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 joy warmed their hands against the fire, lit with the match of your life. Night after night I am possessed with the sound of your breath as if it were the glimmer of a lighthouse for a sailor who was alm...
Dec 09, 2015•6 min
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. Thir...
Dec 02, 2015•6 min
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 anything but black garments. It exists since the beginning on the fruit of the water...
Nov 25, 2015•7 min
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...
Nov 18, 2015•7 min
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...
Nov 11, 2015•8 min
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: T...
Nov 04, 2015•8 min
"People of the Galilee are strong as the sun Rough as the terebinth tender as the oak Fiery as the fires of Sodom Sodden as the salt of the sea So 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 ...
Oct 28, 2015•7 min
"Yesterday I dreamt how the Nile rolled over its banks and I saw the Delta inscribed upon the waters. As I was still looking for other estuaries I suddenly beheld interpretations on my palms and between furrow and furrow a white line of snow stood out and 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...
Oct 21, 2015•6 min
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 Is...
Oct 14, 2015•9 min
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 moth...
Oct 07, 2015•7 min
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...
Sep 30, 2015•8 min
"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 : Abra...
Sep 22, 2015•9 min
"To start love like this: with a cannon shot like 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...
Sep 16, 2015•7 min
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 admission to the sweet and happy years. Mira from Nepal understood 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 comp...
Sep 10, 2015•8 min
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, ...
Sep 02, 2015•5 min
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 ...
Aug 20, 2015•7 min
"Seconds before bursting into flames the boy sent out a cry that his father, hanging farther down in perfect balance could 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 ...
Aug 12, 2015•8 min
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 ...
Aug 05, 2015•7 min
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, whi...
Jul 22, 2015•8 min
"And so, quietly, eyes shut, babies drop into the world, like rain falling in the dark from 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 : Po...
Jul 15, 2015•7 min
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. “Th...
Jul 08, 2015•8 min
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 m...
Jul 01, 2015•7 min
"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 backgr...
Jun 24, 2015•7 min
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 sinc...
Jun 17, 2015•9 min
Tal Nitzán is the author of five poetry books and one children's book, and the editor of three poetry anthologies. Born in Jaffa of Argentine descent, she has resided in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and New York. Here is an extract from the poem 'Mountain High,' which depicts the tall, oppressive buildings of Tel Aviv, where Nitzán is currently living: I went up to the roof one day in May a day that spread upon the sky a sheet the shade of mustard of an orange of an H-bomb and the long arduous craving ...
Jun 10, 2015•5 min
Years passed, memories settled and were invented, stories were told and sprouted different versions, and all the while the American sweeper sat in a locked bathroom in Nahalal. Meir Shalev was born in the village of Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav, in 1948. He is the grandson of the amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923, and who devoted her life to battling against the biggest enemy in the new land: Dirt. Host Marcela Sulak reads from Shalev's memoir, My Russ...
Jun 03, 2015•8 min
Dalia Betolin-Sherman was born in Ethiopia in 1979. In 1984 she crossed Sudan by foot and immigrated to Israel with her parents and sister. Her short story collection, When the World Became White , came out in Hebrew in 2013. Host Marcela Sulak reads from one of its stories - “Circle of Friends” - translated by Ilana Kurshan. Adva stands there looking at herself in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom... Today she has a special hairdo in honor of the performance, and she examines it from all angles...
May 27, 2015•8 min
“Ezra, what would you call the story told by my violin?” Ezra was silent... When he got up to leave, a phrase from one of the dawn hymns occurred to him and stood in front of him, pleading. He said to Rahamim, “I would call it, The Dawning of the Day.” Host Marcela Sulak reads from Haim Sabato's story, The Dawning of the Day, in honor of Shavuot - the Jewish festival that celebrates the giving of the Torah by God to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai. We hear about two friends who end up avidly studyin...
May 20, 2015•8 min
“... Hanging by a thread, my fathers jostle together, A sleeve of Hispania cloth permeated with the scent of jasmine On an austere robe from the lands of years gone by On a breeze bearing blows, payes and pelts…” So reads a section from “Fathers,” a poem by Tel Aviv-born novelist, poet, and theater director Michal Govrin, whose poetry our host Marcela Sulak introduces to us today. The daughter of an Israeli pioneer father and a mother who survived the Holocaust, Govrin’s work is concerned with t...
May 13, 2015•7 min
Tonight is Lag B'Omer, the Jewish holiday of light celebrated by lighting bonfires. Here's a glimpse of poet Agi Mishol's 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...
May 06, 2015•7 min
