We’re currently in the days of Sukkot, in which Jews everywhere dwell in a temporary structure called a Sukkah. One of the customs of Sukkot is inviting guests for meals in the Sukkah, close friends or needy strangers.

This week, Marcela reads from Amichai Chasson, who like many international poets encountering America, has written his Walt Whitman in the supermarket poem titled, “Rami Levy in Talpiot.”

Rosh Hashanah begins Sunday night—it is the beginning of the Jewish new year. To usher it in, we read an excerpt from Etgar Keret’s short story, “Ladder,” published in his brand-new English language collection, “Fly Already.”

Yesterday, Yonatan Berg’s first poetry collection ,“Frayed Light,” appeared in English translation. The poems in this collection gather his experiences of having been born to a religious family and later giving up the religious lifestyle, living in a settlement and then moving to Jerusalem, and military service, into heartfelt narrative poems.

Israeli elections are just one day shy of a week away, and now might be a good opportunity to examine the use of stereotypes to shut down important conversations that we might have, as we elect the people who will represent us.

Yesterday something wonderful happened—Etgar Keret’s newest short story collection, “Fly Already,” appeared in the world. This collection contains all the charm, the absurdities, the intelligence and surreal sense of Keret’s previous collections, but this time, most of the stories are somewhat longer.

“He didn’t call himself a writer, but rather a craftsman,” Haim Be’er says about Yossel Birstein. Today Marcela reads a story containing Birstein’s two great loves: Buses and Shoes.

On this week’s episode, Marcela excerpts from a fairy tale written by Leah Goldberg. She was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.

Naji Daher, a writer, poet, and playwright, was born in Nazareth and lives there. He has published more than fifty books, including six novels. Daher’s works have been translated into Hebrew, English and other languages, and he is the winner of the 2000 Prime Minister Prize.

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. “I always emphasize that I haven’t switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory.”