Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Isra-Isle
WORK NOTES: trans by Jessica Cohen
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1954
WEBSITE:
CITY: Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv
STATE:
COUNTRY: Israel
NATIONALITY: Israeli
http://www.ithl.org.il/page_13244 * http://dramaisrael.org/en/playwright/semel-nava/ * http://www.bookaholic.ro/interview-nava-semel-talking-about-the-jewish-tragedy-and-the-act-of-remembering.html * http://www.israelispeakers.co.il/110277/Nava-Semel-1
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1954, in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel; daughter of Yitzhak and Mimi Artzi; married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Tel Aviv University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Translator, scriptwriter, and author. Worked variously as a media producer, art critic, and journalist.
Yad Vashem, board of governors; Massuah–Institute for Holocaust Studies, board of directors.
AWARDS:American National Jewish Book Award for Children’s Literature, 1990, for Becoming Gershona; Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award, 1994; Austrian Best Radio Drama Award, 1996; Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize, 1996; Book of the Year Award, 1998, for Who Stole the Show?; Rosenblum Prize for Stage Arts, 2005; Woman of the Year in Literature of the City of Tel Aviv, 2007; Educators and Scientists Association Award, 2010; One of the Best Seven Prize, Radio Germany, 2010, for Beginner’s Love.
WRITINGS
Also scriptwriter of theatrical works, including An Old Woman, 1983; The Last Winter, 1983; The Child behind the Eyes, 1986; An Old Man, 2003; Sneaking into the Bible, 2007; There in the World That Is New, 2008; and Ballad of Three Prophets, 2008.
Writer of radio dramas, including Hunger, 1989. Writer of screenplays, including Saying Kaddish and Leave, 1999; Thousand Calories, 2002; and Whereabouts Unknown, 2010. Also the author of Poems of Pregnancy and Birth, 1985; Hat of Glass, 1985; Night Games, 1994; Paper Bride, 1996; Who Stole the Show?, 1997; Night Poems, 2000; The Courage to Be Afraid, 2005; Beginner’s Love, 2006; and Australian Wedding, 2009.
The novel Becoming Gershona and the children’s book Who Stole the Show? were adapted for television, the latter in 1999; Flying Lessons was adapted for both opera and television; And the Rat Laughed was adapted for opera, 2005.
SIDELIGHTS
Nava Semel has cultivated a noteworthy career throughout Israel. She is known as a prominent media producer and writer of stage plays. She has also penned several books in various genres and for audiences of all age groups. And the Rat Laughed, one of her published books, became a long-running theatrical opera. Semel has garnered a large assortment of awards for her work, including the Literary Woman of the Year from Tel Aviv and the American National Jewish Book Award for Children’s Literature. Semel’s work is largely informed by her experiences as a Jewish woman as well as the experiences of her parents, who lived through the Holocaust.
Another of Semel’s novels, Isra Isle, takes place in a divergent universe where Mordecai Manuel Noah, a renowned Jewish writer, succeeded with his plans for Grand Island. Noah acquired this land in the 1800s with the intent of creating a private Jewish sanctuary, yet in the real world, his plans fell through. The novel’s much more idyllic setting forms the backdrop of a larger mystery. In charge of solving this mystery is Simon T. Lenox, a detective and Native American who arrives in Grand Island—now named “Isra Isle”—in search of the disappeared Liam Emanuel. Emanuel is an immigrant from Israel, and his whereabouts since his arrival on American shores have been so far untraceable. Emanuel is also one of Mordecai Manuel Noah’s direct descendants, and Noah’s legacy is Emanuel’s birthright. In the process of finding Emanuel, Lenox is entangled in the culture and history of Isra Isle. The novel jumps back in forth in time, between the events surrounding Noah’s possession of Grand Island and the contemporary customs and cultures of his paradise, Isra Isle. In the process, Semel delves into what this geographical change could have meant for the development of Jewish culture.
“Semel explores issues of global importance—such as terrorism, prejudice, and politics—in this singular, thought-provoking novel,” remarked one Publishers Weekly contributor. Forward contributor Gavriel D. Rosenfeld commented: “In the end, the novel’s greatest significance lies in articulating the growing interest among many Jews in exploring alternate paths of Jewish historical development.” On the Speculative Fiction in Translation web site, Rachel Cordasco remarked: “Semel’s true achievement with this book is her seemingly effortless ability to demolish the walls we instinctively put up in our minds between the ‘past,’ the ‘present,’ and the ‘future.’” Ranen Omer-Sherman, a reviewer on the Jewish Book Council website, remarked that the book, “with Jessica Cohen’s sparkling translation, which delivers all the wit, lyrical power, and tender warmth of the Hebrew original—offers as haunting and thoroughly entertaining a story about the ancient and modern quest for home and belonging as one could hope for.”
Flying Lessons tells the tale of the young Hadara, a preteen girl who resides in rural Israel. She is enveloped in mourning for her late mother and finds both her heavy emotions and life in her village to be suffocating. She is the sole child in her village with a mother who is no longer alive, and this fact of life leaves her feeling isolated from everyone else around her. She can only wish for escape, her dreams of which come in the form of taking flight from her home. She comes to confide her wishes in Monsieur Maurice, a craftsman. Hadara finds solidarity with Monsieur Maurice, who is also alone in the world. Just as Hadara is the sole person with no mother, Monsieur Maurice is the sole person in their village who can make shoes. Monsieur Maurice indulges Hadara’s fantasies with narratives of his life as a circus performer and within his home country, as well as their secrets to achieving the flight Hadara wishes for. He also tells Hadara her dreams have the chance of coming true. After months of studying and waiting, Hadara becomes motivated to turn her dreams to reality by a drought that sweeps over her village, threatening their yearly crops of citrus fruits. She ends up leaping from a tree in an attempt to fly. However, her efforts end in failure. She receives not the chance to escape, but a fractured leg and a visit to the hospital. As Hadara recuperates, Monsieur Maurice vanishes from the village, a fact Hadara discovers later on. The news fills Hadara with resentment, until she makes a startling discovery about Monsieur Maurice’s anecdotes and his past. These revelations give her a brand new perspective on her life and her future. “Semel’s sensitive story, told in poetic language, is given an eloquent and masterful translation,” wrote Hanna B. Zeiger in an issue of Horn Book. Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman remarked: “What comes across best is the sense of daily life among the Israeli citrus growers.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly felt that “sensitive translation preserves the lyricism of Semel’s deeply moving work.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August, 1995, Hazel Rochman, review of Flying Lessons, p. 1942.
Horn Book, March-April, 1996, Hanna B. Zeiger, review of Flying Lessons, p. 200.
Publishers Weekly, June 8, 1990, Diane Roback and Richard Donahue, review of Becoming Gershona, p. 55; July 17, 1995, review of Flying Lessons, p. 230; August 29, 2016, review of Isra Isle, p. 64.
ONLINE
Bookaholic, http://www.bookaholic.ro/ (March 23, 2016), Cristina Foarfă, “Interview: Nava Semel talking about the Jewish Tragedy and the Act of Remembering.”
Forward, http://forward.com/ (January 27, 2017), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “Finding a Jewish Homeland—Just Northwest of Buffalo,” review of Isra Isle.
Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature Website, http://www.ithl.org.il/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Israeli Dramatists Website, http://dramaisrael.org/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
IsraeliSpeakers Website, http://www.israelispeakers.co.il/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Jewish Book Council Website, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org (November 16, 2016), Nava Semel, “My Grandfather’s Ghost,” guest blog article; (May 9, 2017), Ranen Omer-Sherman, review of Isra Isle.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (July 28, 2016), review of Isra Isle.
Nava Semel Website, http://www.navasemel.com (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Speculative Fiction in Translation, http://www.sfintranslation.com/ (October 16, 2016), Rachel Cordasco, review of Isra Isle.
This Century’s Review, http://history.thiscenturysreview.com/ (June 7, 2017), Eldad Stobezki, “Nava Semel on Literature, the Creative Process, the Relationship between Literature and Lyric Opera, on Editing and Deleting,” author interview.
Nava Semel
Nava Semel was born in Tel Aviv-Jaffa in 1954 and has an MA in art history. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, and TV, radio and recording producer. Semel has published six novels, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, two plays, two opera libretti, six children’s books and TV scripts. Many of her stories have been adapted for radio, film, TV and stage in Israel, Europe and the USA. Her novel, And the Rat Laughs, has been made into an opera, running on the Israeli stage for four years (composer Ella Milch-Sheriff).
Semel has received several literary prizes, including the American National Jewish Book Award for Children`s Literature (1991), Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1996), the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize (1996), Best Radio Drama Award in Austria (1996) the Rosenblum Prize for Stage Art (2005) and the latest one Woman of the Year in Literature of the City of Tel Aviv 2006.
