Zion's Fiction
Page 42
Hasson’s latest book, Tickling Butterflies, was released in Israel in 2017; currently he is writing and directing a feature-length horror film, Statuesque.
Keren Landsman, MD, is a mother, an epidemiology and public health specialist, and an award-winning SF author. In 2014 she volunteered to go to South Sudan to instruct local health care workers in epidemiology and public health. She is one of the founders of Mida’at, a voluntary organization dedicated to the promotion of public health in Israel. She currently works at a free STD clinic and at the mobile clinic for sex workers.
Landsman first started reading SF in school, in spite (or because) of the librarian’s claim that “it’s not for girls,” and has been reading it ever since. Her interests come through in her works, where one may encounter children fighting medically accurate space epidemics. From motherhood to friendship and coping with loss, all these and more find their way into stories that balance emotion, plot, and vision. Landsman published her first story in 2006, winning three Geffen awards, Israel’s top prize for science fiction, twice for best original short story and once for best original book: Broken Skies, a collection of her short stories.
“Burn Alexandria,” she says, is the literary fulfillment of her wistful yearning to have saved, together with her editor, close friend and Israeli SF maven Ehud Maimon, the Great Library of Alexandria.
Savyon Liebrecht was born in Munich in 1948 as Sabine Sosnovsky to Polish Holocaust survivors (her father had emerged from Buchenwald, his first wife and baby had not). She was two years old when she arrived in Israel, where her family finally settled in Bat Yam. She started her military service in a kibbutz and was later transferred to the Tank Corps as a communications specialist. During that time she started working on her first novel, about a girl who leaves a kibbutz for the big city. After her service Liebrecht departed for London, where she took up journalism studies. A year and a half later she returned to Israel, changed her first name to Savyon, and began to study English literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. After graduation, she taught English to adults, studied sculpture, and began writing for the women’s monthly At (You). She attended a writers’ workshop run by noted Israeli author Amalia Kahana-Carmon and submitted the resultant story, “Apples from the Desert,” to the editors of Iton 77, who published it in 1984. It was reworked for theater two years later and subsequently (2015) became a feature film.
Liebrecht writes novellas, novels, and plays, but her forte is in short stories. Much of her fiction falls under the category of psychological realism, as testified by titles such as “Horses on the Highway” (1988), “It’s All Greek to Me, He Said to Her” (1992), “On Love Stories and Other Endings” (1995), and “Mail-Order Women” (2000). These provided adequate cover for her rare forays into the fantastique, of which “A Good Place for the Night” (2002) serves as the most accomplished example. She is known as a meticulous craftsperson, building her narratives out of objects she finds in her personal life and experiences. Liebrecht also translated the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley into Hebrew. She wrote a number of teleplays as well, which eventually found their home on Israeli television. These won her the Alterman Prize in 1977.
Nitay Peretz, born in 1974 in Kibbutz Revivim, where he lives now with his family, studied scriptwriting at the Camera Obscura school of art and became a researcher, scriptwriter, and documentary director. He is also a social activist, involved in various projects, and a blogger. Since 2004 he has been directing, shooting, and editing the life stories of many Israelis. His writing career so far includes one children’s book, Eyaly’s Heart, and the novella My Crappy Autumn.
Mordechai Sasson (1953–2012) was a chemist, an artist, and a writer. Born in Jerusalem to a family that has lived there for many generations, Sasson became a self-taught painter, specializing in oils. Since early childhood he avidly collected science fiction books and magazines, comics, and films. His worldview was ahead of its time in Israel, especially in matters of literature and poetry, art and music.
During his military service he participated in the Yom Kippur War, and he subsequently started painting. While studying chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he began to write science fiction. One day he left his notebook in class, and the assistant professor who found it decided to send one of the stories to Fantasia 2000, which published it forthwith. Having won some success with further stories, including the one that follows herein, he began publishing stories in more venues, mainly children’s magazines. These stories were accompanied by his own illustrations. He published one children’s book, The Toads’ Party (1993), also illustrated by him. Sasson dedicated his stories to his good friend Eli Altaretz and to his own two daughters, to whom he always emphasized that knowledge is the greatest power.
Sasson was involved in helping the poor and was severely critical of Israeli society for generally ignoring them. His stories featured the city of Jerusalem and its folksy citizens with gentle humor, kindness, and deep love.
Nava Semel was born in Jaffa in 1954 to Romanian Holocaust survivors Mimi (Margalit) and Yitzhak Artzi, née Hertzig. Her father was a member of the Romanian Zionist Youth Movement, which became involved in a first-of-its kind rescue attempt in Transnistria. The family emigrated to Israel in 1947 but was stopped en route by the British, who sent them to a detention camp in Cyprus. Upon their arrival in Israel, Yitzhak Artzi served as deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, a post he would hold for twenty years, after which he was elected to the Knesset as a representative of the Independent Liberal party. Semel’s brother, Shlomo Artzi, is regarded as one of Israel’s most iconic balladeers.
Semel attended Tel Aviv’s Gymnasia Herzliya, then served in the army as a reporter for the IDF radio station. She worked for Israeli television and the fledgling Beit Hatfutzot while completing a degree in art history at Tel Aviv University. In 1976 she married Noam Semel, a theatrical producer who went on to become theatrical director of Tel Aviv’s iconic Cameri Theatre. Through 1988 she worked as a book reviewer, film critic, and journalist. That year she left to the United States with her husband, who had been appointed cultural consul to the Israeli Consulate-General in New York.
