This podcast is dedicated to marriage—all the engaged couples with cold feet, newly married couples, and long-married couples who survived the wedding day. Marcela reads from and discusses Ronit Matalon’s last book written before her death, which was awarded Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize.

The novel, “The First Mrs. Rothschild,” by Sara Aharoni, tells the story of the wife of Meir Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the banking dynasty, and is written in the form of a personal journal.

Today we read from the story “The Shop on Main Street,” written by Ladislav Grosman, a Slovak novelist and screenwriter. It is both comical and tragic, and it asks the question—are we not our brother’s keeper? Who is our brother, anyway?

Set in contemporary Tel Aviv 48 hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the novel unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event.

What if, when you were in Kindergarten, your mother had given you a magic wand that allowed you to read people’s minds? Well, that’s just what happens in Orit Gidali’s book, “Nora the Mind Reader,” which will bring to a close our month of illustrated children’s books written by Israeli poets and writers.

No Israeli childhood experience would be complete without Leah Goldberg. Her story “Room for Rent” was published in 1948 and is one of the most classic children’s books available in Hebrew.

This month we continue our spotlight on beautifully written and illustrated Israeli children’s books translated into English with “The Heart Shaped Leaf,” by Shira Geffen and illustrated by David Polonsky.

Some of Marcela’s favorite children’s books have been written by well known poets and illustrated by some of Israel’s most talented artists. This episode features “The Mermaid in the Bathtub,” written by Nurit Zarchi and illustrated by Rutu Modan.

For the next few weeks, we will feature new, up-and-coming writers whose work have recently been translated to English. Nano Shabtai is known in Hebrew arts and letters as a poet, dramatist and director.

Ronny Someck’s poems in “The Milk Underground” deals with being a father of girls—adolescent and teenaged, young women. They explore the fraught territory of daughter’s bodies—body as dowry, body as a locus for pleasure and for betrayal, and the poems extend a fatherly embrace to the girls after their pained mother has broken off relations.