alon Hilu, translated by Evan Fallenberg. Harvill Secker, 2006.

Music: Derya Türkan - Nikriz Peşrev Traditional - Üsküdara Giderken Rifat Bey - Prayer for Sultan Murad V Sultan Abdulaziz - Hicazkar Sirto

Today, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Mei-Tal Nadler, whose work distorts and defamiliarizes the Israeli locale in ways that are political, lyrical, and alarming. This is the beginning of "The Voices of Snipers on the Israel Defense Forces Radio Station*":

"The voices of snipers can’t be heard over the radio waves of the IDF Station. But they chose songs for us before they left. What songs do snipers like? I focus all my listening on their musical choices, till my focus becomes a gaze. Perhaps that’s how snipers are trained..."

Nadler received the 2014 Teva Prize in Poetry and the 2008 Ministry of Culture award for emerging poets. Her debut collection, "Experiments in electricity," was published in 2013. She is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University and a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.

Text: Three poems by Mei-Tal Nadler in World Literature Today, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back.

Music: Rockfour - Avshalom Vaadat Charigim - Ein Li Makom Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack ABBA - The Winner Takes It All Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

Last week we featured Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s latest book, Waking Lions. This week, host Marcela Sulak reads from Gundar-Goshen’s first novel, the Sapir Prize-winning One Night, Markovitch. The novel opens on the eve of World War II, with a group of young men setting out from Mandate Palestine to participate in fictitious marriages with Jewish girls who wish to escape Europe and reach the Jewish homeland, then under British rule.

"He felt Sonya’s entrance into the room before he saw her, because over the last six weeks he had learned to pick out the smell of oranges even on a busy street. Therefore he had several seconds to compose himself before turning around and facing her in her ordinary blue dress, part of a sweet routine that was not his."

Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982, and she has already achieved great success in writing for television and film.

Text: One Night, Markovitch, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Pushkin Press, 2015.

Further reading: Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Pushkin Press, 2016.

Music: Khavurat Renanim - Shir HaNamal Benny Goodman - Wang Wang Blues Benny Goodman - One O'Clock Jump Shepheard's Hotel Jazz Orchestra - Where Or When Fred Astaire - Cheek To Cheek

Host Marcela Sulak reads from Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's novel Waking Lions, published in English translation in March 2016. The opening of the novel describes the moment when Dr. Eitan Green, who has just come off a 19-hour shift at Beer Sheva Hospital, has an accident...

"He is thinking that the moon is the most beautiful he has ever seen when he hits the man. For the first moment after he hits him he’s still thinking about the moon, and then he suddenly stops, like a candle that has been blown out."

Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982. Her film scripts have won prizes at international festivals, and Waking Lions is her second novel.

Text: Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Pushkin Press, 2016.

Further reading: One Night, Markovitch, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Pushkin Press, 2015.

Music: Mike Patton - Contrapositive (The Solitude of Prime Numbers OST) Mike Patton - Weight of Consequences (The Solitude of Prime Numbers OST) Ennio Morricone - Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri (Cuore Di Mamma OST)

When Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City was first published in 1992, the French paper "Le Monde" declared that "Kafka has finally arrived in Tel Aviv." Host Marcela Sulak reads two excerpts from Castel-Bloom's remarkable novel, which was translated into English by Dalya Bilu in 2010.

"First of all, I decided I would inoculate the child against as many diseases as possible. I ran outside to buy vaccines against tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, measles, jaundice, scarlet fever, small pox, influenza, etc., and I gave them to him all at once—though I knew you shouldn’t do this. I couldn’t stop myself, I couldn’t control my maternal instinct. The child reacted immediately with a high fever and convulsions..."

Dolly City has been included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, and in 1999 Castel-Bloom was declared one of the 50 most influential women in Israel.

Hear our previous podcast on Orly Castel-Bloom's short story "Heathcliff."

Text: Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.

Music: Proud - You're My Dream Cliff Martinez - Ask Him Why He Killed My Brother (Only God Forgives OST) Cliff Martinez - Wanna Fight (Only God Forgives OST)

Poet, choreographer, and dance critic Hezy Leskly was born in Israel in 1952 to Czech Holocaust survivors. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the only collection of Leskly's poetry to be translated into English, Dear Perverts, translated by Adriana Jacobs. Here is the beginning of the poem "I’m six, on a walk with my parents, Saturday late afternoon":

"My father—the hammer poised above the plate, My mother—the snake of love, And I—a girl with a dick; We set out on the path traced with my tongue. When I tried to eat from the plate at the edge of the path, the hammer struck the fingers of my left hand, and the snake of love smiled and commanded: “Shpatzirn!”"

Leskly studied photography and dance, and at 22 he settled in the Netherlands, where for seven years he studied multi-media. He returned to Israel in 1980, where for the next ten years he worked as dance critic for a Tel Aviv weekly.

If you want to hear more Leskly, come to Bar-Ilan University on Monday, May 30, where you can hear Adriana Jacobs read these translations at the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing international conference.

Texts: "I am Six, Traveling with My Parents, Late Saturday Afternoon"; "Biography of the Deputy Manager of a Brush Factory" - Poetry International Rotterdam "The"; "Reuben and I" - The Ilanot Review

Music: Yehoram Gaon - Yesh Makom Ronen Shapira - HaHiyuch (lyrics by Hezy Leskly) Yonatan Levital & Hila Ruach - Lo Esa LeParis (lyrics by Hezy Leskly) The Djamchid Sisters - Shiur Ha (lyrics by Hezy Leskly)

Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from David Grossman's most recent novel, Falling Out of Time, which is partly a folk tale, partly a play, and partly a novel in verse. In the story, a man known as the "walking man" sets off in search of his dead son, pacing in ever-widening circles around his village and picking up other villagers who've lost their children along the way, like a Pied Piper of bereavement.

"TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: As they commingle, so two rivers flow into my confluence. I did not know, not this way, that life in all its fullness is lived only there, in borderland. It is as though I never yet have lived, as though all things  that happened to me never really were, until you—

WALKING MAN: And he is dead. I understand, almost, the meaning of the sounds: The boy is dead. I recognize these words as holding truth. He is dead, he is dead. But his death, his death is not dead."

Falling Out of Time can be said to be a strange sort of sequel to Grossman's previous book, To the End of the Land, which we featured on the podcast in April 2015. Grossman was working on the final draft of that book when his son, Uri, was killed on the last day of the Second Lebanon War.

On May 29 at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing Conference, Grossman will read from "Falling out of Time," and Marcela will interview him. The event is free and open to the public.

Text: Falling Out of Time by David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen, Vintage International, 2014.

