A few weeks ago, Erez Biton was awarded the Israel Prize for literature, becoming the first Mizrahi Jew to receive the prize. Of Moroccan descent, he was born in Algeria in 1942 and arrived in Israel in 1948 via France. After a joint reading with Yehuda Amichai in Arad, a town bordering the Negev and Judean Deserts, the two poets traveled back to Jerusalem together. Biton asked Amichai to describe for him the essence of the desert as seen along the road. In response, Amichai held Bitton's hand f...
Apr 29, 2015•7 min
We look at how Amos Oz, in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness , describes what happened the euphoric night the UN voted to establish a Jewish state.
Apr 22, 2015•9 min
My face is beautiful when I am understood, it expands to the size of a broad gate in hundreds of shades of color on the paper in the clay’s angles and cuts. These are the final lines of Maya Bejerano's poem "Data Processing 60," translated by Miri Kubovy, which host Marcela Sulak reads in today' podcast. She also reads "Data Processing 10." As you can tell, poetry is a kind of linguistic and emotional laboratory for Bejerano - a place to process a variety of data. Bejerano was born in Kibbutz El...
Apr 15, 2015•9 min
If Passover is the defining Jewish holiday, then Yehuda Amichai is Israel's defining poet. Host Marcela Sulak reads some of his interpretations of the foundational Passover narrative, as we listen to music set to his words. In his poem "Jewish Travel," Amichai imagines Moses standing on Mount Nebo, staring into the Promised Land - a land he would never enter: He yearned for the land of Canaan he would never see, but he turned east, toward the desert of those forty years, and wrote the Torah as a...
Apr 08, 2015•8 min
I call you now to answer me despite my prayer’s silence in the mornings despite the moth’s presence in my closet despite my fullness with rusted talk These are lines from Haviva Pedaya's poem "When I Come From the Place of Crying," translated by Harvey Bock, which host Marcela Sulak reads. Pedaya was born into an Iraqi family of rabbis and Kabbalists. She is a professor of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University specializing in mysticism, and her poetry echoes her scholarly research on time and ...
Apr 01, 2015•8 min
"After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book. Most of it was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written."
Mar 25, 2015•8 min
According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines: I am under the thornbush Nimble, menacing, Laughing [at] its thorns To greet you I straightened up. At a time when Hebrew poetry by women was just beginning to be published, these lines introduced many of the themes and poetic devices that came to characterize Raab’s poetry and the way it was read: A stark landscape, an unconventional female central character, a hint of a biblical inter-...
Mar 18, 2015•7 min
We met the Christian Arab village of Fassuta, on the north-western slope of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee, in a previous podcast: http://tlv1.fm/?p=30469 Host Marcela Sulak takes us there again to discover the work of Nidaa Khoury, who was born in Fassuta in 1959 and still lives there. Khoury’s seven collections of poetry include The Barefoot River, The Prettiest of Gods Cry, and The Bitter Crown, published in Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. She is a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and t...
Mar 11, 2015•5 min
In the Bus/Purim Eve: Little kids in costume giggle happily real flower children and 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 'Megillah' — a retelling of the Purim story in the Book of Esther. Tikva Levi was a feminist activist Mizrahi Jew, born ...
Mar 04, 2015•8 min
There is a strange flavor, seasoned with pomegranates and grapes found in the desert when, without shadows, it flames; while rain rolls through the red dust of dirt trails, and it is possible to taste it in Jerusalem’s hills. These are the opening lines of an excerpt from Avraham Sutzkever's Lider fun Togbukh ( Poems From a Diary, 1974-1981 ), read by host Marcela Sulak. Sutzkever was born in 1913 in today's Belarus. He was sent to the Vilnius Ghetto during WWII, from which he escaped and was fl...
Feb 25, 2015•10 min
Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron have edited a collection of short stories, Tel Aviv Noir , that highlights the hidden, sometimes shameful, always mysterious aspects of the city. Host Marcela Sulak reads from one of her favorites, 'Women,' written by Matan Hermoni and translated by Yardenne Greenspan. The narrator comes across a mysterious figure at the funeral of poet Abraham Sutzkever, taking place at the Kyriat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv on a cold, sad, and rainy January day, full of "raincoats a...
