In his essay, “The Desire to be Gisella,” Grossman ponders the root of our fear of the “other” in ourselves and in those we love, and he thinks of authorship as a mad rebellion against this fear.

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David Grossman, “The Desire to be Gisella.” Writing in the Dark, Essays on Politics and Literature. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

This week, Marcela takes a step back from the literature itself to look at the language of the words we use. The idea of the podcast, Israel in Translation, is that the works discussed were written originally in a language other than English—indeed, in the writer’s native language. But one of the realities of our age—or rather—one of the realities of literature—is that often poets and writers do not write in their first language. Or, if they do, this first language is not the language of the culture in which they find themselves.

Marcela revisits the Granta Hebrew issue of the Ilanot Review to talk about Dory Manor’s The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues.

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Dory Manor. “The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues” translated by Mitch Ginsburg. The Ilanot Review.

In 2014, historian Fania Salzberger Oz, and her father, the late writer Amos Oz, paired up to write a book which is “a nonfiction, speculative, raw, and occasionally playful attempt to say something a bit new on a topic of immense pedigree... the relationship of Jews with words.”

Set in a rural village prior to the creation of the state of Israel, The Blue Mountain describes a community of eastern European immigrants as they pioneer life in a new land. Narrated by Baruch, a grandson of one of the founding fathers of the village, the novel offers not only a fascinating account of the hardships experienced by the Jewish pioneers, but is also extremely funny and imaginative. It is arranged as a series of vignettes, narrated by Baruch, a mortician, who reflects on the many people he has buried in a remote village.

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The Blue Mountain. By Meir shalev. Translated by Hillel Halkin. Cannongate Books, 2001.

On this episode, Marcela features the poems of a fascinating writer whose pen name was Avot Yeshurun. He published his first book of poems in 1942, and his last book appeared in 1992, on the day before he died.

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“Memories are a House” by Avot Yeshurun. Translated by Leon Weiseltier, Poetry Magazine

“The Son of the Wall” by Avot Yeshurun. Translated by Leon Weiseltier, Poetry Magazine

“The Collection” by Avot Yeshurun. Translated by Harold Schimel, Poetry International Rotterdam

“A Day Shall Come” by Avot Yeshurun, translated by A. Z. Foreman in Poems Found in Translation

Marcela shares the second installment of a three-part podcast on Ayalet Tsabari’s important and beautiful memoir, The Art of Leaving. Although it was written in English, Tsabari’s native language is Hebrew. This episode gives us a glimpse of Israelis from Yemen, whose stories are so rarely told.

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Ayelet Tsabari, The Art of Leaving. Harper Collins, 2019.

On this episode, Marcela highlights The Lover, the first novel by A. B. Yehoshua, which he wrote in 1977. Yehoshua has been called the Israeli Faulkner, perhaps because of this novel. It is narrated from the point of view of each of its six main characters.

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The Lover by A. B. Yehoshua. Translated by Philip Simpson. Doubleday & Co., 1978.

https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/07/22/a-b-yehoshuas-green-seas-and-yellow-continents/

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2020/08/12/the-tunnel/

Meir Shalev has been featured on two previous episodes. Four Meals is his third of eight novels. He’s also published 7 works of nonfiction and 13 children’s books.

Four Meals is the story of Zayde, his enigmatic mother Judith, and her three lovers. When Judith arrives in a small, rural village in Palestine in the early 1930s, three men compete for her. Globerman, the cunning, coarse cattle dealer who loves women, money, and flesh Jacob, owner of hundreds of canaries and host to the four meals which lends the book its narrative structure, and Moshe, a widowed farmer, who gives Zayde his home.

During the four meals, which take place over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him.

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Four Meals, by Meir Shalev. Translated by Barbara Harshav, 2000.

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2020/07/29/meir-shalevs-my-wild-garden/

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2015/06/03/my-russian-grandmother-and-her-american-vacuum-cleaner-israel-in-translation/