In 2021, the Irish author Sally Rooney—whose works have been published in China—turned down an offer to have her novel Normal People translated into Hebrew on the grounds that she deems Israel an especially evil country. Now she has joined some 400 other writers in calling for a mass boycott of the Israeli publishing industry. Lionel Shriver, an accomplished novelist and essayist herself, considers this literary drive to conformity:
Because these are writers, you’d think their best route to making their feelings known would be, um, to write. After all, the impulse to form a mob is surely antithetical to the impulse to record your thoughts in text in private and to have your unique voice broadly heard.
I’m not so vain as to imagine that my refusal to have my novels translated into Hebrew would be crushing for the Israeli publishing industry or cripplingly disappointing for the country’s reading public. I’m delighted to learn whenever I’ve secured a translation deal, so in case any Israeli editors are reading this, allow me to go on the record: the Hebrew translation rights to my last novel are still available. And in case you might be reading this, Sally, whether I sell Hebrew translation rights is none of your business.
Besides, to the degree that my fiction is the best expression of my own larger political outlook, disseminating my novels as far and widely as possible constitutes the optimal method of promoting that outlook. Publishing in translation sure beats prissily refusing to allow my precious sentences to be corrupted by the language of Jews.
Boycotts are about withholding, and for writers, boycotts are about silence as well as about silencing. It would be more in keeping with Rooney’s and Roy’s profession for these authors to put their anguish about Israel into words rather than to mutely withdraw their work and pressure other authors to shut up.
Shriver herself has a talent for expressing her ideas, and the entire article is worth reading, even if it strikes one sole false note: “like most Western literary subcultures these days, Israel’s is predominantly left wing, so the Rooney brigade is seeking to punish its natural political allies.” While a fair share of Israeli literati belongs to the country’s political left, and may oppose the current government or its conduct of the war, they are not necessarily Rooney’s political allies. After all, they dissent from the global left on at least one key issue: most, I would wager, don’t think Israel is irredeemably evil or that it should be destroyed in an orgy of blood and cruelty.
More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Literature