From the Myth of Hannah Senesh to Obsessive Love: Writers’ Picks for Book Week
Shiri Shavit is a writer, poet and literary editor ספר שמעניק אפשרויות: Yaniv Iczkovitz on “The Art of Seeing Things”
In recent years, it seems that the genre of personal essays has taken a small but significant step from the margins to the center of literary discourse. This is a genre that is not quite prose and not quite memoir, but a more intimate form of expression, a kind of thought born out of experience, out of observation, out of a small moment that suddenly expands into a large question. “The Art of Seeing Things,” published by Nine Lives, is a collection of essays by very different writers. Among them are mythic creators such as Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, לצד contemporary voices.
● The secular sucker meets Jesus: “Hanoch the Doctor from Karmiel” touches on people’s blind spots ● To constrain the chaotic state into short lines: what wars do to poets
The rich variety in this collection is the secret of its power, because there is no single way to see things. There is no one voice here seeking to explain the world to us, but a collection of gazes, each illuminating a different corner of existence. “I am a better guest than a host, and so I also felt more comfortable as a reader than as a writer,” Virginia Woolf writes in one of the essays, a sentence that lights up the whole book. Above all, this is a book about the possibility of seeing our everyday existence anew and expanding it.
“The Art of Seeing Things” | Various writers and translators “The Art of Seeing Things,” by various writers and translators, Nine Lives Publishing, 200 pages Publisher: Nine Lives Pages: 200
If inside within inside mother: Noa Susana Morg on “Self-Portrait of My Mother”
I experienced Yaara Shachori’s new memoir in a special way, as I read it two months after giving birth to my first daughter and becoming a mother myself. Its title contains a contradiction that immediately intrigued me. By definition, a self-portrait is a work by an artist representing his or her own image, whereas here the mother’s self-portrait is drawn by her daughter. And yet the title suits this memoir, because it describes a paradoxical process, a daughter seeking to speak מתוך her mother and tell her story, while all the while the mother is the one speaking through the daughter as an inner voice that does not let go. Shachori leads readers through a glittering hall of mirrors in which an endless illusion takes place, in which the mother appears through the daughter, and the daughter through the mother. Is this not the very heart of the complex bond between mothers and daughters?
Shachori wonderfully depicts her mother, a stormy woman of many faces and souls, and tells the story she could not tell in her lifetime. Here, a beautiful and layered literary act is carried out, overflowing with truth, breathing life into the mother and making possible what seemed impossible after death, repair.
“Self-Portrait of My Mother” | Yaara Shachori “Self-Portrait of My Mother” by Yaara Shachori, Keter Publishing, 264 pages Publisher: Keter Pages: 264
For all the obsessive lovers: Shehara Blau on “Shin”
Anyone who has ever loved obsessively, who hasn’t?, will be unable not to identify with the book’s protagonist, a married writer who becomes attached to his neighbor, Shin, a divorced, enigmatic woman. Shuali describes this growing infatuation, which begins with an incidental encounter in the stairwell and ends with Shin becoming the center of the writer’s life. The process is predictable, and the reader watches it like a slow-motion car crash. There is that moment in the hotel, when the writer, who is on a writing retreat, cannot write even a small letter because everything loses its flavor without her. Or that party that is completely ruined because the phone is burning in his pocket and the message from Shin is slow in coming. Or the realization that he sees the whole world through her eyes and his consciousness is utterly erased, because everything is only Shin, and without her, emptiness. By the end of the reading, after I had accompanied this story of love, if it was love, for hours, I felt that I had gone through a process of purification and cleansing. I could almost hear Daria’s voice saying, “You are forgiven, you are forgiven, you are forgiven,” to me and to all the obsessive lovers in the world.
“Shin” | Daria Shuali “Shin” by Daria Shuali, Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, 208 pages Publisher: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Pages: 208
A bar mitzvah ceremony that gets out of control: Netali Gvirts on “Mazel Tov”
It is not easy to be a boy, nor to become a man. It is especially challenging if you are a queer Israeli boy, and you have to do this at a public, crowded bar mitzvah ceremony, and you have a mother who drinks like a fish, and a father who has returned to religion and did not bother to come, and a cousin who is performing oral sex on the balcony with an Arab waiter, and the critical security situation is spiraling out of control at the same time. The bold, funny, and highly sensual debut novel by Eili Zuzovski reminded me at times of Jonathan Safran Foer in his early days, made me laugh and broke my heart. The book first appeared in English, where it was warmly received, and was then translated by the author, who added one chapter especially for us, the Israeli audience.