Interview: Nava Semel talking about the Jewish tragedy and the act of remembering
23.03.2015Cristina Foarfă Un comentariu
English
Citești acest articol in aproximativ 7 minute
Nava Semel is an Israeli author, playwright, screenwriter and translator. And the Rat Laughed was recently translated into Romanian and it is a book that not only talks about the horrors of Holocaust, but also it’s a novel that deals with the act of remembering them. Nava Semel is one of the characters in Oana Giurgiu’s documentary movie, Aliyah Dada, talking about her parents experience as survivors of the Holocaust.
What should Jewish people do about their individual, painful stories? Should they keep the stories for themselves, buried deep within their past, in family stories or should they/we bring them to light?
Memory must pass on, so to make sure that the Holocaust won’t be denied or forgotten. The jewish people were murdered only because they were Jews and this is unprecedented in human history.
How to pass on memory is an individual choice. Each survivor must choose his best way to transfer his memory to his next generation.
The subject of your novel is haunting and powerful. I’ve read that you imagined it, that it was not based on an actual true story. How did you come up with the idea, how was your novel born?
It took two years to actually write the novel, yet the seeds were planted ten years before. While living in NY in the late 1980s I attended the first gathering of hidden children. At first, they were the image of success and the SHOAH couldn’t be attached to them. Later, I detected a frozen child inside, struggling with his memory and torn between an impossible dilemma. On one hand, he yearned so much to recall his lost identity, on the other, he was too afraid to remember the most heart breaking moment of his life: the separation from his parents.
When leaving the conference, walking on Park Avenue on a beautiful fall afternoon, I heard a voice whispering in my head: “someone must give voice to these “mute” children”. I never imagined this someone would be me.
Later, I collected testimonies of hidden children. They were very short, laconic, as if not only memory was suppressed but their entire being is coded into short, very formal sentences. Their memory was paralyzed.
The last trigger for writing was a meeting with a survivor who shared his life with me. During the conversation in a café in Tel Aviv on a stormy night, the door opened and closed constantly. I’ve noticed how edgy he became. His face turned that of a boy. He confessed how he is still waiting for his mama to come back, as she had promised him so many years ago.
The door banging started the book. I heard the grandma’s voice in my head.
While writing, I lost the track of reality and the border-line between my real life and fiction was melting. Although my mind knew that the girl in the pit is fictional, my body reacted to her agony. When she was starving I stopped eating too. When she couldn’t sleep I became insomniac.
I’m still in awe that people read it and are moved. Although it is fiction, I felt that people will approach me following the publication with similar stories. A few people did. They thanked me for being the voice for their buried story.
Your novel is about the act of remembering, about the construction of a story starting from painful, deep, childhood memories. And about a trauma. How does a trauma transform when it is being told or written?
In its ancient meaning, the art of storytelling is also the art of healing, when the story succeeds in pulling something from the deep hinterland. Through my storytelling I embraced my mother’s personal account of pain and loss, and the scar she would carry for the rest of her life. Yet I’m aware of the fact that a complete repair – Tikun isn’t possible.
The novel offers a wide spectrum of possibilities on how can we remember; a story, a legend, a diary, a research, and poetry. The poetry chapter in the novel consists of the thoughts and feelings of the little Jewish girl in the pit who one day will become the grandmother in Tel Aviv.
Thinking about the grandmother, why is it so hard to build a story like that, which are the barriers that make it so difficult to take it from the past and put it into words?
Giving a testimony means to re-live the horror. This is why it is so painful.
I salute the survivor for finding the emotional courage to open their bleeding scars. They take the risk of shaking their stability, nevertheless they do it.
I always watch my mother with her grandchildren. She’s much more open to a dialogue with them than she has ever been with me or older my brother.
You were saying at the beginning of the book that it’s not a story easy to love by the public, an optimistic one. How does the public receive such stories?
When I brought the book to my publisher I told him “This is a novel no one will read’. But to my amazement, readers in Israel responded most warmly. The book got rave reviews and to my surprise, even became a best-seller.
It enjoys a long life, being translated to English, German, Italian and now Romanian. The opera version (composer: Ella Milch-Sheriff), was also performed at the National Theatre in Bucharest and Sibiu Festival in 2008.
The story changes depending on the perspective. Do you believe in an absolute truth, in literature, history or real life?
Art can convey emotional truth. However, I make sure that the historical facts are totally accurate. The characters’ emotional space is my challenge as an author.
I always felt that my books had chosen me rather the other way round. It is a mystery how I became a corridor for characters who kept silent for so many years and finally find their voice through my writing.
Could you tell us a bit about your family history during the Holocaust? How and when did you find out what happened to your parents, how did they tell you about their past? How was the act of remembering?
My parents were born in Bukovina, which is now partly Ukraine, partly Romania. Bukovina was a glorious center of German-Jewish culture, so my parents’ native tongue was German. My mother Mimi Artzi, lived in Transylvania in 1944 and was deported to Auschwitz. My late father Yitzhak Artzi was a Zionist activist in the underground in Bucharest.
I am a typical child of the 1950s, driven by an ambition to achieve an instant Israeli identity. We were brought up in Hebrew only, so to break the old stereotypes of Jews in the Diaspora and to become a newly turned page in history. We were supposed to compensate for the horrors of the past.
But the past was hiding secretly, waiting for the right moment to claim its rightful place. “Hat of Glass” (Pălăria de sticlă) I was writing in 1980 revealed to me that the shadow of the Holocaust is part of my identity.
Our break from the Jewish identity was traumatic. It was not a natural stage in the development of a people, one of many luxuries we could not afford. Our transformation from “Jews” to “Israelis” was harsh, painful, costly. It took my generation more than three decades to reconcile ourselves with our ancestors’ identity.
Only when I became a mother myself I dared open the safe deposit box and ask my mother “How did you survive?” The very same question is being asked by the granddaughter in my novel. She, like an echo of me.
What ties you to Romania and how do you see our country, then and now?
My father was always proud of his Romanian roots. Gradually, he made me realize that Romania is part of my heritage too. He took me to Bucharest as early in 1981 and six years later the entire family went to visit our parents’ birth places and our ancestors tombstones in Siret and Suceava.
As a member of the Knesset (The Israeli parliament) my father was very active in both helping the Romanian community in Israel and the Jewish community in Romania. He was a strong advocate for the immigration of Romanian Jews to Israel during the Communist regime.
What do you feel about Oana Giurgiu’s movie, what do you think its role could be?
I admire Oana for taking upon herself such an challenging endeavor. She has done it with lots of energy and sensitivity. I’m sure her film will be an important contribution to our knowledge about the Romanian Jews and their quest to make a new life in Israel.
I’m glad my mother Mimi who is now 93, was able to give Oana an interview. It is probably her last documented testimony.
How can you tell, in the 21st century, a story about a tragic past in a way that the public could feel a connection to what happened then?
The innovative angle in my book is the perspective of the future. In the year 2099 my protagonist Lima discovers a Holocaust myth and tries to unfold its origins.
We all know that we must and should remember the Holocaust, but the question is HOW. This is the last moment because the clock is ticking. Some of the survivors are still among us, so we must listen to whatever they can tell and carry on the mission of remembering.
The real protagonist of my novel is memory itself. I tried to follow its path, how it is carried into a world where the survivors no longer exist, nor their children. In their absence art has a special responsibility of becoming a carrier of past pain and present scars.
What would you like your readers to get from the book?
That a human being has a choice between right and wrong. He/She can either choose to be the two cruel and brutal peasants who abuse the little Jewish girl, or the noble priest who saved her. In writing him I paid homage to those who gave my parents a helping hand during her time of darkness and taught them that the laugher of the rat is still possible.
Let me add that translating from Hebrew is always a challenge. Not only the foundations of this ancient language are rooted in the bible, but because it was revived only 120 years ago, it opened so many new and exciting possibilities.
The translation was done with much care and commitment by Ion Stubea and I’m very grateful for his efforts in bringing this novel to the Romanian public. I’m also deeply honored and moved by the beautiful introduction written by distinguished author Norman Manea.
Nava Semel Author, playwright and translator
nava_semel_by_iris_nesher
Contact: eMail
Agent:
Kneller Artists Agency, office@kneller.co.il.
Award-winning Israeli and international author and playwright Nava Semel has written seventeen books of fiction, plays, scripts and opera libretti. She was born in Jaffa-Tel Aviv and has an MA in Art History from the Tel Aviv University. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, TV, radio and music producer.
Semel translates plays for the Israeli stage and is a member of the Board of Directors of Massuah – the Institute for Holocaust Studies and The Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel. She was a member of the Board of Governors of “Yad Vashem” for many years.
She had participated in international conventions in Israel, Germany, Austria, France, USA, UK, Egypt, Romania, Ireland, Italy, Australia and more.
Semel is married with three children. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Nava Semel was born in Tel Aviv in 1954 and has an MA in art history. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, and TV, radio and recording producer. Semel has published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's books and a number of TV scripts. Many of her stories have been adapted for radio, film, TV and the stage in Israel, Europe and the USA. Her novel, And the Rat Laughed, has been made into an opera; it is also being made into a feature film, directed by David Fisher. Her children's book, The Girl in the Gong, was performed on stage as a very successful musical in a co-production between Beit Lessin Theater and the Holon Mediatheque in 2012. Semel is a member of the Massua Institute of Holocaust Studies and is on the board of governors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.
