Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing

In over 100 short stories, novel excerpts and poems, 24 mizrahi (Jews originating from the Levant, India and Arab countries) Israeli writers grapple with universal issues of family, love and death but also provide uniquely Israeli takes on culture, class and politics. Not every work is current (Shoshannah Shababo's Maria, excerpted here, was written in 1932), but most will be new to American readers. Each writer is introduced in an autobiographical sketch, and many are interviewed by Alcalay, a writer and professor in New York whose After Jews and Arabs was a Village Voice best book. The stories themselves are as different as the individuals who wrote them. In Shababo's ""Simha's Wondrous Spell,"" Yael, frustrated with her inability to conceive with her husband, a much older scholar, chooses one one her husband's students, the Skeptic, as the father. In a series of poems describing her day, Tikva Levi writes: ""past the last intersection/ from the previous poem/ a golden dusty cloud/ of neon cleaves/ the fog/ and in a doorway/ a teenage couple/ hug and kiss/ completely unrelated/ to the couple from poem three."" And in Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's essay, ""A Letter from Mama Camouna,"" her mother chides a younger character who wonders why his grandmother never told him family stories. Perhaps, she says, it is ""because you never asked... you young people nowadays are really not interested in those old tales, when you really can't be bothered with the past, because the world they live in is so different."" Luckily Alcalay did ask, and here are many of the answers. (July)