“Mazel Tov” | Eili Zuzovski “Mazel Tov” by Eili Zuzovski, Am Oved, 208 pages Publisher: Am Oved Pages: 208
Young heroes with big dreams: Shahar Kaminitz on “The World Is a Wedding”
Every reader yearns for the moment when they encounter a staggering text unlike anything they have read until then. Such is the story collection by the brilliant writer Delmore Schwartz, who was almost unknown here, although he influenced an entire generation of major Jewish American writers. Schwartz lived a turbulent life and died young, lonely and destitute, but his stories are delivered with remarkable restraint, in an almost documentary style. Emotion is only hinted at in a few sentences, and those sentences strike the reader. The stories take place during the Great Depression, in the 1930s. Their young protagonists, intellectuals in their own eyes, have great ambitions and far-reaching dreams, but they never get what they want. Sometimes reality slaps them in the face, and most of the time they are hopeless from the start. What remains is to live lives of idleness and endless self-examination, measuring their status against that of others. Failure does not bother them as long as their friends are in worse shape. The protagonists pass their time in long conversations, so instead of a traditional plot the reader enjoys brilliant dialogues that at times seem to lead nowhere. But again and again, Schwartz leaves us, almost incidentally, with a great human or social insight.
“The World Is a Wedding” | Delmore Schwartz “The World Is a Wedding” by Delmore Schwartz, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 263 pages Publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Pages: 263
To be a mother here: Shiri Shavit on “Watermark”
The past few years have posed absurd challenges to Israeli parenthood, ones the heart cannot normalize. How do you explain the word hostages to small children? How do you steer sanity between rockets and sirens? How do you create a routine when none exists? How do you explain that being a surviving captive is actually the best-case scenario? Hadas Gilad is an experienced poet with an exceptional sensitivity to her personal, particular place in the chair of parenthood. The same place that, even in unfamiliar reading, instantly becomes relevant to everyone, universal. Parenting in a time of war brings with it pain, unthinkable responsibility, stoic gratitude, guilt and fear. But despite the important subjects that might sound heavy, Gilad’s poems come together into beautiful musicality. In her new book, “Watermark,” the poet offers a comprehensive, compassionate and very clear-eyed treatment of the Israeli mother’s gaze from October 7 until today, on the reality that is our life. And she does not write only about parenthood. She also writes about how to be a daughter, and a sister, and a sexual being, and a woman in the world. The result is wonderful, powerful and thought-provoking.
“Do not ask what befell us / from the valley of death, we came as a shadow of life / the soul sank, the body was broken / now we are nursing / and forgetting the hours / present and hidden / with all our might / do not ask, that is / do not let go of the question / for a primal void has opened in us / and there is no going back.”
“Watermark” | Hadas Gilad “Watermark” by Hadas Gilad, Shtayim Publishing, 160 pages Publisher: Shtayim Publishing Pages: 160
Bringing Hannah Senesh into the here and now: Ashkol Nevo on “Looking for a Human Being”
“Looking for a Human Being” is the second book by Matti Friedman that I have read, after “Who by Fire.” And it happens again: although this is a true story, whose main details are known to me, and whose ending is predictable from the outset, I read it breathlessly. And with a pounding heart. “Looking for a Human Being” takes the myth of Hannah Senesh and the Yishuv paratroopers, breaks it down into its component parts, and builds it anew. They had no chance of succeeding in their original mission, Friedman tells us, but in the eyes of history they succeeded in another mission, a more literary one. The research work here is impressive, but even more impressive, and at times truly moving, is the way Friedman manages to connect the historical story with our lives here and now.
“Looking for a Human Being” | Matti Friedman “Looking for a Human Being” by Matti Friedman, Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, 256 pages Publisher: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Pages: 256
Hebrew Book Week. Celebrating 100 Tel Aviv: June 10 to 18, Sarona Park, Sunday to Wednesday 17:00 to 22:00, Thursday 17:00 to 23:00 Jerusalem: June 10 to 20, Safra Square, Sunday to Wednesday 17:00 to 22:00, Thursday 17:00 to 23:00, Saturday night 21:00 to 00:00
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