Music: Buttering Trio - What Is Madness Ernest Bloch - Schelomo (from Rhapsodie Hebraique) Max Bruch - Kol Nidrei, Op. 47

Agi Mishol's latest book of poetry, Less Like a Dove, is published in English translation this month. Host Marcela Sulak reads a selection of poems from the collection, including "Holocaust, Remembrance, Independence" in honor of Israeli Independence Day, which begins tonight.

"How we flew – Not from Gadera to Rehovot or up the Castel en route to Jerusalem, like in those dreams, but outside of the stratosphere: My father, myself and that blurry one called Agnes, who in nineteen fifty changed her name to Agi, and since then this hollow girl has tailed my father, who was her father as well."

Agi Mishol was born in Transylvania, and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel in 1950. She lives in an agricultural community and directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv, where she teaches creative writing.

Hear our Lag B'Omer podcast featuring Agi Mishol from May 2015.

Hear last year's Independence Day podcast featuring Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness."

Joanna Chen will launch her translations of Mishol at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing Conference, which lasts from May 29-31. It will feature David Grossman, Agi Mishol, and Matti Friedman, along with several other international writers and translators.

Text: Less Like a Dove by Agi Mishol. Translated by Joanna Chen. Shearsman Press, 2016.

Music: Army Orchestra - IDF March Yehezkel Raz - en si bémol HaAchim VeHaAchiot - God Pities Kindergarden Children Podington Bear - LaDiDay Noa Fort - HaSod (lyrics by Agi Mishol)

In honor of Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel - host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Paul Celan, including his famous "Death Fugue":

"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped"

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitcz in 1920. The death of his parents in the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in a Romanian work camp are the defining forces in his poetry and use of language. Celan wrote in German. According to Pierre Joris, who translated Celan’s later poetry, he "harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through a “dismantling and rewelding” of German."

Texts: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. W.W. Norton & Co. 2001 Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Press, 1995.

Music: Felix Mendelssohn - Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, op.35 no.1 Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.19 no.6 in G Minor Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.30 no.6 in F Sharp Minor

Today’s Passover-themed podcast is taken from Robert Alter’s new edition, The Poems of Yehuda Amichai. Host Marcela Sulak reads excerpts from Amichai’s long poem “Gods Change, Prayers are Here to Stay.”

"I declare with perfect faith that prayer preceded God. Prayer created God, God created human beings, human beings create prayers that create the God that creates human beings."

Listen to last year's Passover podcast, with more Amichai and more information about the holiday of Passover.

Text: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited by Robert Alter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015.

Music: Ernst Toch - Cantata Of The Bitter Herbs Mendy Portnoy - Pesach Piano Medley

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian born and raised in Israel, has a lot to say about the importance of stories and the written word. His latest book to be translated into English is a collection of weekly columns that first appeared in Haaretz newspaper. They’ve been translated by Ralph Mandel into a collection called Native. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the final essay in the collection, in which Kashua contemplates his past as the family prepares to move from Israel to the US.

“Don’t come in,” my daughter shouted angrily when I knocked at her door.

I went in anyway. I sat down next to her on the bed and despite her back turned to me, I knew she was listening. “You hear?” I said before I repeated to her exactly the same sentence my father said to me when he left me at the entrance to the best school in the country twenty-five years ago. “Remember, whatever you do in life, for them you will always, but always, be an Arab. Do you understand?”

Kashua spent last year teaching in Chicago, and it's possible that his move to the US will be permanent. Hear more about him in this previous episode of Israel in Translation.

Text:Sayed Kashua, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life. Translated by Ralph Mandel. New York: Grove Press, 2016.

Further reading:Let it Be MorningSecond Person SingularDancing Arabs

Music:Dudi Levi - Mahar Ani OzevMira Awad - Yousef (by Mahmoud Darwish)Mira Awad - Olakatuna (by Mahmoud Darwish)Amal Murkus - On This Earth (by Mahmoud Darwish)

This week, we feature a new collection of stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, Vilna My Vilna. Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from “Chana-Merka, the Fishwife,” which follows the beginnings of the Max Weinreich Yiddish Institute, today called YIVO and housed in New York. Then in Vilna, Chana-Merka would meet with Dr. Weinreich to hand over lists of "Yiddish pearls" - Yiddish phrases and expressions to be recorded for posterity. Here are some of the Vilna curses Chana-Merka submits to Weinreich:

"May you get a piece of straw in your eye and a splinter in your ear and not know which one to pull out first.

How long do you think she’ll be sick? If she’s going to lie in bed with a fever for another month, let the month last five weeks.

May a fish ball get stuck in your throat.

They should call a doctor for you in an emergency and when he arrives, they should tell him he’s no longer needed."

Karpinowitz was born in 1913 in Vilna, Lithuania, a city long considered the cultural and intellectual center of Jewish Europe. He arrived at the new state of Israel from a Cypriot displaced persons camp in 1949, and for the next three decades he was the manager of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. He died in 2004.

Text:Vilna My Vilna by Abraham Karpinowitz. Translated by Helen Mintz. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:Anonymous - Mein Shtetl Belz, 1928Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - KazimierzNigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - Jovano Jovanake

Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from Sarit Yishai-Levi's best-selling novel The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, recently published in Anthony Berris’s English translation. The novel spans four generations of Sefardic women whose family traces its history in Israel to the Spanish expulsion, and the story centers around the family’s stall in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem.

"Gabriel returned to the shop. He despised the British more every day. He couldn’t stand their haughty presence as they walked through the market in groups in their pressed uniforms, as if they were the lords of the land. Some had come to Palestine from remote villages, simple country boys who’d shoveled cow shit in their English villages, and here in Palestine they behaved as if each of them was the son of the King of England."

Sarit Yishai-Levi, a journalist and author, was born in Jerusalem in 1947 to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for seven generations. She has published four non-fiction books, the first of which is The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which received the Publishers Association's Gold and Platinum Prizes (2014) and the Steimatzky Prize for best-selling book of the year (2014). It is now being made into a feature film.

Text:The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem by Sarit Yishai-Levi. Translated by Anthony Berris. St. Martin’s Press, 2016.

Music (all mentioned in the novel)

Yehuda Amichai is probably the best known Israeli poet in the world. Today, host Marcela Sulak celebrates the recent publication of Robert Alter’s The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai - the largest collection of Amichai’s poetry published in a single volume to date. Alter claims that a complete edition of Amichai’s poetry would be three times larger.

Marcela reads from the end of an epic, autobiographical poem “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela”:

"The players sat inside, the talkers on the verandah:half my love, my left hand, a quarter of a friend,a man half dead. The sound of the killed piecestossed into the wooden box is like distant thunder, heralding evil."

