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The One Facing Us
A richly colored narrative of a flamboyant Jewish-Egyptian family and its dispersal across three continents, from Israel's most original new novelist. Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded Uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future--which include marriage to a cousin--and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; desperate intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrasts between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and finely polished.
The Sound of Our Steps
Gorgeously observed and emotionally powerful, The Sound of Our Steps is an inventive novel of immigration and exile from Ronit Matalon, a major voice in contemporary Israeli fiction In the beginning there was Lucette, who is the mother to three children—Sammy, a gentle giant, almost blind, but a genius with locks; Corinne, a flighty beauty who cannot keep a job; and "the child," an afterthought, who strives to make sense of her fractured Egyptian-Jewish immigrant family. Lucette's children would like a kinder, warmer home, but what they have is a government-issued concrete box, out in the thorns and sand on the outskirts of Tel Aviv; and their mother, hard-worn and hardscrabble, who cleans...
And the Bride Closed the Door
A young bride shuts herself up in a bedroom on her wedding day, refusing to get married. In this moving and humorous look at contemporary Israel, her family gathers outside the locked door, not knowing what to do. The harder they try to reach the defiant woman, the more Matti, the despairing groom, empathises with her, and the more convinced he is that her refusal should be respected. But what, exactly, ought to be respected? Is this merely a case of cold feet? A feminist statement? A mourning ritual for a lost sister?
Bliss
Set in Tel Aviv and Paris, a powerful story of love, friendship, regret, and war, as current as today's headlines Ronit Matalon's fiction has been praised as "haunting," "inventive," "refreshingly daring." Now in a graceful, illuminating second novel, she tells a provocative story of two loves, two partings, two worlds, two women: Ofra and Sarah. When Ofra is called from Tel Aviv to France to attend the funeral of her beloved cousin Michel, she escapes a life lived vicariously through Sarah, her oldest friend, a photographer and political activist. In Paris, Ofra enters the embrace of her French family and the intimate world of domestic life, while Sarah, in Tel Aviv, drifts even farther fro...
And the Bride Closed the Door
A young bride shuts herself up in a bedroom on her wedding day, refusing to get married. In this moving and humorous look at contemporary Israel and the chaotic ups and downs of love everywhere, her family gathers outside the locked door, not knowing what to do. The bride's mother has lost a younger daughter in unclear circumstances. Her grandmother is hard of hearing, yet seems to understand her better than anyone. A male cousin who likes to wear women’s clothes and jewelry clings to his grandmother like a little boy. The family tries an array of unusual tactics to ensure the wedding goes ahead, including calling in a psychologist specializing in brides who change their mind and a ladder ...
Keys to the Garden
One hundred stories, poems and essays by Oriental Jews on subjects ranging from race to political allegiance. One story is on a professor's wife who, unable to conceive, takes a student to bed.
Dreaming the Actual
This book introduces the powerful and provocative new fiction and poetry of Israel's women writers to an English-speaking audience. Read together, the stories and poems in this book will help to create a more sophisticated understanding of Middle Eastern passions and realities, and will foster a wealth of discussion about the meanings of homeland, exile, and diaspora; women's sexuality and spirituality; gender roles; the legacy of the Holocaust; the tensions and reconciliations of religion and secular life; the effects of war; and the power of memory. In her introduction, Miriyam Glazer vividly reconstructs the diversities, tensions, and complexity of current Israeli literature, and the book reflects the multiculturality of modern-day Israel by including stories and poems originally written in Arabic, Russian, Hebrew, and English. Brief biographical and critical introductions are provided for each writer, and the book features specially commissioned and new translations of twenty stories and seventy-five poems, many available here for the first time in English.
Amos Oz’s Two Pens
The Hebrew novelist and political essayist, Amoz Oz (1939-2018), arguably Israel’s leading intellectual, was fond of describing himself as using two different pens - the first used to write works of prose and fiction, and the other to criticize the government and advocate for a political change. This volume revisits the two pens parable. It brings together scholars from various disciplines who assess Amos Oz's dual role in Israeli culture and society as an immensely popular novelist and a leading public intellectual. Next to offering an intellectual portrait, the chapters in this book highlight some of Oz's seminal works, examine their reception, evaluate key political and literary debates he was involved in, as well as trace some of the connections between the two realms of his activity. This book is a fascinating read for students, researchers, and academics of Israeli politics, history, literature, and culture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Israeli History and are accompanied by a new afterword by the Israeli novelist Lilah Nethanel.
The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity (paperback)
This book offers new perspectives on Israel’s evolving Mediterranean identity, which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in the region. It explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life, and analyzes ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity and polical realities.
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt examines the link between cosmopolitanism in Egypt, from the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, and colonialism. While it has been widely noted that such a relationship exists, the nature and impact of this dynamic is often overlooked. Taking a theoretical, literary and historical approach, the author argues that the notion of the cosmopolitan is inseparable from, and indebted to, its foundation in empire. Since the late 1970s a number of artistic works have appeared that represent the diversity of ethnic, national, and religious communities present in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period of direct and ...
