[button style=’blue’ url=’tlv1.fm/israelintranslation’ target=’_blank’]Subscribe To The Podcast[/button]

This week Jews celebrate Shavuot, the celebration of harvest and receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. To commemorate the festival, host Marcela Sulak reads from Israeli author Michal Govrin’s novel The Name in Barbara Harshav’s translation. Shavuot is a corollary to Passover, when Jews begin counting the seven weeks of Omer. In the story, that tradition is mentioned as its main character Amalia, a weaver and daughter of Holocaust survivors, takes refuge in an ultra-orthodox seminary. 

Here is an excerpt from Govrin’s novel:

“Sometimes it seems as if nothing had ever happened, as if everything were only a vision going off, evaporating in silence, swept away beyond the border of the end of the Counting, mixing us up together in a wind bellowing from the jaw of the shofar, confusing us in an impeccable unity. As if everything is already so far away from what will be done perhaps at the dawn of hte Shavuot, movements of leaving that will suddenly hasten, binding the pages, lifting the Torah curtain. Going…”

Text:
The Name, Michael Govrin. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Riverhead Books,1998.

Music:
Csardas – Vittorio Monti

Producer: Ariella Plachta
Technical producer: Itai Shelem