This book catapulted Ari Shavit into the international spotlight. It was a New York Times best seller and listed by the Times in its “100 Notable Books of 2013.” The Economist named it as one of the best books of 2013 and it received the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award in History from the Jewish Book Council. It also won the Natan Book Award.

On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Yaniv Iczkovits’s novel “The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann by the Hand of her Sister Fanny.”

Today, Marcela shares the second installment of a three-part podcast on Ayalet Tsabari’s “The Art of Leaving.”

“Nguyen’s poetry may circulate in the Anglophone literary market as part of an increasingly visible Vietnamese literary diaspora… And yet, introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting it entirely overshadow her work.”

Poet Lali Tsipi Michaeli says, “fear is what I felt as a child every time I drove with my parents in a car on Hayarkon Street. As the car was about to reach the “crazy house”, I hid on the back seat floor and closed my eyes tightly. The house troubled the girl I was.”

“The Memory Monster” takes the form of a report by the narrator, a young Israeli Holocaust scholar, written to his superior from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, and raises ethical questions about the struggle to cope with the memory of the Holocaust

School has begun, and once again children are learning how to read, encountering the alphabet for the first time. Hopefully it is a pleasant and magical time, but here is a story of a boy who feared his teacher, although he loved the alphabet.

As we labor under unbelievable pressures and uncertainties of the pandemic, especially women who have children at home, it might make us feel a little better to see that, back in 2018, the writer Tehila Hakimi already envisioned what work would be like in 2020.

It’s Sukkot again! This holiday, Marcela focuses on the agricultural aspects — the festival was originally connected to the harvest. And to help us along is Rachel Bluwstein, Israel’s farmer-poet.

Amidst the holidays, Marcela celebrates by reading an excerpt from Ayelet Tsabari’s newly published memoir, “The Art of Leaving”