Semel has received several literary prizes, including the American National Jewish Book Award for Children's Literature (1990), the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1994), the Prime Minister's Prize (1996), the Austrian Best Radio Drama Award (1996), the Rosenblum Prize for Stage Arts (2005), and Tel Aviv's Literary Woman of the Year (2007). Most recently, her y/a book, Love for Beginners, received the One of the Best Seven Prize awarded by Radio Germany (2010) as well as the Educators and Scientists Association Award (Germany, 2010).
See also Nava Semel's website:
http://www.navasemel.com/index.php?page_id=1&lang_action=change_lang&to_lang=en
Nava Semel
Books Published in Hebrew
Poems of Pregnancy and Birth, Sifriat Poalim, 1982 [Shirei Herayon Ve-Leida]
Hat of Glass (stories) , Sifriat Poalim, 1985; new ed. 1998 [Kova Zchuchit: Kovetz Sipurim Shel Ha-Dor Ha-Sheni]
The Child Behind the Eyes; An Old Woman (plays), Adam, 1988 [Ha-Yeled Me-Achorei Ha-Einayim; Achat Zkena]
Night Games (novel) , Am Oved, 1994 [Rally Masa Matara]
Bride on Paper (novel) , Am Oved, 1996 [Isha Al Ha-Neyar]
And the Rat Laughed (novel) , Yedioth Ahronoth, 2001 [Tzchok Shel Achbarosh]
Isra Isle (novel) , Yedioth Ahronoth, 2005 [Eesrael]
Australian Wedding (autobiographical fiction) , Am Oved, 2009 [Chatuna Ostralit]
Flying Away [with Ella Milch-Sheriff] (libretto), The Institute of Israeli Drama, 2010 [Laʹuf Mi-Kan]
Head on Backwards (novel) , Zmora-Bitan, 2011 [Rosh-Akom]
Hymn to the Bible (poetry) , Even Hoshen, 2015 [Mizmor La-Tanach]
-----
CHILDREN & YOUTH
Becoming Gershona (youth) , Am Oved, 1988 [Gershona-Shona]
Flying Lessons [Flying Away] (youth) , Am Oved, 1990; Yedioth Ahronoth, 2004 [Morris Chavivʹel Melamed Laʹuf; Laʹuf Mi-Kan]
Who Stole the Show? (children) , Yedioth Ahronoth, 1997 [Mi Ganav Et Ha-Hatzaga]
Nighty Nite (lullabies), Yedioth Ahronoth, 1998 [Lailuna]
Awake in My Sleep (lullabies), Sifriat Poalim, 2000 [Yashen Hu Er Be-Makom Acher]
The Courage to be Afraid (children) , Sifriat Poalim, 2004 [Ha-Ometz Lefached]
Love for Beginners (youth) , Yedioth Ahronoth, 2006 [Eich Matchilim Ahava]
The Backpack Fairy (children) , Sifriat Poalim, 2011 [Fe-Yaya Ve-Ha-Tarmish]
The Bell Maiden (children) , Dani Sfarim, 2015 [Yaldat Ha-Pa'amon]
Taking Wing (Mercurium Trilogy, 1) [under the name: Huan B. Landi] (fantasy novel) , Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2016 [Me'ofefet: Mercurium: Sefer Rishon]
Shendele's Candles (children) , Yedioth Ahronoth, forthcoming [Ha-Pamotim Shel Shendele]
-----
PERFORMED PLAYS
An Old Woman [Haifa, 1983]
The Child Behind the Eyes [Haifa, 1986; Rome, 1990; New York, 1991; Los Angeles, 1996; Prague, 1997; Arab Theater of the Galilee, 2001; Romania (Sibiu Theatre Festival), 2004; Romania (Resita), 2005; Ankara, 2005; Lodz, 2006; Bucharest, 2007; Amsterdam, 2012]
Hi Old Man [The State Youth Theatre, 2003]
And the Rat Laughed [with Ella Milch-Sheriff] (opera) [Cameri, 2005; Warsaw, 2006; Bucharest, 2007; Toronto, 2009]
Flying Away [with Ella Milch-Sheriff] (opera) [Cameri, 2010]
The Bell Maiden [with Ben Artzi] [Beit Lessin & Holon Mediatheque, 2012]
Back to Isra Isle [Theatroneto Festival, 2013; Itim Ensemble, 2015]
Books in Translation
Hat of Glass
Italian: Naples, Guida, 2002
German: Frankfurt, Dr. Orgler Verlag, 2000
Romanian: Bucharest, Hasefer, 2003
Bride on Paper
German: Weinheim, Beltz & Gelberg, 2003; pback: 2005
Romanian: Bucharest, Pandora, 2000
English: Victoria, Austr., Hybrid, 2012
Turkish: Istanbul, Cizmeli kedi, forthcoming
And the Rat Laughed
German: Mannheim, Persona, 2007
English: Victoria, Austr., Hybrid, 2008
Italian: Rome, Atmosphere Libri, 2012
Romanian: Bucharest, Hasefer, 2014
Isra Isle
English: Simsbury, CT, Mandel Vilar Press, 2016
Head on Backwards
Italian: Livorno, Belforte, 2013
Becoming Gershona
English: New York, Viking Penguin, 1990; pback: New York, Puffin (Penguin), 1992
Italian: Florence, La Casa Usher, 1990; pback: Verona, Mondadori, 1999
German: Frankfurt, Alibaba, 1993; pback: Frankfurt, Fischer, 1995; 2004; 2005
Romanian: Bucharest, Fiat Lux, 1995
Dutch: Baarn, Fontein, 2000
Flying Lessons [Flying Away]
English: New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995
German: Berlin, Elefanten Press, 1995; Pback: Weinheim, Beltz & Gelberg, 2000
Italian: Verona, Mondadori, 1997
Czech: Prague, Albatros, 1998
Spanish: Madrid, Loguez, 1998
Dutch: Baarn, Fontein, 1999
Serbian: Belgrade, Book & Marso, 2008
Chinese: Nanjing, Jiangsu Children's Pub., 2016
Who Stole the Show?
Italian: Verona, Mondadori, 2003
Romanian/English: Bucharest, Hasefer, 2007
Love for Beginners
Italian: Casale Monferrato, Sonda, 2007
Czech: Praque, Albatros, 2009
German: Berlin, Jacoby & Stuart, 2010
Slovak: Bratislava, Q111, 2011
Shendele's Candles
Romanian: Bucharest, Hasefer, forthcoming
ward-winning Israeli and international author and playwright NAVA SEMEL has written twebty books of fiction, plays, scripts and opera libretti. Ms. Semel was born in Jaffa-Tel Aviv and has an MA in Art History from the Tel Aviv University. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, TV, radio and music producer.
Her works include:
Hat of Glass, the first Israeli book in prose to focus on the Second Generation - children of Holocaust survivors (published 1985; new edition 1998; translated into German, Italian and Romanian)
Becoming Gershona, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the USA (1990); published by Viking Penguin; translated into Italian, German, Romanian, Dutch. Adapted for Israeli television.
Flying Lessons published by Simon & Schuster (1995); adapted for the Israeli television; translated into German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Serbian, Albanian and Chinese. An Opera version opened in 2009. (composer: Ella Milch-Sheriff).
Her acclaimed novel And the Rat Laughed was published in Israel in 2001 to rave reviews and great success. Germany 2007, Australia 2008, Italy 2012, Romania 2015. An Opera-Play composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff and produced by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv and the Israeli Chamber Orchestra, premiered in 2005 and ran for five years. Semel and Milch-Sheriff won the "Rosenblum Award" of the City of Tel Aviv. North American production, 2009 Toronto. A movie version is currently in the making.
Semel's her one-woman play The Child behind the Eyes, first produced in 1986, ran on the Israeli stage for 11 years. It has also been produced on radio by the BBC London, Radio France, Radio Belgium, Radio Spain, Radio Ireland, six radio stations in Germany, Radio Austria, and Radio Romania. It won the "Best Radio Drama" award in Austria 1996. On the stage it was performed in Rome (1990), New York (1991), Los Angeles (1996), Prague (1997), Sibiu Theatre Festival (2004), Resita Theatre in Romania (2005), State Theatre of Ankara, Turkey (2005), Lodz Theatre - Poland (2006), Bucharest Theatre (2007). A new production in Israel in Arabic opened in 2006. Recently produced in Amsterdam, (2012) and Alaska. (2016)
Semel's children's book Who Stole the Show? published in 1997, won the Illustrated Book of the Year Award (1998), and was cited at the "Ze'ev Award" (1999). Italy 2003. An English-Romanian bi-lingual edition, was published in Romania 2008.
A television series, based on the book was produced in 1999.
