Four German Jews, all refugees from Nazi Germany, and all first-rate musicians, arrive in Palestine in the 1930s. There they join a symphony orchestra, which although made up of Europeans serves as a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist state-in-the-making. Unable to express themselves within this melting-pot orchestra, they join together to form The Rosendorf Quartet. In this compelling and provocative novel, awarded Israel's prestigious Bialik Prize for Literature, Nathan Shaham examines the plight of these refugees, who must adjust to the old-new land--a place fraught with political struggle and impending violence.
Kurt Rosendorf, the quartet's founder and first violin, would like to believe that his true homeland is music. Forced to leave his Christian wife and daughter in Berlin, he cannot adjust to life in Palestine and tries to live "outside history and geography." Konrad Friedman, second violin, is a young Zionist who constantly battles the urge to renounce the European, cultured life of the musician and dedicate himself to the Jewish cause. Bernard Litovsky, the cellist, is tired of wandering and longs for firm ground and a sense of home. The fourth in the quartet is the stunning Eva Staubenfeld, whose beauty and sexual liberation baffle and mesmerize her colleagues. Relieved to be far from the abuses of her past, she is furious that the accident of being born Jewish has disrupted her life.
Uniting the four is Egon Loewenthal, a brilliant and underrated German author who has survived Dachau but cannot forsake the language of his persecutors. He decides that his next novel, written in German, will be about the quartet.
The Rosendorf Quartet is not only a deft portrait of the complexities and contradictions that have gone to make up the state of Israel; it is also a stunning tribute to the curative powers of music, in whose realm dissonance, politics, and personal anguish dissolve into art, transcending human conflict and national boundaries

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a novel that "broke all the barriers . . . sexually explicit yet dense with biblical allusions and psychological insight", Love Life unbuttoned Hebrew literature and spent four months as Israel's number one best-seller. What begins as a story of a young married woman's turbulent affair with an older man rapidly devolves into a feverish, lyrical crash course in the anatomy of obsession.

When Yaara meets Aryeh, her father's boyhood friend, she is instantly drawn to his impassive and archly assured presence. It is not long before she forsakes her devoted and well-meaning husband for the powerful, mysterious older man who seems to embody all that she lacks: will, strength, and the key to her parents' inaccessible pasts. They embark on a heated affair that soon spirals toward the destructive as Yaara finds that the things in Aryeh that attract her also repel her with equal intensity. With shocking immediacy, Shalev lays bare Yaara's struggle to navigate extreme terrain ranging from the sublime to the grotesque, the sacred to the profane, the liberating to the all-consuming. Love Life is cerebral, seductive, provocative, and profound.

" "Dolly City" -- a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son, who she names "Son." Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood -- and its implications in the work of a nation. Gruesome, irreverent, and hilarious, "Dolly City" is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting -- and brilliant -- works ever written in Hebrew.

Na'ama Newman wakes up one morning to a new reality. Her husband Udi, formerly a healthy, active tour guide, announces that he can no longer move his legs. The paralysis is diagnosed as psychosomatic - Udi has gone on strike and Na'ama must cope with the crisis, while balancing the demands of work and motherhood. The plot moves swiftly from this starting point, and Shalev depicts the complexities of intimate relationships with daring perceptiveness. It is a unique and intense novel, compulsively readable and extraordinarily insightful. Husband and Wife brilliantly captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined, as well as the near impossibility of setting out to disentangle them without any casualties. With this novel, Zeruya Shalev is sure to gain the renown in the UK that she already enjoys around the world.

The men, women, and even animals in this collection live at the mercy of their hearts. Young and old, on two legs or four, they grope for love and tenderness, knowing that all connection is fraught with danger and all relationship random and evanescent. Yet the heart wants what it wants. The title novella, a wrenching account of the end of love, traces a gentle dog's transformation into a vicious beast as the couple who owns him breaks apart.

In The Happiness Game the tenuous bonds between husband and wife are undermined by black crows and weak hearts, while Matti presents a chorus of voices—doctors, nurses, jilted wife, dying husband—that recounts an old man's passion for his lover, a fifteen-year-old Lolita. Wise and deft, Housebroken navigates the moments of decision, betrayal, longing, and jealousy that torment the souls of wounded lovers.

The hilarious second novel from actress and bestselling novelist Alona Kimhi holds up a comically warped mirror to contemporary Israel, as well as the very notion of "chick lit."