The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Fiction from Israel appears to be better represented, per capita, in English translation than that from any other country or language. The large English-speaking Jewish population that lives outside Israel but maintains close ties to it is a natural audience, but much of the literature also appeals to other readers.

Hebrew became a medium for fiction only in the twentieth century, and in particular with the establishment of the Israeli state, creating a literature that, even with its frequent biblical references and echoes, often feels very young. With successive waves of immigration, most recently from the former Soviet Union, literary movements in Israel have been subject to more and quicker change than elsewhere over the decades. While the nation has enjoyed relatively rapid economic growth and success, the horror of the Holocaust still weighs heavily here, as do concerns about national identity, geographic isolation, and threats from hostile regional regimes. The unresolved Palestinian situation, especially, has an uncertainty that pervades both daily life and the local literature.

S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) was the first great author writing in Hebrew, but his art is generally not fully appreciated abroad, in part because of the difficulties of adequately translating his allusion-and reference-filled fiction. Even so, his stories and novels, such as A Guest for the Night (1939, English 1968), with its depiction of the conditions of east European Jews after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the massive, rich Only Yesterday (1945, English 2000), describing the world of the early Zionist immigrants to Palestine, are fascinating reading. S. Yizhar (1916–2006) made an early mark with one of the young state’s defining novels, but the massive The Days of Ziklag (1958), about a group of Israeli soldiers in an epic battle in 1948, has not been translated yet. After decades of literary silence, Yizhar published his autobiographical work, Preliminaries (1992, English 2007), set in the Palestine and Tel Aviv of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Along with the controversial Khirbet Khizeh (1949, English 2008), which describes the expulsion of Arabs from a village during the conflict of 1948, Preliminaries is the best of the little of his fiction available in English.

The Holocaust remains central to much Israeli fiction, and the work of representatives of the younger, post-Holocaust generations such as David Grossman’s (b. 1954) classic See Under: Love (1986, English 1989) and Amir Gutfreund’s (1963–2015) Our Holocaust (2000, English 2006) offer interesting perspectives on the deep and lingering effects even on those only indirectly touched by the Holocaust. Aharon Appelfeld (b. 1932), who survived it, began to learn Hebrew only after reaching Palestine in 1946, and it has given him a voice. His novels of great restraint indicate that much remains unsaid, as many of his characters are unable or unwilling to speak, clearly or at all, allowing him to convey some of the Holocaust’s horrors. Some of his novels directly recount the experiences of the war years, such as Tzili (1983, English 1983); others, such as The Retreat (1982, English 1984) and Badenheim 1939 (1979, English 1980), foreshadow what was to come in a Europe where creeping anti-Semitism was creating an increasingly intolerable situation; and his retrospective novels, such as The Iron Tracks (1991, English 1998), show that the past is proving difficult to overcome, with its endlessly, futilely, wandering Jew.

• Adam Resurrected (1969, English 1969), Yoram Kaniuk’s (1930–2013) best-known work, is a novel about living through the Holocaust and continuing with life after that, its protagonist once a world-renowned clown and now a patient in a mental institution. Kaniuk’s The Last Jew (1982, English 2006) also plays with memories in fascinating ways, the “last Jew” of the title a man who seems to have no personal memories yet is a cultural repository of the entire Jewish past.

Aharon Megged’s (b. 1920) fiction is more deeply rooted in the Israeli experience itself. The comic touch he displays in works with writers at their center, such as The Living on the Dead (1965, English 1970) and the wonderful The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump (1982, English 2007), are great literary entertainment, while works like Foiglman (1987, English 2003) consider more expansive horizons. The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump is typical of Megged’s stories with a premise that easily might be stretched into comic excess, in this case when a detested literary critic moves into the apartment above the writer’s own. But Megged does not overdo that part of it—and surprises with the humorous situations he finds elsewhere. His writer-protagonists, with their intriguing unfinished books, are appealingly hapless, if not entirely hopeless, characters.