Other works of fiction include also Paper Bride (1996; Romania 2000. Germany 2003. Finalist of the YA German book award 2005, Australia 2012, Turekey 2016); Night Poems (2000) and The Courage to be Afraid (2005) - two collections of poetry for young readers on darkness and fears.
Nava Semel's 2005 novel IsraIsle had received rave reviews and its stage version opened in 2015. US publication: October 2016.
Her YA book Beginner's Love (2006) was published in Italy 2007, Czech Republic 2008, Germany 2010 and Slovakia 2011. Her biographical fiction Australian Wedding came out in Israel 2009 to rave reviews and became a best-seller. Her children's book The Backpack Fairy came out in 2011. Her novel Screwed on Backwards (2012), the story of a Jewish musician saved by his Christian lover in Italy under Nazi occupation, received rave reviews. Italy 2014.
Her latest Theatre works: The Bell Maiden (musical play for the entire family) 2012, Beit Lessin Theatre and the Mediatheque Youth Theatre.
Paper Bride, (musical), the Israeli Festival for New Musicals, Bat Yam 2013.
Her latest books: Hymn to the Bible (dramatic poetry, 2015) and Taking Wing, a Science fiction crossover, under the pen name Huan B. Landi (2016)
NAVA SEMEL won the Israeli Prime Minister's Award for Literature in 1996 and the Women Writers of the Mediterranean award in France 1994. She was awarded "Women of the Year in Literature of the City of Tel Aviv" in 2007.
She translates plays for the Israeli stage. Semel is a member of the Board of Directors of Massuah - the Institute for Holocaust Studies and served on the Board of Governors of Yad Vashem.
Ms. Semel is married with three children. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Nava Semel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. (May 2011)
This biographical article is written like a résumé. (March 2014)
Nava Semel (Hebrew: נאוה סמל) is an Israeli author, playwright, screenwriter and translator. Her work Kova Zekhukhit (Hat of Glass) was the first published in Israel and addressed topics of the children of Holocaust survivors.[1]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Books
3 Works for the stage and screen
4 References
5 External links
Biography
Nava Semel was born 1954 in Yaffo, daughter of Mimi (Margalit), who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and Kleineshenau, and Yitzhak Artzi, who was a politician and member of the Knesset.[1] Her maternal grandmother was the sister of Rabbi Meir Shapiro. She is the younger sister of Israeli rock musician Shlomo Artzi.[1]
She has an MA in Art History from Tel Aviv University. She published sixteen books, plays, opera libretti, poetry and screenplays. Her work focuses on the second generation in Israel. Her characters are native born Israelis, who confront their identity issues and deal with the scars of the painful past.
Semel also writes plays and translates for the Hebrew stage. Her most acclaimed novel "And the Rat Laughed" was adapted into an opera libretti in 2005.
Her works were translated into many languages and published in many countries. Among her numerous awards she has received are the "The Israeli Prime Minister's Award for Literature" in 1996, "The Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award" in France 1994, and "Women of the Year in Literature of the City of Tel Aviv" 2006.
Semel is a member of the board of directors of Massuah, the Institute for Holocaust Studies at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak, and was a member of the Board of Governors of Yad Vashem for many years. She was also on the board of directors of the "New Foundation for Television and Cinema". She is married to Noam Semel the Director General of the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv and a mother of three children. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Books
Poems of Pregnancy and Birth. Poetry Collection, 1985.
Hat of Glass. The first Israeli book in prose to focus on the children of Holocaust survivors. Published in 1985; with a new edition 1998. Translated into German, Italian and Romanian. Stories from the collection were published in Great Britain, Spain, Greece, France, Turkey, Albania and China.
Paper Bride. Novel, published in 1996, then in Romania 2000, and Germany 2003. Finalist of the YA German book award 2004.
Becoming Gershona. Young Adult novel, published by Viking-Penguin, winner of "The National Jewish Book Award" in the USA 1990. Has been translated into Italian, German, Romanian, and Dutch, and adapted for Israeli television.
Night Games. Novel, published in 1994.
Flying Lessons. Cross-over novel which tells the story of a Holocaust survivor from Tunisia who teaches an Israeli girl how to fly. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1995. It was chosen as one of the best young adults novels in Germany 1995. It has been translated into German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Serbian and Albanian, and was adapted for the Israeli television. In 2009, it was produced as an opera, composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff, directed by Yael Ronen. The opera was a co-production of the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv with the Israeli New Opera and the Beer Sheva Sinfonyetta Orchestra. The libretto was published as a book by the Institute for Israeli Drama 2010.
Who Stole the Show?. Children's book, published in 1997. It won the Illustrated Book of the Year Award 1998 and was cited at the "Ze'ev Award" 1999. It was published in Italy 2003, and an English-Romanian bi-lingual edition was published in 2008. Adapted for a television series in 1999.
Night Poems. Poetry collection for young people on darkness and fears, published in 2000.
And the Rat Laughed. Novel, published in 2001, to rave reviews. It was published in Germany 2007 and Australia 2008. It was produced as an opera in 2005, and is being made into a movie.
The Courage to be Afraid. Another poetry collection for young people on darkness and fears, published in 2005. Selected poems were published in Great Britain, Germany and the USA. They were also set to music by Ella Milch-Sheriff and Hava Alberstein.
IsraIsland. Novel, published in 2006. A documentary based on the book is in production (Director: Oshra Schwartz). Excerpts were published in the USA.
Beginner's Love. Young adult book, published in 2006. It was then published in Italy in 2007, the Czech Republic in 2008 and Germany in 2010. The book won the "Best 7" award of the German Radio in 2010.
Australian Wedding. Autobiographical fiction, published in 2009. Excerpts were published in the USA and Australia.
Works for the stage and screen
An Old Woman. Monodrama on the life of the elderly. Produced by the Haifa Municipal Theatre 1983, and ran until 1989.
The Last winter. Original dialogues for an Israeli-American feature film co-production. Director: Riky Shelach. Actresses: Kathleen Quinlan and Yona Elian, 1983.
Hunger. Radio drama, based on a story from "Hat of Glass", produced by the WDR in Germany, 1989.
The Child behind the Eyes. Monodrama, first produced in 1986, and ran on the Israeli stage for 11 years. It has also been produced as a radio play by the BBC London, Radio France, Radio Belgium, Radio Spain, Radio Ireland, six radio stations in Germany, Radio Austria and Radio Romania. It won the "Best Radio Drama" award in Austria 1996, and released on CD. New Broadcast in Austria 2008. On the stage it was performed in Rome (1990), New York (1991), Los Angeles (1996), Prague (1997), Sibiu Theatre Festival (2004), Resita Theatre in Romania (2005), State Theatre of Ankara, Turkey (2005), Lodz Theatre - Poland (2006), Bucharest Theatre (2007). New production in Israel in Arabic 2006 with actress-singer Amal Murkus. The play was published as a print book in 1988 and an e-book in 2002.
Saying Kaddish and Leave – a screenplay for a documentary on the Holocaust of the Jews in Romania. Produced by the Israeli Educational TV in 1999.
Thousand Calories. TV drama, produced by the Israeli 2nd channel, 2002.
An Old Man. Monodrama, produced by the Israeli Theatre for Young People 2003.
And the Rat Laughed. Opera based on the novel, composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff, directed by Oded Kotler. Produced by the Israeli Chamber Orchestra and the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. World Premiere April 2005. The opera ran on the stage of the Cameri Theatre until 2009. Nava Semel and Ella Milch-Sheriff won the "Rosenblum Award" of the City of Tel Aviv. The opera was performed also in Warsaw 2006, Sibiu Festival 2007 and the National Theatre in Bucharest 2007. A new production of the opera opened in 2009 in Toronto, Canada on the stage of Opera York. It was performed in Hebrew.
Sneaking into the Bible. Song cycle on biblical themes, composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff. Ramat Gan Chamber Choir, conducted by Hanna Tsur. Premiered at the Abu Gosh Music Festival in 2005. Performed also at Tzavta Theatre 2005 and Ramat Gan Theatre 2007.
There in the World That Is New. Musical, 6 minute-piece on a girl on her journey to Israel after the Holocaust. Composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff. Performed by Li-Ron Choir Herzliya, conducted by Ronit Shapira, Torchlight Assembly, Holocaust Memorial Day 2008 at Massuah, Institute for Holocaust Studies, Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak. Live broadcast on cable TV HOT.
Ballad of Three Prophets. Ten-minute musical piece on the three faiths, composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff. Performed by Moran Choir, conducted by Neomi Faran. Premiered at the Song Bridge Festival, Poland on May 8, 2008. Performed also on Holocaust International Commemoration Day 2009 at Massuah, Institute for Holocaust Studies, Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak.
Whereabouts Unknown. TV drama about new immigrants upon their arrival to Israel in 1949. Produced by the Israeli Television- First Channel (Director: Yahli Bergman) 2010.
