The Israeli novelist Irit Linur has translated books by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens into Hebrew, and crafted a TV mini-series based on Pride & Prejudice. She also famously canceled her subscription to Haaretz in an open letter blasting its “radical leftism” and “anti-Zionism . . . often turned into malevolent and stupid journalism.” Her own novels, although sometimes set to the backdrop of war, avoid the issues of politics and identity so often associated with Israeli literature. Noga Emanuel writes:
Incontestably, the triumvirate of the greatest [living Israeli] authors consists of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. Their novels and writings are read in America, Europe, and beyond, perhaps because a certain Israeli existential angst is organic to their oeuvre. As Tolstoy and Dostoevsky explored the darkest and deepest recesses of what it means to be Russian, so these authors of the Hebrew canon bore into the battered identity of the Israeli psyche. . . .
Perhaps this is why, when I stumbled upon Irit Linur’s first novel Shirat ha-Sirena (“The Siren’s Song”), it felt like I’d been touched by the Greek god Zephyr, that bringer of the fresh wind and the spring rains. In the irreverent voice of its mischievous thirty-something female lead, here was a novel—finally!—about the daily lives of Israelis as they pursue their own all-too-human projects.
Irit Linur’s novels have not been translated into English. Perhaps that is because her Israeli characters are thought not to be interesting to a readership weaned on the Yehoshua-Oz-Grossman school of national soul-searching.
More about: Arts & Culture, Charles Dickens, Haaretz, Israeli literature, Jewish literature