Both of Yaakov Shabtai’s (1934–1981) two novels, Past Continuous (1977, English 1985) and the posthumous Past Perfect (1984, English 1987), are in a way driven by death. Stylistically, both novels push Israeli fiction in entirely new directions. Much of Past Continuous takes place between the death of the father of one of the characters, Goldman, and then Goldman’s own suicide less than a year later, packing a great deal of reflection and observation into the dense, free-flowing text. In Past Perfect, the protagonist, Meir, like the author himself, faces his own mortality in a variation of a midlife crisis that is both specifically Israeli and generally existential. In a fluid, almost neutral prose, Shabtai unfolds these novels less in time than in space, though the full feel of the stream of consciousness of Past Continuous, written as a single paragraph in the original Hebrew, is lost in an English translation that breaks the narrative into more digestible bits.

A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1936) and Amos Oz (b. 1939) are the best-known authors of their generation, with much of their work widely available in translation. Particularly impressive among Yehoshua’s novels are A Late Divorce (1982, English 1984), told from the perspective of various characters, including an Israeli who has moved to America and briefly returns to Israel in order to obtain a divorce from his wife, and the dense, layered The Liberated Bride (2001, English 2004), in which a professor explores the reasons for his son’s divorce while also studying the roots of conflict in Algeria and their relevance to the Israeli situation. Other notable novels by Yehoshua are the creatively structured Mr. Mani (1990, English 1992), in which each of the sections introduces conversation partners but then repeats only the words spoken by one of them in their lengthy dialogues. In addition, the text moves backward in time, with the first conversation in 1982 and the final one in 1848, producing a remarkable reverse chronology of Jewish fates. A Woman in Jerusalem (2004, English 2006) is a more conventional tracing of a woman’s history, but Yehoshua finds a moving journey of discovery in it.

A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002, English 2004), Amos Oz’s grand autobiographical work, is a good introduction to the author and his large body of work. From his kibbutz novel, Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966, English 1973), onward, Oz’s work has held up a variety of mirrors to Israeli society, showing how it has changed over the last four decades. From the entertaining bumbling title character in Fima (1991, English 1993) to the clear-headed retired secret service agent who tries to move on after the death of his wife in To Know a Woman (1989, English 1991), Oz constantly adds and uses different and novel approaches in his writing and stories. Among his most successful works are two novels in which he plays with form. In the epistolary Black Box (1987, English 1988), exchanges of letters (and telegrams) document a heated relationship, and the novel The Same Sea (1999, English 2002) is written in verse and prose poems. The Same Sea is only a small, domestic tale but arguably one of Oz’s best works.

David Grossman’s (b. 1954) sprawling See Under: Love (1986, English 1989) is one of the finest and most significant treatments of the Holocaust in Israeli literature, moving in four very different parts and steps, with the final part an attempt to sum up in encyclopedic form, alphabetically arranged, what has come before. The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991, English 1994) and The Zigzag Kid (1994, English 1997) focus on adolescence, the latter a surprisingly light turn for him. Far more intense is Be My Knife (1998, English 2001), a novel in which a relationship is built up entirely around written words, a man baring his soul to a woman in the letters that make up the long first section, with her thoughts written in a notebook then making up the second part of the book before it culminates in an exchange between them.

In Grossman’s widely hailed To the End of the Land (2008, English 2010), a mother, Ora, sets out on a personal journey to the far reaches of Israel, hoping to avoid hearing the news that her son Ofer has been killed in a military offensive for which he was just been called up. The novel’s title in the original Hebrew is literally A Woman Flees News. Ora is gripped by the irrational fear that something has happened to her boy, but her journey is also one of personal exploration as she looks back on her own life and on the men who played such large roles in it.

Also known for his children’s books, Meir Shalev’s (b. 1948) entertaining adult fiction is very popular as well. A true storyteller, his fanciful novels often contain elements of magical realism, particularly in The Blue Mountain (1988, English 1991), with its descriptions of three generations of early pioneers in Palestine. The more grounded A Pigeon and a Boy (2006, English 2007) artfully brings together the story of a present-day tour guide and events from the war of independence.