Text:The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Music:Shimon Bar - Masa'ot Binyamin MiTudelaAlbioni - Adagio in G Minor

In the Bus/Purim Eve:

"Little kids in costume giggle happilyreal flower childrenand Margalit Tzan’ani sings'The Honey in the Groove'"

Today, host Marcela Sulak takes an unusual approach to Purim, reading excerpts from Tikva Levi’s "Purim Sequence," translated by Ammiel Alcalay. We intersperse the first parts of Levi's poem, a Purim bus journey, with excerpts from Itzik Manger’s "Songs of the Megillah" — a retelling of the Purim story in the Book of Esther. Tikva Levi was a feminist activist Mizrahi Jew, born in Ashkelon of Iraqi parents. She died in 2012, at the age of 52. Her life was devoted to the educational rights of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

Text:Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1996.

Music:Songs of the Megilla - Itzik MangerNafas - Rabih Abou-Khalil

Among the excellent new Israeli books to have appeared in English translation in 2015, is Else Lasker-Schüler’s collected poems, My Blue Piano. Host Marcela Sulak reads several poems from the collection, including the title poem:

"At home I have a blue piano,I, who cannot play a note.

It stands in the gloom of the cellar door,now that the whole world has grown coarse..."

Born in Germany in 1869, Lasker-Schüler became a leader of Berlin's Expressionist movement, coining the name "Blue Rider" for her friend Franz Marc's famous school of painting. A few months after receiving one of Germany's highest literary honors, she was assaulted in the streets by the Nazis at the age of 63. After fleeing to Switzerland and Alexandria, she settled in Jerusalem. She died of heart failure before the final defeat of the Nazi regime.

Text:My Blue Piano by Else Lasker-Schüler. Translated by Brooks Haxton. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music (all lyrics by Else Lasker-Schüler):Maya Amir - Mein Blaues KlavierGalia Shargal - ImiElinoar Moav - Bo Elai BaLeil

Host Marcela Sulak reads from the opening of Orly Castel-Bloom’s short story, “Heathcliff,” in which a young girl’s crush on the literary figure, Heathcliff, follows her about the city of Tel Aviv. In Castel-Bloom’s signature narrative style, it is difficult to tell reality from imagination, and the results are menacing.

“Smadar trailed along Ibn Gvirol Street. The taste of the cigarette was bitter. She looked around to make sure that nobody could see her and spat a big gob onto the pavement. When she raised her eyes, she turned red. Two eyes were watching her. They were Heathcliff’s eyes. Green, slightly slanting and focused on her…“

Castel-Bloom was born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to parents originally from Egypt. A leading voice in Hebrew literature, she currently teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv University. Her post-modern classic, Dolly City, has been included in UNESCO’s Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 as one of the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel.

Text:Orly Castel-Bloom, “Heathcliff,” translated by Dalya Bilu, 50 Stories from Israel: An Anthology. Ed. Zisi Stavi.

Further reading:Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City, translated by Dalya Bilu. Dalkey Archive 2010.

Music:REO – Bemakom AcherDesire – Under Your SpellEmily Karpel – Hey!

In May 2000, the IDF withdrew from Southern Lebanon and Beaufort Castle, which Israel had held since 1982. Host Marcela Sulak reads from Ron Leshem's novel called "Beaufort" in the English translation (the Hebrew title translates as "If there is a Heaven"). It is written as the diary of Liraz Liberti, the twenty-one-year-old head of a thirteen-man commando team stationed at Beaufort during the last winter of Israeli occupation.

"...We carried out a comprehensive search, circled the place to determine whether terrorists had beaten a path in through the undergrowth, and which route they’d chosen to booby-trap the target. We unrolled white marking tape wherever we walked in order to know where we’d already been. It was hot and sticky out. The sun had come up too fast. It took us half an hour to complete the first half-circle..."

Leshem's novel was made into a film in 2007, directed by Josef Cedar and co-written by Cedar and Leshem. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was a nominee for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Beaufort was Ron Leshem’s first novel, and it won the prestigious Sapir Prize.

Texts:Beaufort by Ron Leshem. Translated by Evan Fallenberg. The Delacorte Press, 2008.

Music:Ishai Adar - "Beaufort" Original SoundtrackEviatar Banai - Avot Ubanim

The novelist Ronit Matalon has a new novel published just months ago in English translation, The Sound of Our Steps. Host Marcela Sulak reads an extract from the novel, in which the narrator recalls the nightly ritual of hearing her mother's steps leading up to her dramatic entrance to the house:

"What did she put on her feet back then, which shoes, or to be more precise, how did she prepare for battle, how, with what? That sense of purpose she had, to the last detail, the sacred air of purpose, how she loved what was useful, necessary."

To find out more about Matalon, born in Israel in 1959 to a family of Egyptian-Jewish descent, listen to The One Facing Us: Ronit Matalon’s family album, recorded in November 2015.

Texts:Ronit Matalon, The Sound of Our Steps. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Henry Holt & Co., 2015.

Music:Rivka Zohar - HaBayit Leyad HaMesilaSchubert - String Quintet in C (Adagio)Chava Alberstein - Pgisha LeEin Kets

Today host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Ahron Almog, a poet, playwright, and novelist who was born in Tel Aviv in 1931 to a Yemenite family. His grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine with the "Ahaleh BeTamar" operation (1881-1882), was among those who established the Yemenite Quarter ("Kerem HaTemanim") in Tel Aviv, where Almog was born.

"Yemenites from the transit camp came to my grandfather’s housesat and kept silentwhile one sang the other waitedso I was raised between howlingand silence..."

Almog graduated from the Mikve Yisrael Agricultural School and Tel Aviv University, and taught Hebrew literature at a Tel Aviv high school. He is married to the novelist Ruth Almog, and they have two daughters. One of them, Eliana, suggests we consider her father as a poet of quiet protest.

Texts:By Ahron Almog: "On the Silence of the Yemenites"; "About My Mother"; "I Have a Longing"; "The Donkeys Have Disappeared"; "Not Coconut"By Eliana Almog: "My father, the protest poet"

Music:Aharon Amram - Ayin VelevAhuva Ozeri - Shanim ShanimAhuva Ozeri - Mahar Azil Dim'aAharon Amram - Ya TayriShai Tsabari - Me'alai Dmama

Yesterday was the last day in the Hebrew month of Shvat, in which the holiday of Tu B'Shvat - the Jewish new year for trees - is celebrated. So today, host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from Ruth Almog’s story, “After Arbor Day,” which is set during Tu B'Shvat.

