In “The Desire to be Gisella,” David Grossman ponders the root of our fear of the “other” in ourselves and in those we love

One of the realities of our age—or rather—one of the realities of literature—is that often poets and writers do not write in their first language. Or, if they do, this first language is not the language of the culture in which they find themselves.

In 2014, historian Fania Salzberger Oz, and her father, the late writer Amos Oz, paired up to write a book which is “a nonfiction, speculative, raw, and occasionally playful attempt to say something a bit new on a topic of immense pedigree... the relationship of Jews with words.”

Set in a rural village prior to the creation of the state of Israel, The Blue Mountain describes a community of eastern European immigrants as they pioneer life in a new land

On this episode, Marcela features the poems of a fascinating writer whose pen name was Avot Yeshurun. He published his first book of poems in 1942, and his last book appeared in 1992, on the day before he died

Marcela shares the second installment of a three-part podcast on Ayalet Tsabari’s important and beautiful memoir, “The Art of Leaving”

On this episode, Marcela highlights “The Lover,” the first novel by A. B. Yehoshua, which he wrote in 1977. It is narrated from the point of view of each of its six main characters

Four Meals is the story of Zayde, his enigmatic mother Judith, and her three lovers. When Judith arrives in a small, rural village in Palestine in the early 1930s, three men compete for her

Marcela revisits Batya Gur, who introduced the murder mystery into Hebrew literature. Gur’s highbrow mysteries are often set in closed communities that mirror issues in the greater Israeli society

This book catapulted Ari Shavit into the international spotlight. It was a New York Times best seller and listed by the Times in its “100 Notable Books of 2013.”

On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Yaniv Iczkovits’s novel “The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann by the Hand of her Sister Fanny.”

Today, Marcela shares the second installment of a three-part podcast on Ayalet Tsabari’s “The Art of Leaving.”

“Nguyen’s poetry may circulate in the Anglophone literary market as part of an increasingly visible Vietnamese literary diaspora... And yet, introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting it entirely overshadow her work.”

Poet Lali Tsipi Michaeli says, “fear is what I felt as a child every time I drove with my parents in a car on Hayarkon Street. As the car was about to reach the "crazy house", I hid on the back seat floor and closed my eyes tightly. The house troubled the girl I was.”

“The Memory Monster” takes the form of a report by the narrator, a young Israeli Holocaust scholar, written to his superior from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, and raises ethical questions about the struggle to cope with the memory of the Holocaust

School has begun, and once again children are learning how to read, encountering the alphabet for the first time. Hopefully it is a pleasant and magical time, but here is a story of a boy who feared his teacher, although he loved the alphabet.

As we labor under unbelievable pressures and uncertainties of the pandemic, especially women who have children at home, it might make us feel a little better to see that the writer Tehila Hakimi already envisioned what work in 2020 would be like back in 2018.

It’s Sukkot again! This holiday, Marcela focuses on the agricultural aspects — the festival was originally connected to the harvest. And to help us along is Rachel Bluwstein, Israel’s farmer-poet.

Amidst the holidays, Marcela celebrates by reading an excerpt from Ayelet Tsabari’s newly published memoir, “The Art of Leaving”

“The Orchard” tells the story of Rabbi Akiva, placing him in the context of his contemporaries, the Sages of Jewish tradition and of early Christianity.

Marcela has got a thriller for you! “Three” is a page turner that tells the stories of three women. All of them will meet the same man. And he won’t tell the truth about himself.

It may sound crazy, but A. B. Yehoshua has written a page-turner about an aging engineer in the early stages of dementia, which features descriptions of highway construction in great detail

Meir Shalev's “My Wild Garden. Notes from a Writer’s Eden,” is a beautiful book, from the size and shape of the hardcopy, to the feel of the paper. Even the font type is notable. The watercolor illustrations subtly draw out the descriptions, rather than compete with them.

The literary critic Yitzhak Laor once noted about Ben-Simhon’s work and perspective, that “In the literary arena at the beginning of the 1980s, it took a lot of courage – not to speak about Mizrahim, but as one.”