Hebrew fiction has emerged as a vital modern literary force, and the scope and riches of this literature is brilliantly exemplified by the eight short novels included in this landmark collection. Some of the authors represented here, like S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua are internationally celebrated. Others, like David Vogel, are writers of rare genius whose work until now had not been widely avaliable. Earlier writers like Y.H. Brenner and Uri Gnessin virtually created modern Hebrew literature, yet are rarely read by modern audiences. Writing in Hebrew, these writers tell of earlier European experiences, of emigration to Israel and of the lives of modern Israelis. Chosen and introduced by Alan Lelchuk, the American novelist, and Gershon Shaked, the Israeli critic, 8 Great Hebrew Short Novels has been superbly translated. This is an outstanding introduction to classic and contemporary Hebrew writing, now avaliable to English readers.

Set in the early 1900s, Viennese Romance tells the story of Michael Rost, an eighteen-year-old Jewish youth who travels to Vienna, hungry for experience. There, he forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path - prostitutes, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men alike. With a foreword that explains how this lost novel came to light, Viennese Romance is a seminal work that explores the conflicts faced by many Jewish intellectuals in early-twentieth-century Europe. A compelling portrait of a decadent society, it also lays bare the obsessive-destructive nature of love.

"Israeli writer Shaham explores the beams and pilings of a special mode of Zionist life--that of the kibbutz--and, especially in the first and third novellas here, lays out the psychologies of some of the pioneers with almost case-file (if undramatic) precision. In "S/S Cairo City," a delegate to a 1939 Geneva Zionist convention writes a series of letters to a lover, another delegate, who has left (disastrously) to return to Poland. As Hitler throws shadows which many of the Zionists are not yet ready to accept, they are nevertheless grateful to jam aboard a Palestine-bound Egyptian ship out of Marseilles; on the ship, Shaham probes the skepticisms of men-ideologues being turned into plain victims by what they're fleeing. ("Kuperberg spoke about the congress. He was not at all impressed with certain speeches that I found deeply moving. He said Zionism tends to be like manna. It gives the Western Jew a taste of Yiddishkeit, while to the Eastern Jew it holds forth a promise of Europe.") The last novella--"The Salt of the Earth"--is about an old kibbutznik's first trip to America--and seems like an ironic variation on the opening story; New York literally kills, the old man, hostile to every vision of social life for which he's striven back at home (and knows he's losing there, too). And the central, title novella is where Shaham shows his hand at deeper narrative: a bookish young kibbutz woman becomes erotic guardian over her married neighbor's clandestine love life--as the situation of universal daily sharing builds up such an edifice of public virtue that private weakness becomes downfall, destruction. Like Amos Oz, whose subject matter is similar, Shaham is delicate, historical, unillusioned, undogmatic; Oz's poetry is lacking here, but Shaham may have the edge in social perspicacity."-- Kirkus

The award-winning novelist recounts his miraculous survival of the Holocaust, from a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp at the age of seven, his escape from the camp, his life in hiding in the Ukranian forests, his negotiation of several displaced persons' camps, his 1946 arrival in Palestine and his struggle to build a new life on the fragments of his past.

Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon's famous masterpiece, his novel Only Yesterday, here appears in English translation for the first time. Published in 1945, the book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. Only Yesterday quickly became recognized as a monumental work of world literature, but not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.

Yoel Hoffmann's novel The Christ of Fish, revolving around its heroine Aunt Magda, offers a heart-stopping view into the soul of things. Hoffmann makes a beautiful, epiphanic mosaic out of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, still speaking German after decades in Israel, and a widow, Aunt Magda has "divided her life into two periods: 'When my husband was alive' and 'now.'" "Now," ever elusive and ever inclusive in Hoffmann's work, contains her childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, two stolen handbags, Bing Crosby, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer. Spontaneous and dreamlike, Hoffmann's images of reality shift in currents of "realness,"creating moments of absolute clarity -- life, seized as it is and of itself-- from the "cotton reels of memory." One reel concerns the title fish: "At the beginning of the fifties (Food was scarce in those days. Once a month, in exchange for government stamps, we ate a yellow chicken.) on Passover Eve, Aunt Magda's friend Berthe came to visit her and brought her from the Jordan Valley a large carp in a metal bucket....Aunt Magda filled the bath with water and put the carp in it. Two whole days the carp swam up and down the length of the bath. On the third day, Aunt Magda declared that the carp 'thinks just like we do, ' and sent Uncle Herbert (an expert in Sanskrit) 'to put the fish back in the sea.'"

A novel of ordinary, every day life in Israel during multiple plagues ― deadly flu, economic collapse, apocalyptic weather, and suicide bombings. “It was an exceptional winter.” With understatement, Orly Castel-Bloom draws back the curtain on her disturbing, revelatory novel set in Israel during the Al Aksa intifada. This is a world already regularly interrupted by terrorist ambushes and suicide bombs. And now it is further plagued―by a Saudi flu that is decimating the population, and by weather that brings a ruinous winter after eight years of drought. The economy is shot to pieces. Hail stones as big as dinner plates are falling from the sky. And yet, against this backdrop of monumental affliction, ordinary people are still trying to lead normal lives. Kati Beit-Halahmi, an impoverished cleaner, is snatched up by a community television program and given her full fifteen-minutes-of-fame. Iris Ventura, divorced with three children, is wondering how she can afford both to replace her broken washing machine and have some essential dental work done. And the Israeli president, Reuven Tekoa, travels from hospital to funeral, musing on the state of the nation from the back of his limousine. First published in 2002, Orly Castel-Bloom spins a web of filament-fine connections between her characters. Death or disaster might intrude at any moment, but people still watch game shows on TV, go to the laundromat and train to be beauticians. Holding a mirror up to her country, Castel-Bloom shows us a society in microcosm, struggling for continuity and normalcy in a fractured world. Sardonic, topical and wholly engrossing, this is a novel capturing the maelstrom of contradictions that is life today.

