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 ...
Jul 27, 2016•7 min
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 C...
Jul 20, 2016•8 min
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 wo...
Jul 14, 2016•7 min
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. P...
Jul 06, 2016•7 min
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, becaus...
Jun 22, 2016•8 min
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 o...
Jun 15, 2016•8 min
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, i...
Jun 01, 2016•7 min
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. Whe...
May 25, 2016•9 min
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 di...
May 18, 2016•8 min
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 he...
May 11, 2016•9 min
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...
May 04, 2016•7 min
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 : T...
Apr 27, 2016•7 min
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 d...
Apr 20, 2016•9 min
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: "...
Apr 13, 2016•10 min
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...
Apr 06, 2016•8 min
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 vera...
Mar 28, 2016•7 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 "Songs of the Megillah" — a retelling of the Purim story in the Book of Esther. Tikva Levi was a feminist activist M...
Mar 23, 2016•7 min
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" f...
Mar 18, 2016•9 min
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. Wh...
Mar 09, 2016•8 min
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 dete...
Mar 02, 2016•7 min
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...
Feb 24, 2016•8 min
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 house sat and kept silent while one sang the other waited so I was raised between howling and ...
Feb 17, 2016•8 min
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 sapli...
Feb 10, 2016•7 min
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 mother and they will honour you with twice as much spanking and with two good blows on the backside so that th...
Jan 27, 2016•9 min
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 exact...
Jan 21, 2016•9 min
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 floors and the distance between my son laying his head on the table and my hand is like a slice of bread." Winner of the 2005 Israeli President’s Prize in Literature, Erdal studie...
Jan 13, 2016•5 min
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 wonder Once 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 recipi...
Jan 06, 2016•7 min
In our last podcast of 2015, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Hagit Grossman: "Once I was a Palaeolithic painter, a sensual hunter plundering 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 A...
Dec 30, 2015•7 min
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 Jose...
Dec 23, 2015•8 min
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 stopped but always flew." Nata...
Dec 16, 2015•7 min