"I saw boys and girls all over the mountainside with spades in their hands, planting saplings in basins of loose soil. When I planted my own little sapling and tightened the soil around it, black earth stuck to my fingers. “Will my sapling live?” I asked myself. An inexplicable dread suddenly took hold of me."

Ruth Almog was born in 1936 in Petah Tikva, Mandate Palestine, to parents who immigrated from Hamburg in 1933. She has been deputy editor of the literary section of the daily Haaretz, and writer-in-residence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is married to the poet Aaron Almog, who will be featured on next week’s podcast.

Texts:Ruth Almog, “After Arbor Day,” translated by Dalya Bilu. 50 Stories from Israel: An Anthology. Ed. Zisi Stavi.

Music:Chava Alberstein - Etz HaKochavimShir HaIlan - Music by Mordechai Ze'ira, lyrics by Raphael SaportaHaAchayot Shemer - BeGani Neta'aticha

Today, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Anat Levin, who was born in Israel to a mother of Russian descent from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and a father from Kornitz, Belarus. Her debut book of poems, Revolving Anna, was published in 2008, and won the Ministry of Culture Award for Poetry that year. Here is an excerpt from the poem "Oh Mother":

"And it was said:honour thy father and thy motherand they will honour you with twice as much spankingand with two good blows on the backsideso that thy days will be longand pleasant upon the earthand aching under the blankets..."

A graduate of the film and television department at Hunter College in New York, Levin worked for many years as a commercial writer for a large law firm in Israel. She now lives in Givatayim with her husband, the poet Adi Assis. Marcela ends by reading Levin's poetry from the 2011 social justice protests.

Texts:"Birthday Poem 2005"; "Oh Mother""The Reasons or: Invitation to the demonstration"

Music:Gustavo Santaolalla - Babel OSTIoann Rutenin - Russian Orthodox Lent SongLoco Hot - Nadlan

Host Marcela Sulak reads from Alex Epstein's story "Death in Pajamas," which appears in the Tel Aviv Noir anthology, edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron, and translated by Yardenne Greenspan. The story begins:

"Death wore a leather jacket over blue pajamas. He opened the door and came in. Without a word, he sat at the counter facing King George Street. It was 7:24 in the morning. I’d just opened up shop and made myself an espresso. To really wake up, you have to blow on a mirror. That’s exactly what I was about to do when Death came in."

Epstein was born in St. Petersburg (called Leningrad at the time) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of four collections of short stories and three novels; his work has been widely translated. He’s also won the Israel Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature.

Text:Alex Epstein, “Death in Pajamas,” Tel Aviv Noir edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, Akashic Books, 2014.

Music:Ziknei Tsfat - HaShachenAssaf Amdursky - 15 DakotRockfour - Khor BaLevanaAviv Geffen & Beri Sacharov - Sof HaOlam

Ayana Erdal was born to Polish parents who had immigrated to Israel from Paraguay and Istanbul. Today, host Marcela Sulak reads some of Erdal's poetry concerned with family life, translated by Lisa Katz and Rebecca Gillis:

"Abandoned dishes pile up in the sink,and lines of ants wake up to resume their march across the floorsand the distance between my son laying his head on the table and my handis like a slice of bread."

Winner of the 2005 Israeli President’s Prize in Literature, Erdal studied comparative literature at Hebrew University, and teaches at the Max Rayne Hand in Hand Bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) school in Jerusalem. She has published two collections of poetry.

Text:Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:All tracks by Thomas Newman from the "Revolutionary Road" OSTSpeaking Of Production ControlSimple Clean LinesRevolutionary Road (End Title)The Bright Young Man

In our first podcast of 2016, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Israel Pincas:

"And the heat that once was in me became a liquid that froze:

A dirty block of ice,Halley’s Comet,An evil omen, they said,A rare visitor in our skies,A tourist in the Solar System,A subject of wonderOnce every few years."

Born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1935, Pincas lost his father at the age of six and immigrated to Mandate Palestine with his mother in 1944. He began publishing poetry in 1951, and is the recipient of the Bernstein Prize, the Prime Minister's Prize and, most recently, the prestigious Israel Prize for Literature (2005). He now lives in Tel Aviv.

Text:Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir - Galina Durmushliiska Prochu Se Moma ManolkaBorodin Quartet - Shostakovitch Quartet No.10Philip Glass - The American Four Seasons (Violin Concerto No.2 prologue and movement 1)

In our last podcast of 2015, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Hagit Grossman:

"Once I was a Palaeolithic painter, a sensual hunterplundering the earth, living from hand to mouth,drawing at one end of the cave, all my worries ordinary.I was faithful to nature, transmitting pure and honest beauty,my drawings of movement were snapshots. "

Grossman was born in Rishon LeZion in 1976, and now lives in Tel Aviv. She studied photography at Camera Obscura, theatre at Beit Zvi, painting at the Arts Academy, and literature at Tel Aviv University. Painting has clearly influenced her poetics.

Text:Time Train: Several translations by Jonathan DayanPoetry International Rotterdam

Music:Tesha - Bathe In WhiteL.B.T - Live Beat Tape Vol. 1 (Full Power)Ninet - Child

This week’s podcast is in honor of the novelist Amir Gutfreund, who died four weeks ago at the age of 52. Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening of his first novel, Our Holocaust, a colorful description of the narrator's Grandpa Lolek:

"He usually burst into our world in his 1970 Vauxhall, a moribund chassis of protestations upon which only he could impose life. Always wearing a tie, always smoking and dressed in colorful grandeur, he would emerge from the Vauxhall as if he were Kaiser Franz Joself out to wave at the masses from his balcony. Within minutes he would be sitting at the table drinking tea, eating whatever cake he was served, and smoking a cigarette."

Gutfreund was born in Haifa to Holocaust survivors. He earned an MA in applied mathematics from the Technion in Haifa, and went on to serve as an officer in the air force doing mathematical research for 20 years. He retired with the rank of Lt. Colonel.

Text:Our Holocaust. Amir Gutfreund (2001). Translated by Jessica Cohen. AmazonCrossing, 2006.

Further reading:The World A Moment Later. Amir Gutfreund (2005). Translated by Jessica Cohen. AmazonCrossing, 2011.

Music:Mieczysław Fogg - Odpukaj PanFajga Jofe - Abduł Bey

This week, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Natan Yonatan alongside a soundtrack of songs dedicated to his poetry - each poem is accompanied by its musical version. Here is an extract from "Poems Only Go So Far":

"Poems only go so far. It’s time we conceded that,and break the bond of silence that we’ve shared.Our poppies never were any redder than theirs;our sins were never white as the drifting snow,and it seemed we’d always be so; weary birds that never stoppedbut always flew."