Feb 18, 2015•8 min
You’ve still got time to visit a Tel Aviv beach this winter. To get you in the mood, host Marcela Sulak reads Rachel Chalifi's poem 'Tel Aviv Beach Winter '74,' translated by Alexandra Meiri. Here's an excerpt: The sun is a faded photo. Shore birds peck greyly at the sand. The muscles of the sea groan. A solitary woman in a nylon scarf. What is she, against a thunderstorm? Chalfi was born in Tel Aviv, the daughter of two poets. She studied in Jerusalem, then Berkeley, and finally Los Angeles, be...
Feb 11, 2015•8 min
Shimon Adaf's poem 'Sderot' begins: It took me twenty years to love this hole in the middle of nowhere. The cotton buds dispersed in a white flame and the wind meddled in the cypresses... Born in Sderot, the 'bomb shelter capital of the world,' to parents of Moroccan origin, Shimon Adaf has written five novels and three collections of poetry, which have received numerous national prizes. He lectures on Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is head of the Hebrew-language cr...
Feb 04, 2015•11 min
Host Marcela Sulak takes us on an unusual trip to the bakery with Sharron Hass' short story The Thief , translated by Amalia Ziv. On encountering a mysterious woman in red stealing a box of cookies from a bakery, the protagonist sees her own situation reflected in the thief's predicament: "The risks you take. The poverty of truth. And the panic, the terrible panic that we shall never receive as much as we give." Tel Aviv poet, Sharron Hass, is known mostly for her poetry; among her three collect...
Jan 28, 2015•9 min
Host Marcela Sulak reads Aharon Shabtai's poem 'Our Land' (translated by Peter Cole), which features a kind of 'afterlife' Tel Aviv: ... Soon we will all / meet in the Tel Aviv below— Weinstein the milkman, / and Haim the iceman, Solganik / and the staff at the dry-goods co-op: Hannah and Frieda and Tzitron; / and the one-armed man from the clothing store / at the corner near Café Ditze... Aharon Shabtai was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv and spent his childhood on Kibbutz Merhavia. He’s the brother o...
Jan 21, 2015•8 min
Blessed be He who made me woman created of nothing! Blessed be He who hasn't made me man who never dies and is not born. So began the mornings of Shin Shifra, born in Bnei Brak in 1931, who turns the traditional Jewish Orthodox morning prayer up-side-down. Shin Shifra’s poetry is steeped in Orthodox religious practice, befitting her home life and background. But it portrays a feminine and feminist focus, as in the poem 'Sabbath Prayer,' translated by Tsipi Keller and read by host Marcela Sulak: ...
Jan 14, 2015•6 min
Winter is the rainy season in sunny Israel, and in general we welcome the rare, rain-filled clouds. Tuvya Ruebner's poems are full of clouds in Rachel Tzvia Back's wonderful new translation of his selected poems, In the Illuminated Dark . After losing his entire family to Auschwitz-Berkenau, Ruebner made it to Mandate Palestine. He married Ada Klein from his native Slovakia and had a daughter with her in 1949. A few months later Ada was killed in a bus accident that seriously injured Tuvya and f...
Jan 07, 2015•9 min
Tonight we’ll end 2014 with a blast of fire; we hear Dahlia Ravikovitch's own recitation of her poem 'Dress of Fire,' which host Marcela Sulak translates for us (using Chana and Ariel Bloch's translation). We also listen to some of Ravikovitch's poems set to music. Born in the Ramat Gan suburb of Tel Aviv in 1936, Ravikovitch wrote fiction, children’s books, and 12 collections of poetry, which have been awarded many literary prizes. After the 1982 Lebanese War, she began writing protest poetry. ...
Dec 31, 2014•8 min
As Christians all over the world celebrate Christmas Eve tonight, we travel to the Galilee through the eyes of the novelist Anton Shammas, a native of this region of Israel. 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...
Dec 23, 2014•8 min
Last night in Israel we celebrated the first night of Hanukkah: The festival of lights, or the festival of the dedication of the temple. From dreidels to doughnuts, host Marcela Sulak takes us through the holiday's customs and traditions, and then lets historian Titus Flavius Josephus, born Yosef ben Matityahu, tell the story in his own words. In Hanukkah's spirit of 'light,' Marcela reads a poem by Admiel Kosman, 'A Small Pillar of Fire,' translated specifically for this podcast by Lisa Katz. T...
Dec 17, 2014•7 min
Yona Wallach was born in 1944 in Tel Aviv and never travelled outside Israel's borders. Eleven collections of her poetry have been published during her lifetime and posthumously, and many of her songs have been put to music. She also wrote for and joined a rock band. Though she died in 1985 of breast cancer at the age of 41, she is still very much present in Tel Aviv. Never one to shy away from controversy, her provocative (some would say pornographic) poem 'Tefillin' created a public storm and ...