Nava Semel has published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children’s books, and a number of TV scripts. Her stories have been adapted for radio, film, TV, and stage in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Her books have been translated and published in many countries. Her novel And the Rat Laughed was adapted into a successful opera, and it is also being made into a feature film, directed by David Fisher. Semel is on the board of governors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. Her book Becoming Gershona received the 1990 National Jewish Book Award in the U.S. She has received many other literary prizes including the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1994) and the Prime Minister’s Prize (1996).
My Grandfather's Ghost
Wednesday, November 16, 2016| Permalink
Earlier this week, Nava Semel wrote about creating an alternative Jewish history for her novel Isra-Isle. Nava is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.
For my bat mitzvah I received a gift. It was a collection of Incredible Stories in Jewish History. I recall reading about a Jew who created a homeland, not the one I knew so well, but another one—in America.
I was sure it was a fairy tale, pure fiction. How wrong I was.
In the 1990s my family and I lived America. My husband Noam was Israel's consul for cultural affairs. One stormy day, I went to seek refuge at the New York Public Library, where I came across a footnote in an article. It mentioned Mordechai Emanuel Noah and his vision for a Jewish homeland named Ararat situated near Niagara Falls. The old fairy tale resurfaced and came back to life. I immediately knew I hit the jackpot, discovered lost treasure.
I had to write a book about this place. I felt so connected. September 15th, Ararat’s inauguration date, is my birthday, too. I was born in Jaffa-Tel Aviv, yet I could have easily been an American kid. My grandfather was an American, living most of his life in New York. What if he had not left my grandmother and my father, who was then a small baby? What if he had not emigrated to America? My fate would be completely different.
Grandpa left in 1921, when the small Jewish shtetls all over Europe were rife with rumors that the sidewalks of New York were paved with gold—the Goldene Medina, as America as called in Yiddish. He promised to send tickets for his wife and child as soon as he was settled.
He indeed got settled, but the tickets were never sent.
Grandma remained an abandoned wife. According to Jewish religious law, a woman who has not been granted a divorce by her husband cannot remarry. But this did not prevent Grandpa from maintaining a relationship, progressive for its time, with another woman. They lived in separate apartments on the Lower East Side for over thirty years. Every morning he came to his mistress for coffee and a bagel and then went to the New York Stock Exchange. Although he did not pluck gold from the sidewalks, he became an expert in stocks and shares, which for him epitomized the essence of his exciting new world.
In 1946, after the Holocaust, my father, as a young Zionist activist, was interviewed at a conference in Paris by a journalist from an American-Jewish newspaper. One New York morning, over his cup of coffee, my grandfather suddenly recognized his son in the article: that’s how he discovered my father was even still alive. Perhaps Grandpa was assailed by pangs of conscience for not doing enough to rescue his wife and son from the horrors of the Nazi occupation. He contacted the newspaper and asked for information to contact them.
Three years later the family was reunited at the circumcision of my older brother in a kibbutz. Grandpa came to Israel to meet his first grandson and his son—two for the price of one.
No happy ending awaited them. Grandpa and his abandoned family did not get along, nor did he harbor any love for the State of Israel either. He saw it as a godforsaken place that didn’t stand a chance in the Middle East, surrounded by hostile neighbors. He loathed the kibbutz, regarding it as the “stronghold of Communism,” and viewed Zionism as an absurdly misguided and dangerous adventure. He gave my father an ultimatum: “Either you come with me to America, or I’m leaving for good.”
My father, of course, refused. Although the sidewalks in Israel were not paved with gold, nor was the land flowing with milk and honey, it was the only place for him and my mother, an Auschwitz survivor. I was born after Grandpa left, but when I was five he came again. Blind and abandoned, my father took him in. My small task was to take Grandpa on daily tours. I cunningly used his blindness to describe an imaginary Tel Aviv, one that could compete with his beloved New York. Now it was my turn to tell fairy tales. He taught me English, told me about Lady Liberty and the Empire State Building. He showed me how to draw the Star-Spangled Banner and sing about “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” He was an American patriot until his last breath—and I was his headstrong opponent, an Israeli to the very core of my being.
Isra-Isle echoes my old arguments with my grandfather. What if he had sent for my grandmother and their son back then in 1921? For starters, I would write in English, not Hebrew. In Isra-Isle I'm still trying to prove to Grandpa’s ghost that Israel is the one and only place for us. After all, that's where he found his final resting place—not in his beloved America. Listen to me, Grandpa, wherever you are: Your offspring live in Hebrew, love in Hebrew, and they will die in Hebrew.
Nava Semel holds an MA in Art History from Tel Aviv University and teaches creative writing at the Tel Aviv Public Library. Her previous books have been translated into 12 languages and received literary distinctions including a National Jewish Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1991.
Nava Semel on literature, the creative process, the relationship between literature and lyric opera, on editing and deleting
Eldad Stobezki
Tel Aviv, December. Europe is snowed in, but here the sun shines and it is quite warm. The coffee shops are open everywhere and it is difficult to find a place at the tables that crowd the pavements. The country is in a pre-election fever. But then Israel is always finding itself in the grip of events that seem destined to decide its future. Everything feels so fateful. When you arrive from Europe, it seems like everyone here is in a hurry, everyone speaks so loudly, as if they were charged with electricity. Yet people find the time to meet in coffee shops and the restaurants are full of diners. The initial impression is that in Israel people live more intensely, one has to make the best out of every minute because it might be your last. The sun is hotter, the coffee is stronger, the heap of whipped cream on the strudel is higher.
In a few minutes I will meet Nava Semel, the successful writer whom I call an “ambassador of cultures”. I aggressively defend two seats in a popular coffee shop in the north of Tel Aviv. Nava grew up here; her childhood was shaped by these streets. Once an immigrant settlement, this area is now a pleasant and rather fashionable quarter of Tel Aviv. Nava was born into a family of Jeckes (Yekkes), or Jews of German origin, and true to her European roots she arrives at the meeting very punctually. Not like Middle Easterners for whom being late is innate…
Nava Semel, you are a well-known writer. Many of your books have been translated. Recently you gave a series of lectures in Italy in which you spoke about Fossoli, the concentration camp from which the Jews of northern Italy were sent to the extermination camps and gas chambers of Germany and Poland.
Your book The Rat Laughs is currently experiencing great success in an adaptation for the lyric opera composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff and performed by the Israeli Chamber Orchestra and the Tel Aviv Chamber Theatre. The novel tells the story of a little girl hiding in a potato cellar during the Holocaust. She survives together with her only friend – a rat. A priest saves her from the peasants who keep her imprisoned and restores her dilapidated body and soul. The novel will be published soon in Germany.
Your latest book, IsraIsland, the story of an alternative Jewish state established on a Native American island in the United States, deals with the meeting of cultures and the question of identity, both personal and national.
This issue of This Century’s Review is dedicated to the theme of deleting, erasing, like the delete button on a computer keyboard. How do you connect to this motif?
The big challenge in writing is not the writing itself, but the erasing. People get caught up in the fact that they can fill their computer with words that can be immediately printed. But for me the process of writing starts after I’ve written, and I don’t mean just filtering out the errors.
If you consider the first draft to be the initial reflex, then the deleting and rewriting that follow create the blood circulation necessary to breathe life into the text. The initial writing is like an epidermis, it is very external, this body lacks a heart and a backbone and specifically, the lifeblood that keeps the system running. Deleting supplies the text with the inner organs – and the less text the better. Deleting creates a lively and essential tension between the words. The result I aim for is a purified, concise text that does not contain even one superfluous word and in which any additional deletion would destroy the delicate structure. Being a writer, I aspire to cleanliness, so that the page can also contain what is beyond the page. Deletion is the window through which the reader enters the text as a blind passenger. The poems in The Rat Laughs, for example, are very short. Some of them comprise only two lines. And readers react rather vehemently to these poems. They are shocking indeed. A girl is sitting alone in a dark hole, the adults have discarded her, her distorted voice expresses her topsy-turvy philosophy of life. In the poem Above Under, parents take the uppermost position whereas the children of Jewish people occupy the lowest rung of the ladder. Readers reported to me that they found these words deeply troubling, that they could not sleep at night after reading them.
Deleting considers events that are beyond the text. When I delete I try to aim the text at the emotions of the reader, to get at his most concentrated centre. I want to give the reader the freedom to be able to read the text in the context of his own personal soul map. A text full of words suffocates me. Writing is a third of the work of a writer; the rest is editing out. Editing is extremely painful because I naturally have an emotional connection to what I have written. In order to start editing things out I need to separate myself from the text so that the next time I take it up I am able to operate on it like a surgeon, or even go at it with an axe if necessary. A book that is stiflingly over-written is like a tree with dense foliage that gives too much shadow. I prefer a tree that alternates between light and shadow. When a leaf has space to move in the breeze, there is play between light and dark. Literature is at its best when it allows space for the reader, as opposed to newspapers and television which transmit all details, including the unnecessary and the negligible. I try to write literature that does not direct the reader, but rather allows the personal soul map of the reader room to move and vibrate like an accompanying musical score.
