Throughout his life, the kitchen was the place where truth always found Michael Twitty. It was where he first came out to his mother. Where he first felt kinship toward Jewish tradition. And where he...

In Yishai Sarid’s novel “The Memory Monster,” a tour guide to the Nazi death camps begins to unravel.

The Tel Aviv Review of Books and Jerusalism are proud to present a Zoom talk with Ruby Namdar on July 15th. For more details, please see here. It happened a few decades ago. Tel Aviv was still a...

I’m a 40-year-old Columbia University professor and last month I found myself crying in front of dozens of strangers on campus.

“Petty Business” is a tale of two families, related by marriage, who are shop owners in 1980s Israel. Rarely are middle-aged, petit bourgeois families the protagonists of Israeli literature, but...

Watching her daughter struggle through the emotions, excitements, and inequities of childhood seems to bring to mind Liv Ullmann’s own painful childhood, punctuated by her father’s untimely death and...

Ilana Bernstein’s 2018 novel is a portrait of a motherhood so demanding and a depression so immersive that it becomes impossible to tell which came first. Throughout the book, the symptoms of the...

Despite the memoir’s rigorous production method, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s mind wanders throughout the book, resulting in the vivid connection between his present and his past.

An intelligent mouse, a broken umbrella and Franz Kafka feature in tiny stories of love and hope translated from Hebrew

Catherine Raven’s friendship with a fox that wanders onto her property highlights the challenges she’s struggled with for years—an urge to isolate in a world that celebrates civilization, a belief in...

As with one’s family, Loskutoff has a complicated relationship with the Northwest, one that cannot be reduced to a single definition such as “love” or “hate.” He is mixed up in this wild country,...

Elisha didn’t know exactly when his right eye turned blue. On the family holiday, they were both still green, he was sure of it. The lake was clear (he remembered glancing at it) and Rivchu told him...

Karen Havelin’s debut novel keeps readers teetering on the edge of an abyss that cannot quite be named—the notion of living an existence of ongoing pain, the isolation of a disintegrating body—only...

When my mother, born in America to Israeli parents, first met my father in Tel Aviv, she said she knew he was right for her because he was an American living in Israel. As a young woman who grew up...

Tal Yacob's debut novel, Snowtrain, was published in 2019 by Orvim Publishing House to rave reviews in the literary supplements of major Israeli newspapers. This short novel describes a violent and...

Ling Ma’s 2018 novel is a story about what it means to make a life when one has been removed—whether willingly or by force—from one’s familiar surroundings, and the faith and perseverance required in...

Our new understanding of how trauma lingers inside and outside of the body has expanded to include not only relationships between peers of the same age group, but seems to have grown over time to...

The fictional, nameless nation in Katie Kitamura’s 2012 novel is a country of men obsessed with possession. They care to possess land, money, women. What use these things might be to them is hardly...

In Sayed Kashua’s 2004 novel, when injustice drips in bit by bit, it is easy to adapt—though with every such adaptation, reality shifts until finally it is irrevocably transformed.

Spending less time working and more time with our children was a choice that was entirely in our control. We realized that most people didn’t have a choice—they either went back to work quickly after...