Orly Castel-Bloom (b. 1960) is the rare Israeli author whose works are far more widely translated into a language—French, in her case—other than English. Her fiction is more experimental and extreme than that of most Israeli writers, and her shocking Dolly City (1992, English 1997) is a graphic allegory of modern Israel in which the title character’s gruesome experiments in her home laboratory extend to an abandoned baby she finds. In Human Parts (2002, English 2003), Israel is beset by not only terrorism but also bitterly cold weather and a vicious flu epidemic, all in a biting satire of contemporary Israeli society.

The enormously popular Etgar Keret’s (b. 1967) work includes several collections of generally very short stories, but he also has collaborated on adaptations of these as graphic novels and films. His fiction has an appealing surrealism and humor, which rarely is overtly political, but even the unexpected can be wearing over the course of so many quick-fire bursts. The patchwork volume The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (English 2001), which includes several different people’s translations of stories from two early collections as well as the amusingly dark novella Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998), about the afterlife of suicides, offers the best overview of his talents. Keret’s more recent The Nimrod Flip-Out (2002, English 2005) is overall, however, a better collection.

Sayed Kashua (b. 1975) offers an Arab-Israeli perspective in the semiautobiographical Dancing Arabs (2002, English 2004), the story of a young Palestinian who is accepted at an elite Jerusalem boarding school but cannot live up to his promise and expectations there or later. Let It Be Morning (2004, English 2006), in which an Arab-Israeli journalist returns to his small and already far from idyllic hometown, where the situation devolves further when it is sealed off by the Israelis, the worst of the conditions in the occupied territories manifested there. The many personal issues and conflicts in a small community, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, are central, too, to Eshkol Nevo’s (b. 1971) Homesick (2004, English 2008). Escalating with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, it nevertheless remains focused on the individuals and their relationships and burdens, related from their various perspectives, one of which is Palestinian.

Batya Gur’s (1947–2005) Michael Ohayon novels remain the preeminent Israeli detective series. She focuses on particular communities and fields, such as the literary world and academia in Literary Murder (1989, English 1993), the world of classical music in Murder Duet (1996, English 1999), and psychoanalysis in The Saturday Morning Murder (1988, English 1992).

• Yoel Hoffmann’s (b. 1937) remarkable works of fiction are built out of small pieces and short fragments, whether in a chain as in Bernhard (1989, English 1998), in which the last line of each of chapter is the beginning of the next, or in the looser mosaics of a life presented in The Christ of Fish (1991, English 1999) or the love story of The Heart Is Katmandu (2000, English 2001), each consisting of more than two hundred chapters.

• Several of Yehoshua Kenaz’s (b. 1937) novels offer microcosms of Israeli society in their focus on small communities, such as The Way to the Cats (1991, English 1994), in which an elderly woman recovers from a fall, and Returning Lost Loves (1997, English 2001), which tells the different stories of the residents of one Tel Aviv apartment building.

• Zeruya Shalev’s (b. 1959) explicit novels probe relationships. In Love Life (1997, English 2000), a self-destructive young woman has an affair with a close friend of her father’s. In Husband and Wife (2000, English 2002), the breakdown of this marriage is manifested in the husband’s psychosomatic paralysis.

• Gail Hareven’s (b. 1959) The Confessions of Noa Weber (2000, English 2009) is a beautifully composed novel about obsessive love. In Lies, First Person (2008, English 2015), her characters deal in different ways with unforgivable evil.

• Yael Hedaya (b. 1964) novels include Accidents (2001, English 2004), in which two writers, one still grieving for his deceased wife, slowly find their way into a relationship. This long book is dwarfed by Eden (2005, English 2010), which describes contemporary Israeli life in an emblematic place that might be called Eden but cannot live up to its name.

Haim Lapid’s (b. 1948) Breznitz (1992, English 2000) is a less conventional but solid police procedural with a driven protagonist, and the short The Crime of Writing (1998, English 2002) provocatively ties together crime and literature.