And the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters transfer memory from one another, while travelling on the axis of time. The book begins in the last day of 1999, when a survivor Grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. The day after – 2000 already – the granddaughter tells the legend of "Girl and Rat" to her teacher and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes a myth. In 2099 a future anthropologist discovers it and tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved that little Jewish girl (who later became the Grandmother in Tel Aviv) and returned her after the war to her Jewish people. In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world will never forget. The chain of remembearers, therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past. The novel is written in 5 genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years. And the Rat Laughed got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. How do we tell our painful story? Does it change while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in his own individual way? Is Art the only corridor to transfer emotional memory?

The author's daring treatment of nine frenzied days in the life of a troubled Israeli family, Yehoshua's latest novel reconfirms his status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals. Neatly and leisurely divided into "five seasons" following the death of the protagonist's wife of 30 years, this is a genuine and elegant portrait of a widower, Molkho, a middle-aged Sephardi, like his creator, and his heartfelt grief and painfully awkward readjustment to life as a single person. A passive, frugal civil servant obsessed with bodily functions and malfunctions, who diligently and celibately cared for his wife through a long illness, Molkho is a straight man, vulnerably ripe for absurd romantic entanglements. He is variously infatuated with or fancied by the barren, fey cast-off wife of a "born-again" Orthodox Jew; an aggressive lawyer, who is senior to him on the bureaucratic ladder; an Indian girl in a development town; and a Russian emigre Molkho helps to repatriate. Although much here is universally applicable, Yehoshua continues to advance his vision of Israel as the necessary, if chaotic and problematic, receptacle of the scattered remnants of world Jewry.

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping older man in a fancy car appears at school one day offering her luxuries her single mother cannot afford, Nina believes he's her ticket out of her dumpy little town. Ignoring the danger signs and her mother's constant pleas, which end in exhausting screaming matches, she packs a suitcase and leaves home after one last fight. Ten days later, a terrified Nina, her dress torn, is hiding in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment after witnessing a murder she cannot talk about. She is discovered by one of the building's tenants, a confused, lonely old widow who mistakes her for the granddaughter she hasn't seen for a long while, not since her son moved his family to America. "You've come back to me, Dana'le." Instead of correcting the mistake, the desperate Nina jumps at the chance for a place to hide. Hiding from her mother and the dangerous man who are both frantically searching for her, Nina settles into the old woman's apartment. But how long can Nina possibly hide out until the poor woman realizes she's not who she says she is, or before someone else, her homesick son in America who keeps calling, or the lovely local neighbors who drop by with groceries, catches on?

Past Continuous is a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition.

S.Y. Agnon's first book-length, breakthrough work, originally published in Hebrew in 1912 and now available in English for the first time in a fully annotated edition. This novella depicts an impossible moral dilemma faced by the tragic hero Menasheh Chaim, in mid-19th century Buczacz (in today's western Ukraine). In the framework of a traditional Jewish folktale of old world Eastern European Jewry, Agnon delivers a profoundly modern piece of literature, which benefits from the tension between plot and genre.

Abraham Mapu (1808-1867) was one of the first, & finest, of the novelists to write in Hebrew. Heavily influenced by a wide range of sources, the Bible, the Romantic Novelists, & renewed pride in ancient Jewish history, his works recall the finest works of writers such as Flaubert & other great romantic novelists.

To a large degree, In Mr. Lublin's Store sums up Agnon's thematic and formal development. This novel is also a prime example of an objective correlative for a world that is out of joint—a world where a plot is no longer possible because impersonal forces deriving from the setting where it takes place, Germany, no longer permit development of a normal plot. Only the components of the place, which determine the fate of many individuals who live there, can be described. The entire tradition has been undermined, although many of the characters yearn for it in their nostalgia for the shtetl of their birth. However, there is no hope of returning home; there is no chance to rebuild the fallen tabernacle of the tradition.

A collection of interrelated short stories centering on the author's Egyptian family and ancestors exiled from Castile.

In this book, Dvir Abramovich brings together a batch of timeless classical Hebrew novels, short stories, and poems, and furnishes readers with commentaries and critical readings of each landmark work. The selection of seminal texts include masterpieces from Yehuda Amichai, Haim Gouri, Amos Oz, Dvorah Baron, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Hanoch Bartov, Shulamit Hareven, and Aharon Megged. Each interpretative essay includes a bio-graphical overview of the author whose opus is explored. This collection will prove exceptionally useful for teachers who wish to introduce their students to the treasures of contemporary Israeli fiction and are searching for reflective analyses and searching insights. Guaranteed to ignite discussion and debate, this informative and entertaining volume, written in an accessible and lively style, will appeal to a general and academic audience and will tempt readers to read or re-read these great works.

Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future-which include marriage to a cousin-and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrats between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving.

When Flora Elhayani is twelve years old, God appears to her through the television and suddenly, after being mute for two months, she can speak again. Flora changes her name to Ori, and acquires a new, fantastical vantage point of her life in the desert town of Netivot. Trying to decipher what the revelation holds for her, Ori comes across a rare series of young adult novels about a strange wonderland whose heroine plays special part in Ori's own coming of age. Twenty years later, we meet Ori again. She now lives in Tel Aviv, where she is married to a successful man and the mother of a little girl. She has become a writer for young adults, focusing her work on various Wonderland themes. Life is good until a second revelation, very different from the first, rattles the very foundations of her life and puts all in doubt. Sunburnt Faces examines the nature of revelation in a world in which the fantastical takes place only in situations of error and misunderstanding. But will the social and political nature of this world allow Ori to find the certainty without which she cannot live?