Sayed Kashua
Sayed Kashua סייד קשוע
Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian author and journalist born in Tira, Israel to Palestinian Muslim-Arab parents. He is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel. From the beginning of his career as a writer, Kashua wrote exclusively in Hebrew despite having grown up speaking exclusively Arabic. This was an intentional choice on his part in reaction to the poor representation of Palestinian characters in Hebrew books at his school library.. Kashua wanted to “tell the Israelis…the Palestinian story."
Translated Titles by Sayed Kashua
Kashua’s nameless antihero has big shoes to fill, having grown up with the myth of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and with a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, different schools, different languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. Kashua brings us a protagonist whose greatest accomplishment is his ability to disappear. In a land where personal and national identities are synonymous, Dancing Arabs brilliantly maps one man’s struggle to disentangle the two, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both.
In his searing new novel, a young Arab journalist returns to his hometown–an Arab village within Israel–where his already vexed sense of belonging is forced to crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, the village devolves into a Darwinian jungle, where paranoia quickly takes hold and threatens the community’s fragile equilibrium. Let It Be Morning offers an intimate, eye-opening portrait of the conflicted allegiances of the Israeli Arabs, proving once again that Sayed Kashua is a fearless, prophetic observer of a political and human quagmire that offers no easy answers.
Kashua’s third novel centers on an ambitious lawyer who is one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem. He has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of the city, a large house, speaks perfect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife, Leila, and their two young children. One day at a used bookstore, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous owner—a man, according to the inscription, named Yonatan—pulling at the strings that hold all their lives together. Kashua spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin. Second Person Singular is a complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.
Learn more about Sayed Kashua
Gale Literature Resource Center - Sayed Kashua Biography
Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret אתגר קרת
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his stories, graphic novels and writing scripts for film and television. Keret's writing style is lean, using everyday language, slang, and dialect. His work has influenced many writers of his generation, as well as bringing a renewed surge in popularity for the short story form in Israel in the second half of the 1990s.
Translated Titles by Etgar Keret
Almost all of the thirty short stories in Etgar Keret's collection, The Nimrod Flip-out, take place against backdrops that are deceptively banal. Each site, though, eventually reveals a rupture, a tear in its seeming ordinariness through which the perverse, bizarre or fantastic is oozing in.
In the collection of short stories, Fly Already, Etgar Keret takes you into a parallel plane of reality that is uncannily familiar to our own, but peppered with whimsical and sometimes bleak science-fictional twists and turns.
Learn more about Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret's Professional Website
Gale Literature Resource Center - Etgar Keret and Hebrew Romance