Natan Yonatan was born Natan Klein in Kiev in 1923, before his family immigrated to Mandate Palestine two years later. Much of Yonatan’s poetry, which won him the Bialik Prize, is inspired by the natural world, and also by the loss of his oldest son, Lior, who fell in the Yom Kippur War at the age of 21. Yonatan died after a brief illness in 2004, at the age of 80.

Text:Within the song to Live: Selected Poems by Natan Yonatan, translated by Janice Silverman Rebibo. Gefen Publishing 2005.

Music by Gidi Koren, performed by The Brothers and the Sisters:If This WorldAfter The StormPoems Only Go So FarBeyond The Pass

On Sunday night Jews in Israel and all over the world lit the first candle of eight on their hanukkiot. In honor of the holiday, host Marcela Sulak reads poems about miracles, light, and candles, for instance Ronny Someck's "Poem to a Girl Already Born":

"On the day you were born the workers of joywarmed their hands against the fire, litwith the match of your life.Night after night I am possessed with the sound of your breathas if it were the glimmer of a lighthouse for a sailor who was almost devouredby the ocean’s teeth."

Our 2014 Hanukkah podcast focused on the story of the Maccabi revolt and modern day Hanukkah traditions. This year Marcela conveys the spiritual side of the festival of light.

Texts:T. Carmi: "Miracles" (Poetry International Rotterdam)T. Carmi: "Awakening" (Poems Found in Translation)T. Carmi: The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself: A new and updated edition. Ed. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, Susan Glassman, Ariel Hirschfeld and Ezra Spicehandler. Wayne State University Press, 2003.Ronny Someck & Dan Armon: Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Translated by Tzipi Keller. SUNY Press, 2004.

Music:Itzhar Cohen - Al HaNisimYosef Karduner - Maoz TzurRuhama Raz - Nerotai HaZeirim

As the Israeli school year is finally under way, it might be a good time to examine our professors. Host Marcela Sulak reads the end of Yoel Hoffmann’s latest book, Moods, which starts off with a quirky comparison:

"We know some professors who are the exact opposite of wild geese. First of all, they’re always quarreling and therefore they can’t take off and fly in those beautiful formations. Second, their colors. They’re never white. Usually they’re one shade or another of green or yellow. Third, their necks are short."

Hoffmann was born in Romania in 1937. He is one of Israel’s foremost experimental novelists, and this is his tenth novel. You can hear an excerpt of Yoel Hoffman’s Katzchen on the October 6 podcast, as well as Hoffman’s more complete bio.

Texts:Moods, by Yoel Hoffmann, translated by Peter Cole. New Directions Press, 2015.

Music:Philip Glass - Glassworks: Opening, Island, Closing

This week we return to the Druze village of Maghar in the upper Galilee, with the poetry of Salman Masalha. He was born there in 1953, three years after his fellow villager, the poet Naim Araidi, featured in our October 13 podcast. Host Marcela Sulak reads Masalha's elemental sequence of poems on Water, Fire, Earth, and the Ark.

"Fire is a young body.The winds of doubt will not touch it.It refuses to dress in anythingbut black garments.It exists since the beginningon the fruit of the waters."

Masalha has been living in Jerusalem since 1972, where he taught Arabic language (at Hebrew University) and served as co-editor of the Concordance of Early Arabic Poetry. Marcela also reads an excerpt from an essay about his adopted city of Jerusalem, called “The City of the Walking Flower."

Texts:"Water," "Fire," "Earth," "The Ark" - The Virginia Quarterly

Music written by Salman Masalha:Kamilya Jubran - LafzMarwan Abado Ensemble - Ya Sahib Al Dann

Today host Marcela Sulak reads some poems by Hava Pinhas-Cohen. An anthology of her selected poems, Bridging the Divide, has just appeared, with English translation by Sharon Hart-Green. Pinhas-Cohen was born in Israel into a family of Bulgarian Jewish immigrants who’d arrived after WWII. Here's an extract from the poem “Only in the East”:

"Only in the East are two priestly hands a pyramid for your soul.Only in the East do lions and deer stop in their tracks to hear the sounds of distant water.There, in the East, the world has sides that are equaland your soul will find its rest. There."

Pinhas-Cohen has taught literature and writing in high school for many years, and has developed a special method of integrating literature, Bible, visual arts, and cinema. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Dimui journal, and a columnist for the daily newspaper Maariv. Her six collections of poetry have won many prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Prize.

Hava Pinhas-Cohen also founded and serves as the Artistic Director of Kisufim, a conference of Jewish writers that occurs every other year. It's happening next week in Jerusalem, from November 23-27.

Text:The Selected Poems of Hava Pinhas-Cohen: Bridging The Divide. Bilingual Edition. Edited and Translated by Sharon Hart-Green. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:Yifat Gelber - Shilkhi (words by Hava Pinhas-Cohen)Ahuva Ozeri - Emek HaPrakhimTesha - Just A Beautiful Day On The Beach

The poet Ilana Shmueli was born in Czernowitz in 1914, and is perhaps best known in relationship to the poet Paul Celan, also from Czernowitz . There they met when they were young, taking a memorable walk together through an autumnal forest in 1942, quoting poetry to one another:

"Then we strode solemnly down the chestnut allee—and the chestnuts bloomed a second time—white candles against the improbably profound blue of the sky. Beautiful!"

Host Marcela Sulak reads extracts from Shmueli's memoir, translated from the German by Susan Gillespie. Shmueli moved to Palestine with her family in 1944, joined the army and took part in the war of independence. She married a doctor there in 1953, with whom she had a daughter. She met Paul Celan again in 1965 and they renewed their acquaintance until his death in 1970.

Text:Toward Babel: Poems and a Memoir by Ilana Shmueli. Trnaslated by Susan H. Gillespie. The Sheep Meadow Press, 2013.

Music:Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No. 7 in C major, 3rd Movement (Adagio)Faran Ensemble - RainGevatron - Ani Nose Imi

Ronit Matalon’s first novel to be translated into English is organized around 17 snapshots from an imaginary photo album. This kaleidoscopic family mosaic chronicles the disintegration of an Egyptian-Jewish clan after WWII, when its members are dispersed from Cairo to Israel, New York, and Cameroon. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the following passage:

"Photograph: Left to right: Grandpapa Jacquo and Uncle Sicourelle, Cairo Train Station, 1946. That’s Grandpapa Jacquo, to the left of the uncle: Tall, slightly stooped, smirking like the best man at a wedding."

