Israel In Translation

No Israeli childhood experience would be complete without Leah Goldberg. Her story “Room for Rent” was published in 1948 and is one of the most classic children’s books available in Hebrew. Shmuel Katz’s illustrations bring Goldberg’s words to life in both the original and in Jessica Setbon’s 2017 translation. Leah Goldberg born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), in 1911, moved to Mandate Palestine in 1935. Well known during her lifetime as a poet, author, and translator, she is remembered as one of Israel's great authors and literary scholars. She earned a PhD in Semitic languages from Bonn University and helped found Hebrew University's Department of Comparative Literature, which she chaired until her death in 1970. Previous Episodes on Leah Goldberg: https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/08/21/a-fairy-tale-by-leah-goldberg/ https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/04/02/i-have-been-planted-with-the-pines-israel-in-translation/ Text: Leah Goldberg, Room for Rent. Illustrated by Shmuel Ka

This month we continue our spotlight on beautifully written and illustrated Israeli children’s books translated into English with The Heart Shaped Leaf, by Shira Geffen and illustrated by David Polonsky. The story opens with eerily beautiful illustrations of a very rare day in Israel: an overcast sky dotted with yellow leaves; tree branches are bent in the wind, and a cobalt blue school building glows out of the gray. The book's main character Alona makes her way home from school. Text: The Heart Shaped Leaf, by Shira Geffen. Illustrated by David Polonsky. Green Bean Press. Green Bean Books

Some of Marcela's favorite children’s books in Hebrew have been written by well known poets and illustrated by some of Israel’s most talented graphic artists. This episode features The Mermaid in the Bathtub, written by the poet, essayist and writer, Nurit Zarchi, and illustrated by Rutu Modan. Translated by Tal Goldfajn, and published by Restless Books. Previous podcast on Rutu Modan: https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2015/08/20/rutu-modans-graphic-touch/ Previous podcasts on Nurit Zarchi: https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/05/22/nurit-zarchis-the-plague/ https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2015/07/15/nurit-zarchis-baby-blues/ Text: The Mermaid in the Bathtub by Nurit Zarchi. Illustrations by Rutu Modan. Translated by Tal Goldfajn. Yonder (Restless Books) 2019 Music: Millie, “Mermaid in the Bathtub” from Miracle Milk

For the next few weeks, we will feature work published in The Ilanot Review’s special collaborative issue with Granta Hebrew, focusing on new, up-and-coming writers. And so it is a pleasure to introduce the young writer Nano Shabtai, translated by Maya Klein. Shabtai is already known in Hebrew arts and letters as a poet, dramatist and director. She was born in Jerusalem, to a large family, where she attended the High School of the Arts, majoring in theatre. She studied acting and directing at the Kibbutz College in Tel Aviv, and completed the screenwriting track at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School. Since 2005 she has worked as a fiction reader for an Israeli publishing house, and as a book editor and reviewer. Her first book of poems, The Iron Girl, was published in 2006. She’s published a collection of short stories, children stories and a few plays. Text: Corn by Nano Shabtai, translated by Maya Klein.

Many poems in Ronny Someck's The Milk Underground deal with being a father of girls—adolescent and teenaged, young women. They explore the fraught territory of daughter’s bodies—body as dowry, body as a locus for pleasure and for betrayal, and the poems extend a fatherly embrace to the girls after their pained mother has broken off relations. Previous Someck Episode Text: Ronny Someck, The Milk Underground, translated by Hana Inbar and Robert Manaster. White Pine Press, 2015.

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, served in the Israeli army, and travelled extensively throughout South East Asia, Europe and North America. In 1998 Ayelet moved to Vancouver, Canada, where she studied film and photography. She directed two documentary films, one of which won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival. As an Israeli writer, she is unusual in that she usually writes in English, not Hebrew, though the essay we are featuring today called Barefoot and Enlightened was originally written in Hebrew. Text: Ayelet Tsabari. “Barefoot and Enlightened,” translated by the author and Janice Weizman.

We’re currently in the days of Sukkot, in which Jews everywhere dwell (or at least take their meals) in a temporary structure called a Sukkah to commemorate the forty years of wandering in the desert, and also because Sukkot is an agricultural festival as well, and in ancient times people lived in temporary shelters as they harvested. One of the customs of Sukkot is inviting guests for meals into the Sukkah, close friends or needy strangers, as well as the supernatural —“Ushpizin” is Aramaic for “guests.” Today we’ll hear poems that feature these ushpizin, from Orit Gidali’s book, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. The Selected poems of Orit Gidali. Previous Podcast Text: Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Select Poems of Orit Gidali. Translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas Press, 2016.