Semel’s scrapes at the scar tissue of the Holocaust, searching for the effable behind the determined silences in Israeli survivor families. Her SF/F, most particularly the novel And the Rat Laughed (2001), deals with the ostensible inability to confront the unmentionable. This novel was staged by the Cameri Theatre and is slated to become a major international film. Isra-Isle, published in 2008, is an alternate history novel that posits the creation of a Jewish homeland in upper New York State. It was published well before Michael Chabon embarked upon his similarly themed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Semel is an SF aficionado and is unapologetic about what others may see as rummaging behind the cowsheds.
Nava Semel was the recipient of several awards, including the American Jewish Book Prize, the Prime Minister’s Prize, Austria’s Best Radio Broadcast Prize, and Israeli Woman Writer of the Year. She succumbed to cancer in 2017.
Gur Shomron is a writer, poet, and technology entrepreneur and inventor. He co-started his first technology company, Quality Computers, at the age of twenty-two and took it public in Israel. He continued his career as an entrepreneur and investor and spent thirteen years in the United States building high-technology companies. At the same time he started writing science fiction. In his first (as yet unpublished) book, A Message from Nowhere, Shomron envisioned a network similar to the Internet more than thirty years ago. His second book, NETfold, was selected by Kirkus Reviews in 2014 as one of the best in its category (Indie). It describes a virtual world where people have twenty-four times more time and can lead alternate lives. NETfold was published in Israel by the Modan Publishing House.
Currently, Shomron divides his time among writing, charity, and serving as chairman of various Israeli technology companies. He is the chairman of WalkMe, a world-leading company in the Internet guidance and engagement field, and of Coldf
ront, which develops medical devices for the treatment of brain stroke. Gur Shomron lives in Raanana, Israel. He is married and has four children.
Eyal Teler was born 1968 in Jerusalem to a literature teacher and an astronomy buff. Teler took to SF/F in high school, advancing from Hebrew translations of genre standards to English, largely, he says, thanks to a seeming inexhaustible supply of Perry Rhodan novels. He attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science, and has been a software developer ever since, creating, among other products, games, an AI chip, and a 3D 360-degree camera. Teler credits the online Critters writing workshop with his first and only sale so far, “Possibilities,” to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2003. The story was a response to Bradbury’s story, “Quid Pro Quo,” published in 2000. Teler later sold the story through the online service Fictionwise, earning a majestic $2.20, the proceeds of which he never banked, as check-cashing charges in Israel exceeded the value of the check. Henceforth, writing took the far back seat to family and work responsibilities—Teler is married and has two children—and although he has considered writing a novel centered on the female protagonist of his story, time, he says, has eluded them both.
Lavie Tidhar is winner of the World Fantasy Award for Osama (2011) and The Violent Century (2013) and of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize for A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and is author of many other works. He writes across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction, and historical and autobiographical material. Tidhar’s work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times and to that of Kurt Vonnegut by Locus.
Tidhar was born in 1976 on a kibbutz in northern Israel, where he discovered SF/F in a cache of the Israeli SF magazine Fantasia 2000 gathering dust in the collective’s library. Upon moving with his family to South Africa in his teens, Tidhar adopted English as his primary creative language. His first publication, however, a collection of verse translated as Remnants of God, appeared in his native Hebrew in 1998. He launched his career as an English-language SF/F writer in the online magazine Chizene in 2005.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sfe.com) describes the writer, who now resides in the United Kingdom, as a postmodern pioneer of equipoisal fantastika. “Tidhar’s literary strategy,” it intones, “repeatedly relies on the recycling of stereotypes and clichés drawn from classical pulp SF and detective fiction, traditional mythologies and contemporary popular culture.”
This penchant can be identified in his first English-language collection of linked short stories, Hebrewpunk, published in 2007. It reaches full steam(punk) in his Bookman sequence (2010–12), three linked novels transpiring in an alternate Victorian England under the claws of a reptilian alien race. But it is in his World Fantasy Award–winning novel Osama (2011), which channels noir, alternate history à la Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Timeslip, that Tidhar breaks free into new psychological and genre-shifting territory. “The Smell of Orange Groves” is featured in Central Station (2016), winner of the John W. Campbell Award and a Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee. It is a mosaic novel set around a spaceport erected several hundred years hence on the ruins of the eponymous Tel Aviv bus station.
Nir Yaniv, a Tel Avivian, is a musician, writer, editor, and occasional director. He describes himself as a hi-tech wizard with a background in computer programming and an instrumental vocalist, a devoted a cappella performer, bassist, composer, and arranger. Yaniv performed at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in 1999 and 2002 and at numerous other festivals. He records his own music at his own studio, The Nir Space Station. Yaniv performed live music with a dance company for ten years and created music for films and TV. Indeed, he starred in a short, award-winning Israeli horror film as the monster. Yaniv has participated in numerous musical groups and bands and says he still hasn’t had enough. His short-story collections include One Hell of a Writer (Odyssey Press, 2006) and The Love Machine & Other Contraptions (Infinity Plus, 2012). Short films include Conspiracy (2011), MicroTime (2013), and LiftOff (animation, 2013). Yaniv draws weird caricatures, sometimes to be found on T-shirts and coffee mugs. He founded Israel’s first online SF/F magazine and served as its chief editor, then moved on to edit the printed SF magazine Halomot beAspamia and to found the website of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. He writes columns, articles, and reviews for various publications.
Yaniv’s short stories appeared in magazines in Israel and abroad (notably Weird Tales, ChiZine, Apex, and other publications, electronic and printed). He wrote two novels with fellow author Lavie Tidhar: Fictional Murder (Odyssey Press, 2009) and The Tel Aviv Dossier (ChiZine Publications, 2009).