Israeli author Nathan Shaham, who gave separate English and Hebrew readings from his 1987 novel The Rosendorf Quartet in Toronto recently, is amazed that the book has become a bestseller, won prestigious literary prizes, and been translated into several languages, including Chinese and Russian. “I never tried to have this book published abroad,” said the…
Tag: novel
Biblical novel set in 1st century
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Andrew Sanders, a resident of both Toronto and Haifa, is the author of a new work of historical fiction, Hanina My Son: A Novel of the First Century (Gefen, 2001), which has already appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. Hanina My Son is set during a time of fighting between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the…
Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers
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Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
Troupe of Israeli characters trapped in low farce
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Set in modern Israel, Orly Castel-Bloom’s latest novel Human Parts (translation by Dalyu Bilu, Key Porter Books) follows a troupe of characters around their ordinary lives as the nation struggles with an assortment of blights and curses that almost seem like divine punishments. In Castel-Bloom’s version of Israel, as in real life, there’s a grueling…
Appelfeld’s ‘Age of Wonders’
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Addressing the question “Is it possible to write fiction about the Holocaust?”, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld told a large gathering in Toronto recently that man’s nature compels him “to express not only his joy but also his pain” and that concentration camp inmates sometimes sang songs that “were as mighty as the suffering from which…
The Origin of Ivanhoe’s Rebecca
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Scottish novelist Walter Scott’s portraits of the Jew Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca in his classic medieval romance Ivanhoe (1819) provides English literature with its strongest positive counterbalance to the stereotypical conception of the Jew as a dark misanthropic being along the lines of Shakespeare’s Shylock. Thackeray, who grew up with Ivanhoe, described…
Jonathan Rosen: Eve’s Apple
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It’s easy to see why Cynthia Ozick called this first novel by New York writer Jonathan Rosen “the work of a natural master.” For one thing, Rosen writes like an angel. For another, his main characters exude a gentleness and emotional sensitivity that is rarely caught on the page. In this deeply insightful psychological detective…
Obit: Chaim Potok
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Many astute readers consider Chaim Potok, the New York-born, rabbinically-trained author who died last July, as being categorically unlike most other notable Jewish scribes of his generation because his books open a unique window into the Orthodox Jewish world. While acclaimed American writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth tended to write…
The Dream of Scipio, by Ian Pears
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British author Iain Pears has created a literary character named Gersonides, based on the actual medieval French Jewish philosopher of the same name, known to Talmudists as Levi ben Gershom or by the acronym Ralbag. The character appears in Pears’s new novel, The Dream of Scipio (Knopf Canada, 2002), itself a complex intellectualized study of…
Family Saga from Erica Jong
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American writer Erica Jong, best known for her sexually explicit 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying, flew into town peddling her seventh novel, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (HarperCollins, 1997), a four-generational family saga stretching between Russia circa 1880 and America in 2005. “I was never much interested in my roots until I…