IsraIsland testifies as to how difficult it is for Israelis to depart from the familiar concept of the state of Israel. In fact, they are a product of this state, and the creation of an alternative state, even if only on paper, tears the soil out from under their feet. The disorientation that IsraIsland provokes in many readers makes me happy in a way, because this is the real philosophy of life in my opinion. We all search for a place that we can call home, but at the same time I fear becoming too settled; I see it as a danger for the free spirit. I don’t want to lose the ability to feel at home in other places, to be able to absorb what is different. So deleting is also a way to avoid repeating my own patterns. Deleting works covertly against your own text. The text has a coherent order which editing things out breaks. Deleting brings the world back into chaos. Art should also contain disorder, the fermentation and the freedom to abandon one’s own familiar patterns. I don’t shy away from this uneasy task. Deleting begins when the text lies in front of me, weighed and orderly. I start kicking and biting it. That’s how I keep the text alive for me, and hopefully for the reader as well. Deleting takes a two-dimensional text and renders it in three dimensions, and perhaps even in four or five or six dimensions. Who knows how many exist? It resembles Einstein’s Twin Paradox about the brother who returns from a week in outer space to find out that his twin died a hundred years before. In my dreamed and fictive trips as well there are no rules and regulations, just as memory does not function according to a known system. My last two books address the journey along the complex ways of memory and time. The Rat Laughs deals with private memory and IsraIsland focuses on the collective recollection of the Jewish-Israeli nation.
I do not try to flatter the reader while I am writing. The genuine addressee is the enfant terrible in me, who knows that what we see is not the real world. The text on the page is an external partition and in order to really enter it I have to shake it, like shaking a tree and making the leaves fall down. Maybe my real profession is “tree-shaker”…
That is why there is a big connection between my poetry and my prose. It is expected that poetry be economical, concise, leaving space for the unseen, the unsaid. When I am careful with my prose the result may not always agree with the reader, but on my part, I do not want to be bound to only one discipline. I want to rediscover myself anew each time. Art is a road to the unknown, to underground currents that cause upheaval in me as they do in the reader. A book is born when I get the feeling that I’ve lost my “place” or “home” and I need to get established again. I dedicate a lot of time to research, which is a process of discovery that allows me to slowly build the infrastructure of the world I am in the process of creating.
In my books for children I try to address themes that this kind of literature traditionally avoids, such as the fears and phobias in my book The Courage to be Afraid. Fears and dreams also mean concentrating time and breaking it. I cannot negate the world of the child in the text itself but I create crevices and space around the words so that the child can get used to the fact that there is another world beyond the world of the text. The poems for children are sometimes short but contain all that is necessary, and at the same time they offer these alternative worlds.
The renowned composer Ella Milch-Sheriff convinced me to transcribe The Rat Laughs into an opera. Her argument was that while she was reading it she heard it in her head. The libretto to the opera is in fact a concentrated product, like perfume. The music penetrates spaces that are beyond the words. The more I reduced the text, the more space was there for the composer to occupy. Ella Milch-Sheriff also composed music for some of my poems for children in The Courage to be Afraid and Awake in My Sleep, creating a new piece that deals with the Bible and is called I Want to Enter Genesis. I suddenly discovered that the space left around the text makes it possible for another artist to add his interpretation and his art. The beautiful gift I receive is the inspiration that other artists get from my little text and the enormous talent they add which results in a new work of art. In her vision, the composer saw the combination of all three tenses in the book, because music happens in one tense, one time. Understanding the music enriches me. The priest who saves the little girl in The Rat Laughs sings pessimistic words on stage: “A world in which it is necessary to hide small children should be destroyed and it should begin again from the beginning.” The priest lets God know that the world He created is broken and cannot be mended. As a Creator He is a failure. In this sombre text a flute starts to play and with its optimistic notes it sows the seeds for a new world, a better world, one that is created with the help of music.
I have to mention that with the computer every deletion is actually registered, it is not a void but a whole world in itself. Watching the opera in the last year was like discovering all the hidden signs. What the deletions contain came out into the light. Most people consider deleting to be banishment. For me deleting is an unseen addition, visible only to the soul.
Thank you for the interview and for your candidness.
Isra-Isle
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Isra-Isle
Nava Semel, trans. from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. Mandel Vilar, $16.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-942134-19-0
Award-winning Israeli author Semel's novel explores an intriguing what-if scenario based on historical fact. In 1825, Jewish-American Mordecai Manuel Noah purchased Grand Island, near Niagara Falls, from Native Americans, planning to create a place of refuge for Jews. Semel's novel asks the question, What if this plan had worked? In Part 1, Native American NYPD detective Simon T. Lenox, in the present, is looking for a missing person, Liam Emanuel, an Israeli last seen on a flight to New York City. Lenox follows the trail of the missing man to Grand Island, N.Y. Part 2 flashes back to 1825, when Mordecai gets his first look at his newly purchased land with a Native American guide. Part 3 takes place in modern times but with an alternate history: Mordecai's plans succeeded and Grand Island is now Isra Isle, a thriving city filled with Jewish people from all over the world. In this changed world, Israel never existed, Native American and Jewish customs have been merged, and the American Jewish state affects many issues in the world. Each of the main characters struggles with issues of religion, spirituality, and identity in streaming thoughts and discussions. Through those voices, Semel explores issues of global importance--such as terrorism, prejudice, and politics--in this singular; thought-provoking novel. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Isra-Isle." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236416&it=r&asid=906b086d3694d197a2bce1ba66ae6232. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236416
Flying Lessons
Hanna B. Zeiger
72.2 (March-April 1996): p200.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Nava Semel 112 pp. Simon 9/95 ISBN 0-689-80161-0 14.00
Translated by Hillel Halkin. In the small citrus-growing village in Israel where three generations of her family have settled, eleven-year-old Hadara is the only one whose mother has died. In her mind she dreams of being able to leave her village - and her sadness - by learning how to fly like a bird. Monsieur Maurice, who has just arrived and opened a shoemaker's shop behind her house, tells her that people from his island home know the secret of flying. In her frequent visits to his shop, they talk constantly about how to fly. Hadara studies birds and practices jumping until one day, during a long drought-filled winter while her father is away, she decides she is ready. Climbing to the top of one of the tallest trees in the grove, she thinks, "There was no more down anymore, no more earth, and no one buried beneath it,' and she jumps into the air. Her friend Arele, finding Hadara lying on the ground with a seriously broken leg, gets her to the clinic. At the same moment, rain starts, ending the disastrous drought. When her cast comes off at the end of the winter, Hadara learns that Monsieur Maurice has left the village and that all his stories of flying were a metaphor for the concentration camp where he learned his trade and where he lost everyone he loved. Although Hadara resents his leaving and her failure to fly, she comes to realize that, in fact, "He had tried to teach me how to fly with both feet on the ground." Semel's sensitive story, told in poetic language, is given an eloquent and masterful translation. H.B.Z.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zeiger, Hanna B. "Flying Lessons." The Horn Book Magazine, Mar.-Apr. 1996, p. 200+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18162963&it=r&asid=750e7ab5240c9e8fb40de3939ad69566. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18162963
Flying Lessons
Hazel Rochman
91.22 (Aug. 1995): p1942.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Semel, Nava. Tr. by Hillel Halkin. Sept. 1995. 122p. Simon & Schuster, $14 (0-689-80161-0). Galley.