Ronit Matalon was born in Ganei Tikva, Israel, the daughter of Egyptian-Jewish immigrants. She covered Gaza and the West Bank for Haaretz newspaper between 1987 and 1993. She lives in Tel Aviv and teaches literature at the University of Haifa. She has published 8 novels in Hebrew, two of which are translated into English.

Texts:The One Facing Us: A Novel by Ronit Matalon. Translated by Marsha Weinstein. Metropolitan Books, 1998

Further reading:Bliss by Ronit Matalon, Translated by Jessica Cohen, Metropolitan Books, 2013.

Music:Tiki Dayan - Tachanat RakevetIhsan Al Munzer - The Joy Of Lina (Farha)

"People of the Galilee are strong as the sunRough as the terebinth tender as the oakFiery as the fires of SodomSodden as the salt of the seaSo far from their bodies."

Host Marcela Sulak reads some of the poetry of Israeli Druze poet Naim Araidi, who passed away on October 2 this year. Araidi was born in 1950 in the Druze Village of Maghar in the Galilee and received his PhD in Hebrew Literature from Bar-Ilan University. Like another Arab-Israeli writer, Anton Shammas, Araidi chose to write in Hebrew as well as Arabic.

Among the legacies of Naim Araidi is the Nissan organization for Literature, which he established in 1999. The international Nissan Festival is held annually in April in Maghar, his native village. This village of Maghar is said to have the highest density of poets per capita — 17 in a population of 1,000.

Texts:Back to the Village by Naim Araidi, translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut, Herzlia: Levant, 1994.“What Shall We Say to Whom,” translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut, Jerusalem Review, 5-6, 2006. 154-158.“Jerusalem Divides,” translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut, Jerusalem Review, no 8. 2015, 13-14.Other poems forthcoming in Jerusalem Review, January, 2016.

Music:Riad El Sonbati - Ya Nassini (performed by the Jewish-Arab Orchestra)Jamil Bey Tanburi- Samai Shad Araban (performed by the Jewish-Arab Orchestra)Sovu Be Machol - Debka DruzitNadech Seisi - (Unknown)

"Yesterday I dreamt how the Nile rolled over its banksand I saw the Delta inscribed upon the waters.As I was still looking for other estuaries I suddenly beheldinterpretations on my palmsand between furrow and furrowa white line of snow stood outand the Delta was trampled by the running."

Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from the poem “We’re Children of Atlantis,” by Baghdad-born poet Amira Hess. Its allusions to Noah’s ark are fitting for the immanent season of rain, as well as for the parsha of Noah that was recently read in synagogue.

Hess, not to be confused with journalist Amira Hass, was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and arrived in Israel in 1951, first living in an immigrant transit camp, and then moving to Jerusalem, where she still lives today.

Her translator, Ammiel Alcalay, says of her poetry that it is often written in an almost hallucinatory language of the Prophets, but the demons that have come to inhabit their figures of speech reflect and refract other realities, like in a hall of mirrors. Sudden shifts in tone cut across thousands of years.

Text:Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay, City Lights, 1996.

Music:Toshiro Mayuzumi - Abraham, The Alliance with GodTarabband - Baghdad Choby (Live)Ramin Djawadi - House Of Black And White

In this episode, host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from Yitzhak Gormezano Goren's Alexandrian Summer, his first novel to be translated into English. In this semi-autobiographical work, Robby, aged ten and accompanied by his parents, leaves his home in Alexandria in 1951 to rejoin his two brothers who had already moved to Israel.

In this extract, three generations of the family are sitting together in their home in Alexandria, reading a letter from Robby's brothers about what life is like in Israel. Robby's grandmother thinks it sounds a little primitive:

“They say that people work in construction in Palestine. Yes, even educated boys. A grandson of mine, putting his hand inside the cemento? Wy-di-mi-no!”

André Aciman says in his introduction to the novel, "Alexandrian Summer is a nostalgic, farewell portrait of a world that was fast expiring but still refused to see that history had written it off."

Text:Alexandrian Summer, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren. Translated Yardenne Greenspan. New Vessel Press, 2015.

Music:Dalida - Salma Ya SalamaFarid Al Atrash - WayakUmm Kulthoum - Enta Omri

The last of the fall Jewish holidays, Simchat Torah, came at the start of this week. It's a celebration of the Torah; it takes a year to read the entire Torah in synagogue, and on Simchat Torah one finishes the reading and begins again with Genesis. Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from Yoel Hoffmann’s short story, “Katzchen,” translated by Eddie Levenston and David Kriss:

“God,” thought Katzchen, “gave birth to the world and died. And now the world asks for God in vain. A child sees his mother only for a short time, when he is a baby, and then, for the rest of his life, he asks for his mother who has no form and the mother who has no form asks for her child.”

Hoffman was born in Hungary in 1937 and immigranted to Mandate Palestine as an infant. His mother’s early death and a childhood spent boarding with relatives and in children’s homes figure prominently in his prose. He is a professor at Haifa University, where he teaches Japanese poetry, Buddhism, and philosophy.

Text:“Katzchen,” translated by Eddie Levenston and David Kriss in 50 Stories from Israel. Edited by Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Books, 2007.

Further reading:Katschen and The Book of Joseph, trans. from Hebrew by Eddie Levenston, David Kriss, and Alan Treister, New Directions (New York, NY) 1998.Bernhard, trans. from Hebrew by Alan Treister & Eddie Levenston, New Directions (New York, NY), 1998.The Christ of Fish, trans. from Hebrew by Eddie Levenston, New Directions (New York, NY), 1999.The Heart is Katmandu, trans. from Hebrew by Peter Cole, New Directions (New York, NY), 2001.The Shunra and the Schmetterling, trans. from Hebrew by Peter Cole, New Directions (New York, NY), 2004.Curriculum Vitae, trans. from Hebrew by Peter Cole, New Directions (New York, NY), 2009.Moods, trans. from Hebrew by Peter Cole, New Directions (New York, NY), 2015.

Music:Gustav Holst - The Planets: "Venus," "Saturn"

As we celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, host Marcela Sulak reads an extract from a story about the mitzvah of the etrog, by Israeli Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon. It starts with the narrator making a trip to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim to purchase his own etrog:

"I pushed my way into the shop of a seller of old books, who abandons book selling during the month or so before Sukkot in order to sell etrogs. The shop was full of customers, aside from the usual scholars and the types that crowd about wherever crowds are gathered. A beautiful scent arose from the etrogs and hadasim, which masked the smell of old books, most of which had come from the apartments of poor folk, forced to sell off their libraries to buy Sabbath provisions or to marry off their daughters."

