Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Shmuel Agnon is the only Israeli writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is still regarded as the best writer in modern Hebrew literature. This book takes place in Jaffa between the end of the 19th century and the start of the First World War. I read it three times to get the atmosphere and spirit of the place at that time.
Your first book is Only Yesterday by Shmuel Yosef Agnon.
Shmuel Agnon is the only Israeli writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is still regarded as the best writer in modern Hebrew literature. This book takes place in Jaffa between the end of the 19th century and the start of the First World War. My latest book, The House of Rajani, takes place at the same time and in the same place so I was very much inspired by his book. I read it three times in order to get the atmosphere and spirit of the place at that time. Nevertheless, when I read Agnon’s book I do have some criticisms of it. This is because I think that when he described the immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine he disregarded the Palestinian existence. In the entire book, which is about 600 pages, he doesn’t even mention one Arab person by name.
Do you think that was a consciously political choice?
Yes, I think it was a political choice. The way he describes, for example, the first meeting of his protagonists in Palestine. He totally ignores the Palestinian existence in Jaffa back then. The majority of people living there were Palestinian and he only describes the Jewish population. And I think that this was a political choice, which I have tried to remedy in my own book by talking about the Palestinians living there at the time.
Are you the only person who is critical of him? Do others dare, considering how important he is in Jewish literature?
I think I am part of a new trend in Israel to be critical of the way we tell our history. For example there is a group of historians who are called the new historians and Benny Morris is one of them. And what they try to do is to correct the political bias in the writing by talking about Palestinians, and Israelis helping Palestinians.
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Alon Hilu is an Israeli writer and playwright. He was born in 1972. His first book, Death of a Monk, is an historical novel which retells the story of the blood libel against the Damascus Jews which took place in 1840. It won the Israeli Presidential Prize for a debut novel in 2006 and the Israeli Prime Minister Prize in 2008. His second novel, The House of Rajani, set in 1895 Jaffa, was awarded the 2009 Sapir Prize. Alon Hilu lives with his family in Tel Aviv.