Jews--Israel--Fiction [parallel] Israel--Fiction [parallel] Holocaust survivors--Fiction [OCLC] 95-1755
Gr. 7-10. There's too much metaphor and too little story in this coming-of-age novel set in an Israeli village in the 1950s. Lonely and motherless, 12-year-old Hadara dreams of flying. The shoemaker next door, Monsieur Maurice, says he was once in a circus, and he encourages her to fly. She tries one day and breaks her leg, but eventually she learns to fly "with both feet on the ground." It turns out that Monsieur Maurice was not in a circus but in a concentration camp. where he fixed shoes for the Germans. There are echoes here of Hamilton's exquisite story The People Could Fly, about slaves who flew away to freedom, but Semel's magic realism doesn't really work. The Holocaust revelation comes right at the end--some of it only in the final historical note and most kids won't get the elliptical images in the story. In contrast to the understatement, there's a crudely overwritten" comic" character, a village scold who'll do anything to get a husband. Halkin's translation from the Hebrew is clear and lyrical, and what comes across best is the sense of daily life among the Israeli citrus growers: their petty rivalry, their friendship, and their dreams.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rochman, Hazel. "Flying Lessons." Booklist, Aug. 1995, p. 1942. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17210843&it=r&asid=55162df682b9fa7a6d5cb3ad2cfe7966. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17210843
Flying Lessons
242.29 (July 17, 1995): p230.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Nava Semel, translated by Hillel Halkin. Simon & Schuster, $14 ISBN 0-689-80161-0
The Israeli author of Becoming Gershona weaves dreamlike images and innocent profundity into a coming-of-age tale of great power. In a remote part of Israel, Hadara, the 12-year-old daughter of the "one and only dead mother in the village," decides to learn to fly. While her father works in his citrus grove, Hadara visits Monsieur Maurice Havivel, the village's "one and only" shoemaker. After inflaming Hadara's imagination with tales of the magical circus of flying Jews he once belonged to, Monsieur Maurice agrees to help her learn to fly. No matter how much she practices, however, he tells her that she is not yet ready. But as drought threatens the citrus groves and with them the welfare of the village, Hadara thinks, "If I could fly, I would tie all the clouds to a string and pull them back down with me." Her maiden flight, from her father's tallest tree, culminates in a broken leg--and in the life-giving rain--but a saddened Monsieur Maurice tells her, "You weren't scared enough to fly for real." Only after Hadara recovers and Monsieur Maurice goes away is his past revealed--although readers knowledgeable about the Holocaust will have intuited much of it already. Sensitive translation preserves the lyricism of Semel's deeply moving work. Ages 10-up. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Flying Lessons." Publishers Weekly, 17 July 1995, p. 230. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17279990&it=r&asid=6a634f34cf4b23c90a1848b726049ba0. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17279990
Becoming Gershona
Diane Roback and Richard Donahue
237.23 (June 8, 1990): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
BECOMING GERSHONA Although more than 10 years have passed since the end of World War II, the Holocaust has left its mark on all the adults in Gershona's world; everyone one, even her new friend Nimrod, has a sad and secret past. A life spent skirting the miseries of others has made Gershona, Awkward and lonely. But when her long-lost grandfather comes to live in Tel Aviv, Gershona's life takes a turn for the better. As various family secrets are revealed, the girl comes to understand and accept her place in her family and the world. This is a thoughtful novel of a girl's growing up; its strongest components are Gershona's delicate, precise observations. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the translation, these moments are often obscured by ponderous narrative and stilted dialogue. Still, readers capable of sifting through the stiff writing will enjoy both Gershona's story and the authr's depiction of everyday life in the young state of Israel. Ages 10-14. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Roback, Diane, and Richard Donahue. "Becoming Gershona." Publishers Weekly, 8 June 1990, p. 55+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9114137&it=r&asid=5143b05f6b66dc5922d03f2fb3f80373. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A9114137
Finding a Jewish Homeland — Just Northwest of Buffalo
Gavriel D. RosenfeldJanuary 27, 2017YouTube
Isra Isle
By Nava Semel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Mandel Vilar Press, 240 pages, $16.95
The boom in Jewish alternate history continues. Following on the heels of Lavie Tidhar’s novel, “A Man Lies Dreaming” (about Adolf Hitler failing to become the Führer of Nazi Germany), Emily Barton’s “The Book of Esther” (about the medieval Jewish Khazar kingdom persisting into the 20th century) and Simone Zelitch’s “Judenstaat” (about a post-Holocaust Jewish state being established in Saxony), Israeli writer Nava Semel’s new novel, “Isra Isle,” imagines a Jewish homeland being established on an island near Niagara Falls. Originally published in Hebrew in 2004, the English edition (beautifully translated by Jessica Cohen) offers an engrossing, if at times confounding, narrative about Jewish history as it might have been.
The novel is less an integrated narrative than it is a triad of short stories linked by a common theme. The three tales are set mostly in the same place — Grand Island, New York (a small island in the Niagara River, just northwest of Buffalo) — but they unfold in different eras. Part I takes place in the days leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; part II is set in the 1820s; part III is set in the third decade of the 21st century.
The plot of “Isra Isle” is based on the actual, if ill-fated, 1825 plan of the American Jewish journalist and diplomat Mordecai Manuel Noah to create a Jewish settlement known as “Ararat” on Grand Island. In exploring the plan’s fate in three different worlds — the present, where the plan is never realized; the 1820s, when it still has potential, and a future world, where it actually comes into existence — the novel offers a range of comments about the dilemmas of Jewish statehood. Indeed, by exploring how the development of a Jewish state in North America might have shaped Jewish (colonial) relations with Native Americans, the novel offers an allegory about the current state of Israel’s precarious relationship with its Arab neighbors.
Part I is a quasi-detective story: Manhattan-based Native American detective named Simon T. Lenox is trying to track down Liam Emanuel, a missing Israeli airline passenger who was last seen on a flight to JFK Airport from Tel Aviv. Lenox’s investigation eventually brings him to Grand Island, where he encounters the missing man. When they meet, Emanuel shows Lenox the original deed of ownership for Grand Island, which he has just inherited from his recently deceased father. The document’s symbolism, and that of the two men’s encounter, centers on Emanuel’s disclosure that the document has long been stored in a boydem (a Yiddish term literally meaning an attic, but also a place for hiding things and, thus, a symbol of a refuge). As the two men debate the merits of pursuing the document’s potential for world Jewry, it becomes clear that the original Ararat plan has the potential to become a geographical boydem — a hedge against the potential failure of the State of Israel in the rough-and-tumble Middle East. Part I ends with Lenox experiencing a tragic fate, but his final admonition to Emanuel is not to give up on his ancestor’s dream.
ADVERTISEMENT
Part II, set in the 1820s, depicts how the local inhabitants of Grand Island view Noah’s utopian plan for a Jewish homeland. The most important local figure is a Native American woman who has been given the nickname “Teibele” (Little Dove) by Noah himself. She initially feels displaced by Noah’s purchase of her island and is urged by the spirit of her departed ancestors to kill Noah. But after overhearing her abusive employer — a member of the white landowning Lenox family — discussing how the Jews of Ararat will be confined to the island like Indians on a reservation, Teibele begins to empathize with the Jewish people’s yearning for a homeland. Especially as Noah begins to have frightening visions of the future 20th-century Holocaust, she urges him to pursue his utopian dream. She willingly enters into a sexual relationship with him, becomes pregnant and starts a line of descendants.
Part III imagines a world in which Ararat has evolved into Isra Isle — an autonomous religious polity within the United States of America. As narrated by Simon, the African-American lover of Jake (yet another descendant of Mordecai Noah), Isra Isle is home to 6 million Jews who live in a forest of Dubai-like supertall skyscrapers built partly upon artificial islands in the river. The state has fulfilled its purpose of being a refuge for the world’s Jews (Europe’s Jews have successfully fled from the Nazis, although “the Gypsies, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the homosexuals” are murdered). Yet while Isra Isle struggles to be a normal state, its original purpose weighs on its citizens. Jake is estranged from his grandmother — a refugee from Nazi Germany whose enduring anxieties about persecution turn him away from his Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the state’s female governor, Emmanuelle Winona Noah, campaigns for the U.S. presidency (the outcome is left in doubt), citing the compatibility of her Jewish-Native American heritage with American values. Part III — and the novel overall — concludes on a bleak note, however, with Jake traveling to the coast of “Grand Palestine,” a Muslim state devoid of Jews, and scattering the ashes of his grandmother (and the ill-fated Lenox) to the wind.
“Isra Isle” presents in numerous small paragraphs that are spare in exposition but rich in literary symbolism. The novel features an extensive array of recurring images, including (beyond the ubiquitous boydems) references to biblical stories, Native American mythology, types of birds, and sundry objects, such as javelins and canoes. Semel also interweaves relationships across time and space between the novel’s Jewish, Native American, White Christian European, African American and gay and lesbian characters, showing how names and identities blend and intersect in different historical circumstances.
Readers can decide for themselves how actively they wish to decode the significance of what at times can seem to be a surfeit of interconnected symbols. But they will not be able to avoid wrestling with the many questions that Semel poses about modern Jewish history.
The questions include whether the Jewish yearning for national self-determination could have been achieved in more peaceful and harmonious fashion; whether the quest for a Jewish homeland was destined to displace another people (if not Palestinians, then Native Americans), and whether or not the Jewish quest for normalcy can ever triumph over the desire to preserve a secret boydem.
Still, the novel may leave some readers wanting more. Those who wish to discern Semel’s own authorial stance will struggle to find any clear message among the many competing voices. Aficionados of alternate history, meanwhile, may chafe at the novel’s many implausibilities. Although it may be unfair to deny Semel the literary license to alter the past’s historicity as she wishes, the most effective counterfactual tales are those that provide maximum grounding to their exposition. Semel’s novel never really explains the (constitutionally unlikely) means through which Isra Isle becomes part of the United States, nor how the state manages to hold 6 million people in its 28.5 square miles (Manhattan contains 1.6 million in its nearly 23 square miles).
In the end, the novel’s greatest significance lies in articulating the growing interest among many Jews in exploring alternate paths of Jewish historical development. At a time of growing concerns about the long-term security of the State of Israel, it is not surprising that counterfactual scenarios are proliferating on Jewish subjects. Whether they express fantasies or nightmares, wondering “what if” about the Jewish past expresses the present-day struggle to cope with the uncertainties surrounding the Jewish future.