During his trip the narrator is plunged into a world of over-eager sellers, beleaguered customers, and, most importantly, old rabbinical tales about etrogs.

Text:“The Etrog,” by S. Y. Agnon. Translated by Jeffrey Saks. Forthcoming in Forevermore: Stories of the Old World and the New, edited by Jeffrey Saks, the Toby Press in 2016.

Music:Shirei Sukkot - Yerushalayim (Shloshet HaRegalim)Shirei Sukkot - LaSukkah SheliAvihu Medina - Melech BaSukkah

"Ever since my pious mother ate earth on Yom Kippur,ate dark earth on Yom Kippur, mixed with fire,I, a living man, must eat dark earth on Yom Kippur,and be, myself, a memorial candle made of her fire."

Host Marcela Sulak reads Abraham Sutzkever's poem "Ever Since My Pious Mother Ate Earth on Yom Kippur" to mark the holiday of Yom Kippur. She then reads from an article by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, explaining why Yom Kippur is his favorite holiday.

Text:Abraham Sutzkever, The Ilanot ReviewEtgar Keret, Table Magazine

Music:Avraham Brudno - Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern (words by Abraham Sutzkever)HaMechashefot - TsiporYafa Yarkoni - En Den Di NoAdam - Sod

"To start love like this: with a cannon shotlike Ramadan.That’s a religion! Or with the blowing of a ram’s horn,as at the High Holidays, to exorcise sins.That’s a religion! That’s a love!"

As we enter the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Marcela Sulak reads several of Yehuda Amichai's poems about the themes of the High Holidays: Judgement, memory, and, of course, the blowing of the shofar or ram's horn.

Text:Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems.  Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. The University of California Press, 1996.

Music:Adonai BeKol Shofar Nosach TripoliRav Moshe Levi - Tikiat Shofar Nosach TeymanIlanit - LeOrech HaShdera SheEin Ba IshShai Tsabari - Lavi Oti

With the Jewish New Year - Rosh Hashanah - coming up on Sunday evening, host Marcela Sulak reads some of the poetry of Navit Barel on that theme. "Free Admission" begins like this:

We ate apples dipped in honey. Free admissionto the sweet and happy years. Mira from Nepalunderstood when we talked about indulgence, income tax and chopped liver.

Navit Barel was born in Ashkelon to immigrants from Libya, who had lost a son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “I grew up in a home in mourning; it was a complicated existence,” she told Haaretz newspaper when her second book, MAMASH, appeared in 2011. Barel has also been active with the Cultural Guerrillas – a group of Israeli artists who promote social and political struggle via poetry and music.

Text:All poems and biographical information come from Poetry International Rotterdam.

Music:Idan Raichel Project - Brachot LaShana HaChadasha (Blessings For The New Year)Noa Shemer - Yitzrach (Words by Navit Barel)Arik Einstein - Od Yihiye

Israel's children have gone back to school, so this podcast is dedicated to the wonder of summer vacations. Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening of Judith Katzier’s short story, Schlafstunde, translated by Barbara Harshav. It starts like this:

"Once, when summer vacation stretched over the whole summer and tasted of sand and smelled of grapes and a redhead sun daubed freckles on your face..."

Each sentence in Katzier's story is roughly the length of a paragraph and features little punctuation, capturing the endlessness of the summer and the breathless excitement of the children enjoying their adventures.

Text:Schlafstunde, by Judith Katzir, translated by Barbara Harshav, in 50 Stories from Israel. Ed. Zisi Stavi & Chaya Galai. Yedioth Ahronoth and Chemed Books. 2007.

Music:HaKeves HaShisha Asar - Hayalda Hachi Yafa BaganHaKeves HaShisha Asar - Ani Ohev

This week host Marcela Sulak features a graphic novel for the first time ever on this podcast - Rutu Modan’s The Property, translated by Jessica Cohen.

It's about an Israeli grandmother and her granddaughter getting to know Warsaw as they try to reclaim a property lost during WWII.

Marcela, with the help of her crew, reads the book's opening scene, set at Ben-Gurion airport, and a later scene in which Mica, the granddaughter, gets to show off her martial arts skills.

Rutu Modan was born in Tel Aviv in 1966, and graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Critics have called The Property “a triumph of storytelling and fine lines," saying it "cements Modan's status as one of the foremost cartoonists working today."

Text:The Property, translated by Jessica Cohen. Drawn and Quarterly, 2013.

Further Reading:Exit Wounds, Drawn and Quarterly, 2007Mixed Emotions, 2007, a visual blog at the New York TimesThe Murder of the Terminal Patient, a graphic serial in the New York Times Magazine, 2008Jamilti and Other Stories, Drawn and Quarterly, 2008Where Is?, written by Tamar Bergman, Houghton Mifflin/Walter Lorraine Books 2002 (children’s book)Dad Runs Away With The Circus, written by Etgar Keret, Cambridge, MA, Candlewick Press, 2004 (children’s book)Maya Makes a Mess, written and drawn by Rutu Modan, Toon Books, 2012

Music:Nigel Kennedy & Kroke - KazimierzWalter Wanderley - Beach SambaKapela Harnasie - Lipka Zielona

"Seconds before bursting into flames the boy sent out a crythat his father, hanging farther down in perfect balancecould not make out:thismustbehowyoufeelwheninventing!He cried out, joyful,And fell."

So ends Yael Globerman's poem "Icarus," translated by Lisa Katz and the author. Host Marcela Sulak reads this and Globerman's follow-up poem, "The Desk," translated by Vivian Eden.

Poet and translator Yael Globerman was born in Tel Aviv and studied film at Tel Aviv University. Elements of film and theater find their way into Globerman's poetry, as we hear in this podcast. Globerman has written a novel and two books of poetry, and currently teaches creative writing at Oranim College and the Minshar Academy for Art.

Text:Poetry International Rotterdam

Further Reading:EurozineVirginia Quarterly

Music:Maya Yitzhaki - HaNesicha Bulimia (Words by Yael Globerman)Shualei HaMachshava - HaNivchar (Words by Yael Globerman)Tsevet Bidur Cheil HaAvir (Air Force group) - The Ballad of Daedalus and Icarus

Today host Marcela Sulak reads an extract from Asaf Schurr's novel Motti, translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy. In it, Motti imagines the precise details of the death of Laika, a Soviet dog who became the first animal to orbit the earth.

"Did she bark? I have to know if she barked. And how the echo sounded in that narrow space. If it sounded like distant dogs answering her."