Dec 10, 2014•8 min
Host Marcela Sulak traces the life of poet Ronny Someck , from his origins in Baghdad to Israeli transit camps to Tel Aviv, through his poetry. Life in the transit camps in the 1950s was difficult, as described in the poem 'Poverty Line,' in which Someck says, "The only line I saw was the horizon and under it everything / looked poor." He went on to study Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. At 63 he now lives in Ramat Gan, and has been called "a poet of Tel Aviv" for poems l...
Dec 03, 2014•6 min
Sayed Kashua is perhaps most known for the wildly popular satirical television series he created, Arab Labor ( a phrase that in Hebrew - avoda aravit - usually implies 'shoddy or second-rate work'). The show holds a mirror up to the racism and ignorance on both sides of Israel's ethnic divide, and is the first program to present Palestinian characters speaking Arabic on primetime Israeli television. Kashua was born in 1975 in Tira, and attended the prestigious Israeli Arts and Science Academy in...
Nov 26, 2014•7 min
Benjamin Tammuz’s sculpture 'Memorial for the Pilots' rises above Independence Park, north of the Hilton Beach Hotel on Tel Aviv's promenade. It’s a tall, stylized bird dedicated to the pilots of the 1948 war. Tammuz wasn’t just a sculptor, though; he was also a painter, novelist, journalist, critic, and editor. Born in Russia in 1919, he immigrated with his parents to Mandate Palestine at the age of five. He joined the Haaretz editorial board in 1948, and from 1971 to 1975 served as cultural at...
Nov 05, 2014•6 min
Nisim Aloni was born into a poor family in the South Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentine in 1926. He enlisted in the Notrut, a Jewish militia operating as an auxiliary police alongside the British, and he fought in the 1948 war. Though Aloni is best known for his theater plays, he also wrote short stories. 'To Be a Baker,' translated by Tirza Sandbank, opens the anthology 50 Stories from Israel, compiled by Zisi Stavi and published in English in 2007. The book represents the first 50 years of Is...
Oct 29, 2014•7 min
Poet, novelist, and playwright Shulamit Lapid was born in Tel Aviv in 1934. She is the mother of Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid. All of her novels, with one exception, feature female protagonists, and most address social issues and ethnic discrimination. Shulamit Lapid’s novel Valley of Strength, turned into a film by Dan Wolman in 2010, depicts the first seven years of the Gai Oni agricultural settlement, later renamed 'Rosh Pina' or 'Corner Stone' after Psalm 118: 22: “The stone which the...
Oct 28, 2014•8 min
Israelis have not been writing detective fiction for very long; Batya Gur’s 1992 The Saturday Morning Murder: a psychoanalytic case was the first Israeli crime novel to reach a wide American Audience. In her 2005 obituary, the New York Times said she was “almost single-handedly responsible for making the detective novel a flourishing genre in Israeli letters.” Breaking with the conventions of detective fiction, Gur’s novels are always set in closed societies: A psychoanalytic institute, a kibbut...
Oct 28, 2014•7 min
Assaf Gavron's novel The Hilltop follows the lifespan of an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank which, as in a fairytale, comes into being ostensibly to satisfy a woman and child's innocent longing for salad greens. The narrative follows two orphaned brothers who find themselves on the settlement for different reasons, and geographically we're taken from Ma’aleh Hermesch C to Tel Aviv, New York City, and Miami. We move in and out of government agencies and meetings, and at protests we fi...
Oct 22, 2014•8 min
Born in Saffuriyya in the Galilee, Taha Muhammad Ali settled in Nazareth after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. There, he owned a souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation, which became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. Host Marcela Sulak tells Ali's charming fairytale about how his craft was tested by a visitor who came daily to his shop, and had to be bribed with an olive-wood camel to hear Ali's latest poem. Ali’s poetry is written in literary Arabic, "grounded in the vernacula...
Oct 15, 2014•7 min
Today we explore the etrog, a powerful symbol of the holiday of Sukkot, through a short story by Shai Agnon and a poem by Orit Gidali. Agnon's story 'That Tzaddik’s Etrog,' translated by Shira Leibowitz and Moshe Kohn, is a parable about a rabbi who sells his tefillin in order to buy a perfect etrog for Sukkot. Gidali's poem is about the fragility of the etrog - she talks of wrapping her son in cotton wool "so that the world around you will treat you like an etrog." Compared to the other three S...
Oct 08, 2014•10 min