Yesterday, Yonatan Berg’s first poetry collection appeared in Joanna Chen’s English translation, Frayed Light, published by the Wesleyan Poetry Series. The poems in this collection gather all of these experiences—religion, settlements and the Palestinian neighbors they displace or live next to, military service—into heartfelt narrative poems. Berg was born in 1981 in Jerusalem to a religious family and grew up in Psagot, a settlement in the West Bank. After serving in the military, Berg gave up the religious lifestyle. He now lives with his wife, the poet and essayist Geula Gertz in Jerusalem, with their young daughter. Text: Frayed Light by Yonatan Berg, translated by Joanna Chen. Wesleyan Poetry Series, Sept. 2019. Previous Podcast Featuring Yonatan Berg

Israeli elections are just one day shy of a week away, and now might be a good opportunity to examine the use of stereotypes to shut down important conversations that we might have, as we elect the people who will represent us. Today, Marcela reads a lyrical essay from a graduate student in poetry at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Her name is Hiba Ghannan, and this piece will appear in her thesis entitled “Leftovers.” Text: “My Essay on Stereotypes” by Hiba Ghannan

Yesterday something wonderful happened—Etgar Keret’s newest short story collection, Fly Already, appeared in the world, in English, translated by a ridiculously talented cast of translators. This collection contains all the charm, the absurdities, the intelligence and surreal sense of Keret’s previous collections, but this time, most of the stories are somewhat longer. Today, Marcela reads the shortest piece in the book, and the final story, Evolution of a Breakup. Text: Fly Already, by Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, et. al. Riverhead Books, Sept. 2019.

Today Marcela reads a story containing the writer Yossel Birstein’s two great loves: Buses and Shoes. Birstein was born in Poland in 1920. Having moved to Melbourne, Australia and later to Israel, he changed languages, continents, countries, towns, as well as professions, more than once or twice. Not many people work both as a shepherd and a national archivist in their lives. He wrote most of his life in Yiddish and began to write Hebrew later. “He didn't call himself a writer, but rather a craftsman,” Haim Be'er says about Yossel Birstein. Be'er continues: “We would be walking in Jerusalem and talking about our profession. He said that he had learned to sew from his father. That if a thread in a shoe tore, you had to start everything from scratch, because where would the knot be? If you make it on the upper part of the shoe, it will be visible, and if you make it on the sole, it will make walking uncomfortable. In his writing, he realized this ability to connect the threads without the stitch being visible.”

On this week's episode, Marcela excerpts from a fairy tale written by Leah Goldberg. She was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature. Text: The Rose Garden (a Fairy Tale) by Leah Goldberg. Translated by Leanne Raday.

Naji Daher, a writer, poet, and playwright, was born in Nazareth and lives there. He works as a creative writing teacher and writes literature reviews. He has published more than fifty books, including six novels. Daher's works have been translated into Hebrew, English and other languages. He is the winner of the 2000 Prime Minister Prize. Text: “Nightly Lament” by Naji Daher. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark and published in The Short Story Project.

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. To Think: A River, her first book of poems in Hebrew, in translation from the original Russian, appeared in 2000. The most recent of three volumes written in Hebrew, Translucent, was published in 2017. She’s published seven collections in Russian. In a 2003 interview with Lisa Katz, Singer notes: I always emphasize that I haven't switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory. It seemed to happen one way, but then I remembered that the process actually began much earlier, when someone tried to translate a poem of mine [into Hebrew] and I didn't like the result and I started to write it myself and I saw that it was impossible to translate it as it was in the original, and not worthwhile, because what works i

On Monday, the literary world lost one of its bright lights with the passing of Tuvia Ruebner. He was 95 years old, and passed in his home on Kibbutz Merhavia, where he had lived since arrival from Nazi occupied Bratislava as a teenager in 1942. He loved his home on the kibbutz so much that he even refusing Lea Goldberg’s invitation to move to Jerusalem and work with her at the Hebrew University. Born in 1924 as Kurt Erich in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Ruebner grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family. Nazi race laws forced him to leave high school before graduating. In 1941 he immigrated to Israel with the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. His family members, who remained behind, were murdered at Auschwitz. The poem “Postcard from Pressburg-Bratislava,” found in the volume “Late Beauty,” is his goodbye to his home town and its devastation during the war. Text: In the Illuminated Dark. Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. Translated and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back. Hebrew Union College Press, 2014. L

Israel Bar Kohav was born in Israel, the grandchild of Russian immigrants who were among the founders of the city of Tel Aviv. His ancestors took part in what is known as the Second Aliyah, an influential, ideological wave of immigration that took place between 1904 and 1914. Bar Kohav himself grew up in Givatayim and Ramat Gan, in the greater Tel Aviv area, and his poem refer to these areas. One of the most predominant themes in his work is childhood. He’s written about this period in nearly each of his 11 books. The writing is not nostalgic or romantic, but often filled with the terror and anxiety of a child confronting uncontrollable and enigmatic forces. Text: Israel Bar Kohav on Poetry International Rotterdam.

Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s work attempts to capture, not just the mind at work, but also the spirit, the soul, as it becomes aware of itself as an entity both anchored in, and apart from, the body. Likewise, the body is often viewed as a physical object, one of many that occupy the world. Lali Tsipi Michaeli was born in the Georgian republic and immigrated to Israel with her parents at the age of seven. She studied comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University, and returned to Georgia in the early 1990s as a Hebrew teacher for the Jewish Agency. From 2005-2007, she worked in Denmark, editing human rights texts. She currently teaches Hebrew language at Ben Gurion University. Text: Poems by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin and Alexa Christopher-Daniels in Poetry International Rotterdam “Sketches of Tel Aviv” by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin. Mediterranean Poetry

The poetry of Adi Assis injects us with the distress that consumes his days and nights. His laments madden us as we find ourselves rare witness to circumstances usually hidden from view, and even more profoundly, to the hidden reaches of the poet's heart. Podcast on Anat Levin’s poetry Text: Various poems by Adi Assis from Poetry International Rotterdam