Exploring Israeli literature in English translation. Host Marcela Sulak takes you through Israel’s literary countryside, cityscapes, and psychological terrain, and the lives of the people who create it.
https://tlv1.fm/israelintranslation
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 20 hours 39 minutes
“Three”: D. A. Mishani’s Thriller Read
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...
“The Tunnel”
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...
Meir Shalev’s “My Wild Garden”
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...
Miri Ben-Simhon’s “The Absolute Reader”
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...
Shimon Adaf’s “Aviva-No”
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...
Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail”
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...
The Drive
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....
Darwish’s “In the Presence of Absence”
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...
“Ladies From the Bible Tell Their Tales”
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...
Track Changes, Part 2
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...