Gavriel Rosenfeld is the editor of “What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism,” due for publication in late October by Cambridge University Press.
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/360377/finding-a-jewish-homeland-just-northwest-of-buffalo/
Review: Isra Isle by Nava Semel
By Rachel CordascoOctober 16, 2016reviewHebrew, Israel, Jessica Cohen, Mandel Vilar Press, Nava Semel
semeltranslated by Jessica Cohen
Mandel Vilar Press
November 1, 2016
240 pages
This spellbinding alternate-history is not just one story, but three.
In Isra Isle, Nava Semel draws on historical fact and an optimistic alternative future to explore the ramifications of a Jewish state located in the United States and established in the early 19th century. Prior to Theodor Herzl and the dream of a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel, there was Mordechai Manuel Noah, a journalist, diplomat, and playwright who purchased Grand Isle, near Niagara Falls, from Native Americans in 1825 and tried to establish “Ararat,” where Jews from around the world could settle in peace. Needless to say, Noah’s dream never came true.
Semel begins the novel in September 2001 with a story with elements that are familiar to anyone who has read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union: a detective, troubled Jews, issues of exile and trauma. But in Isra Isle, the detective is a Native American man charged with finding an Israeli citizen who has traveled to Grand Isle to find the land that was purchased by his ancestor Mordechai Noah. The search stirs the detective’s own memories of his grandmother and her thoughts on human relationships to the land. And as he pursues the Israeli, he simultaneously pursues a relationship with a Jewish woman he’s met while on the case. With three failed relationships behind him, he searches for a way to make this new one meaningful and lasting, and, at times, wonders why this Jewish woman has a Native American middle name (this becomes significant near the end of the book).
The second part’s imagining of how the sale of Grand Isle actually happened and how Noah pursued his goal of a Jewish homeland brings up issues similar to those in the first part, suggesting that the constants of exile, trauma, and intolerance influence our actions whether we’re aware of the fact or not. After all, a Jewish man is purchasing a piece of land so that his people can finally find a stable home and live without fear of persecution, but that very land had belonged to Native Americans who resisted the idea that any human being can “own” a piece of land. One persecuted people replacing another persecuted people: Semel suggests that we can never truly start anew without displacing those who came before.
The final section of the novel is the alternate history, in which Noah’s vision actually comes true and Ararat/Isra Isle has been around for a couple of centuries. The consequences are numerous and staggering: no Israel, no Holocaust, a Jewish land deeply imbued with Native American cultures and traditions. And yet, the old issues arise once more: exactly how well “assimilated” are the Jews of Isra Isle in the United States? And what happens to the Jewish identity when persecution, intolerance, and violence are no longer real concerns?
Semel’s true achievement with this book is her seemingly effortless ability to demolish the walls we instinctively put up in our minds between the “past,” the “present,” and the “future.” Each section is on the surface self-contained, but names, narrators’ styles, and traumatic events bleed through and into one another, suggesting recent theories in quantum mechanics about how time doesn’t necessarily flow in just one direction. Rather, Isra Isle suggests that, in two different universes (one in which Israel doesn’t exist, and one in which it does), the same problems persist: what does “home” mean? What about “exile”? Can we ever really escape tragedy and catastrophe, even if the conditions are vastly different?
And then there’s the narrative style itself: introspective, almost dreamy at times, hurrying forward with a retrospective clarity that dazzles the reader. Jessica Cohen masterfully brings this through in her translation, and we’re lucky to have the opportunity to read this beautiful novel in English.
Isra-Isle
Nava Semel; Jessica Cohen, trans.
4
Mandel Vilar Press 2016
240 Pages $16.95
ISBN: 978-1942134190
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Ranen Omer-Sherman
Though not well known in the United States, Nava Semel is among Israel’s most esteemed writers, perhaps best known for And the Rat Laughed, an extraordinary hybrid novel containing poetry, dream, diary, and science fiction which was later transformed into an extraordinary opera, one of the most unforgettable “Second Generation” Holocaust narratives you have probably never read. Semel is a recipient of the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize, among others. Isra-Isle, Semel’s latest novel to be translated into English, is another genre-bending triumph, and a particularly sophisticated contribution to the vibrant literary tradition of Jewish alternative histories like Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Simone Zelitch’s recent Judenstaat, speculating on what might have happened had Jews settled in alternative Jewish homelands outside of the Middle East. Revisiting Mordechai Manuel Noah’s audacious 1825 scheme to create a refuge for his coreligionists on Grand Island, just downriver from the Niagara Falls, Semel’s Isra-Isle poses urgent questions about the meaning of collective memory, peoplehood, and heritage in the author’s own inimitable way.
Isra-Isle—the very name seems to express a fracture, an impossible attempt to suture a void, or perhaps an unhealed wound. Structured in three discrete temporalities, each is written in a strikingly different style ranging from detective noir to lyricism. In Part One, which reads like a classic detective story, we trace the steps of Liam, a descendant of Noah who travels from Israel to reclaim his grandfather’s legacy only to vanish without a trace. Simon Lenox, a police detective of Native American ancestry, is pressured by his superiors to find Liam and beset with his own unsettling origin dreams—as well as an erotic entanglement that seems to carry mysterious undertones of a deeper attachment. The further he proceeds with his investigation, the more metaphysical his search becomes. Most good literary fiction requires a strong degree of empathy, but Semel places that challenge front and center as the reader follows the resentful detective, who in turn tracks down the strange Jew, and comes to root for this beleaguered character, endlessly frustrated by the peculiar ways of Jewish Israelis and forced to make the fateful choice to step into the shoes of the Other.
Reaching the shores of Isra-Isle in the novel’s final section at last, the novel confronts the intriguing cultural complexities that ensue when the true homeland of the Jews is a water-saturated realm instead of a desert land. It is here that Semel raises fascinating questions about the nature of identity, a people’s psychology, and the environment that shapes it. One of the more captivating aspects of Semel’s tour de force is her sensitive and imaginative portrayal of intermingled Native American and Jewish traditions in both ritual (bar mitzvahs emulate tribal vision quests, prayer shawls decorated by feathers) and the trappings of statehood (Isra-Isle’s official flag displays a Magen David above sacred elm leaves, and so on). Another fascinating choice is Semel’s subtle portrayal of the trauma of 9/11 in two different versions, reflective of how certain mysterious traces of each of the novel’s three realities are present in the others, always in intricate and surprising ways that can be both poignant and funny all at once.
Journeying through this fever dream of this novel, readers will likely find themselves challenged and provoked in unexpected ways, though surely not more than the author herself, who wrote to the Jewish Book Council that “Hebrew is my true homeland, my cradle, my comfort, the language in which I dream and make love. How strange, even bizarre, it is to wipe it out from a book written in it. But perhaps such paradoxes are the only way for an artist to put their fingers on the things that often escape them and point to some hidden truth.” In that respect, Semel has surely succeeded, for Isra-Isle—with Jessica Cohen’s sparkling translation, which delivers all the wit, lyrical power, and tender warmth of the Hebrew original—offers as haunting and thoroughly entertaining a story about the ancient and modern quest for home and belonging as one could hope for.
ISRA ISLE
by Nava Semel
BUY NOW FROM
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Email Address
Email this review
KIRKUS REVIEW
What if the world’s Jews had resettled in North America instead of in the Middle East?
Simon T. Lenox is an American police investigator reluctantly pursuing Liam Emanuel, a man gone missing. Emanuel, an Israeli, arrived only recently in the United States. He arrived and then disappeared. Lenox traces him to Niagara Falls, where it seems Emanuel has an inheritance waiting for him. It turns out that in 1825, an American Jew purchased an island, downriver from the falls, intending it to be a homeland for Jews from all over the world. Semel (And the Rat Laughed, 2008, etc.) has rooted her most recent work of fiction in what is apparently historical fact. A man named Mordecai Noah really bought Grand Island with the grand intentions that, as we know, came to nothing. The first portion of Semel’s novel, set in September 2001, concerns Lenox’s search for Emanuel, a descendant of Noah’s. The second part goes backward in time to see Noah buy the land in question from the Native Americans currently settled there. The last part imagines an alternate world in which Grand Island became a real refuge for Jews. It is called “Isra Isle,” and it has effectively replaced a certain nation with a similar-sounding name. This is an odd—a deeply odd—piece of fiction, and it is even odder in Semel’s telling. That’s partly because she packs in so much that is tangential to the story: 9/11, for one, but also the fact that Lenox, the investigator, is of Native American descent—and not only that, he experiences visions. It’s hard not to see this as cultural stereotyping, especially since Lenox, like Semel’s other characters, is otherwise as flat as a piece of cardboard.
Semel’s imagined history might have been more convincing if her smaller details had held together: her characters, for one, and their motivations, manners of speaking, and so on—but they don’t.
Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 2016
ISBN: 9781942134190
Page count: 208pp
Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press
Review Posted Online: July 28th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016