Schurr was born in Jerusalem in 1976. He has worked on the editorial staff of the magazine Kahn for human and animal rights and environmental issues, and was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Motti (2008).

Text: Motti. Translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy. Dalkey Archive Press (May 3, 2011).

Music: 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 - Movie Soundtrack (music by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss & Gyorgy Ligeti)

Host Marcela Sulak today reads from A. B. Yehoshua's novel A Journey to the End of the Millennium. Set in the year 999. It follows a Jewish merchant from Tangiers on his annual voyage to Europe to secure and expand his trade:

"And so in these twilight days, as faiths were sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next, it was preferable to restrict encounters with adherents of another faith and to be content, at least for the greater part of the way, to travel by sea, for the sea, which can reveal itself at times to be capricious and cruel, owes no obligation to what is beyond its reach."

Avraham Yehoshua was born in 1936 into a fifth generation Jerusalem family of Sephardic origin. The New York Times calls him “The Israeli Faulkner.”

Text:A Journey to the End of the Millennium - A Novel of the Middle Ages. By A. B. Yehoshua. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Inc., 1998.

Further reading by A. B. Yehoshua:The Lover. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday, 1978 (translated by Philip Simpson). Dutton, 1985. Harvest/HBJ, 1993.A Late Divorce. London, Harvill Press, 1984. San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1993.Five Seasons. New York, Doubleday, 1989.Mr. Mani. New York, Doubleday, 1992.Open Heart. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday, 1995.The Liberated Bride. London, Peter Halban, 2003.A Woman in Jerusalem. London, Halban Publishers, 2006, 2011.Friendly Fire: A Duet. London, Halban Publishers, 2008.The Retrospective. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Music:Los Tiempos Pasados - Una Matica De RudaLa Roza Enflorese - La Roza Enflorese

"And so, quietly, eyes shut,babies drop into the world,like rain falling in the darkfrom a gigantic hand into shafts,into a spider’s tent, a cold apple."

That's the opening stanza of Nurit Zarchi's poem "Baby Blues," read by host Marcela Sulak in today's podcast about the Jerusalem-born poet. Zarchi, who now lives in Tel Aviv, is one of Israel’s best-known children’s authors and has published eight collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and a collection of essays.

Text:Poets on the Edge. An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Selected and translated by Tsipi Keller. State University of New York Press, 2008.

Music:Li-Ron Choir - Yalda Mazleg Ve Yalda KafShlomo Gronich - Barehov ShelanuLi-Ron Choir - Shalosh Yeladot Mayim

In our second installment, host Marcela Sulak reads an essay from Etgar Keret's memoir, The Seven Good Years, called "Bombs Away." We hear how Keret and his wife Shira Gefen cope after receiving "inside" reports about an imminent Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

"Gradually my wife also began to realize the advantages of our shabby existence. After she found a not-exactly-reliable news site warning that Iran might already have nuclear weapons, she decided it was time to stop washing dishes. “There’s nothing more frustrating than getting nuked while you’re putting the soap in the dishwasher,” she explained. “From now on, we only wash the dishes on an immediate-need basis.”"

Hear how this attitude escalates in much the same way as the panic surrounding the Iranian nukes.

Listen to Part I of our dip into Keret's memoir, in which Marcela reads the opening essay - Keret's son is born on the day of a terror attack.

Text:The Seven Good Years. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, and Anthony Berris. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.

Further reading:Suddenly, a Knock on the DoorThe Girl on the FridgeMissing KissingerThe Nimrod FlipoutThe Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories

Music:Eran Tzur - Bachutz (lyrics by Etgar Keret)Shlomi Shaban and Etgar Keret perform at Tel Aviv's Pecha Kucha festival

Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening essay from Etgar Keret's memoir The Seven Good Years, about the seven years between the birth of his son and the death of his father. Marcela also explains why, although Keret is Israeli, the book was never published in Hebrew nor released in Israel.

As Keret waits in the hospital for his wife to give birth, he's surrounded by the victims of a terrorist attack that has just occurred, and is pestered by a journalist looking for an "original" reaction to the mass murder.

"Six hours later, a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button comes popping out of my wife’s vagina and immediately starts to cry. I try to calm him down, to convince him that there’s nothing to worry about. That by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled: peace will come, there won’t be any more terrorist attacks, and even if once in a blue moon there is one, there will always be someone original, someone with a little vision, around to describe it perfectly."

The podcast features songs written by Keret, performed by the band Mouth and Foot. Tune in next week for "Part II," in which Marcela reads another extract from the memoir - this time about the Keret household's reaction to the threat of an Iranian nuke.

Text:The Seven Good Years. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, and Anthony Berris. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.

Further reading:Suddenly, a Knock on the DoorThe Girl on the FridgeMissing KissingerThe Nimrod FlipoutThe Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories

Music:Hape Vehatlapayim (Mouth and Foot) - AnonimiEviatar Banai - Hamon Anashim

"His small, perpetually dirty hands with their closely-clipped nails fumble with the space around him, seeking their way to me, here he is, kneeling on the carpet at my feet, apparently defeated, the crown of his head craning toward my lap, but then he straightens up, grabs one of the stuffed animals and hurls it at me."

Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening of Zeruya Shalev's novel Thera, translated by H. Sacks & Mitch Ginsberg. Shalev was born in 1959 on Kibbutz Kinneret, and in the background you can hear songs by other famous natives of the kibbutz.

Text:

Thera, by Zeruya Shalev. Translated by H. Sack & Mitch Ginsberg, The Toby Press, 2010.

Music:

Liel Kolet - ImaBenny Amdursky - Ani Gitara (written by Naomi Shemer)

I sit at the entrance of the labyrinth

in which my country has vanished.

I don’t know why my country is lost

or what I should do to reclaim it

and the sunlight, the good breeze,

the songbirds in groves of oleander

and acacia...

Moshe Dor was born in 1932 in Tel Aviv. He served in the Haganah and then became a correspondent for the Israel Army magazine. One of the founders of the literary journal Likrat, Dor has served as literary editor and member of the editorial board of Maariv newspaper since 1958. His work has been published abroad in some 30 languages.

Host Marcela Sulak reads poems from the collection Scorched by the Sun, translated by Barbara Goldberg and Moshe Dor, as we listen to his words sung by various artists.

Text:

Scorched by the Sun, by Moshe Dor. Translated by Barbara Goldberg and Moshe Dor. The Word Works, 2012.

Music:

Chabad Choirs - Erev Shel Shoshanim (lyrics by Moshe Dor)Traditional - Tapuach Chinani (lyrics by Moshe Dor)Hagesher - Night Of Roses (lyrics by Moshe Dor)