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...
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 i...
“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. Marcel...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 Eccle...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 t...
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 traditional...
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 fr...
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 ...
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...
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 b...
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 obses...
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 st...
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 bo...
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 C...
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 . T...
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
