Six Israeli Novellas

This is the most representative anthology yet published of modern Hebrew novellas, a book that will provide any reader with a fine overview of the best fiction that small but vibrant country has to offer. Included here are novellas by six of Israel’s most important and honored contemporary writers. Aharon Appelfeld’s In the Isles of St. George tells of a fugitive black marketeer hiding on a desolate Italian island, who finds his past, his Jewishness, and his very sense of identity resolved. In Yani on the Mountain, David Grossman explores the psychological impact of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on a young generation of Israelis living in a Mount Sinai army base in its final days before demolition. Ruth Almog’s Shrinking lyrically portrays the loneliness and frustrations of a middle-aged heroine whose longing for human contact is thwarted by her stifling bond to her father. Also included are Yaakov Shabtai’s Uncle Peretz Takes Flight, a grotesque portrait of one man’s cowardice, in the vein of Shalom Aleichem; Yehudit Hendel’s Small Change, about the interaction between the paranoid experience of an Israeli woman abroad and a complex father-daughter relationship; and Benjamin Tammuz’s My Brother, in which one brother’s selfish conquests are contrasted to the other’s passive, but ultimately more sinister, altruism. In the words of editor Gershon Shaked, these novellas show modern Israeli fiction at its richest and most diversified, with a character all its own.