Four excerpts from Rachel Shihor's novella Yankinton have been selected, and translated from the Hebrew for this cahier. These poignant and humorous tales are as much about the act of recollection as they are about the remembered Tel Aviv of the 1940s. In a playful and yet muted style, Shihor tells of the everyday life of a child beginning to grasp her surroundings. Six works by the painter David Hendler further explore the city.

In this playfully designed dual-language edition, Rachel Shihor's stories-published here for the first time in the original Hebrew-appear alongside Ornan Rotem's English translation. Shihor offers a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories, carving out a slice of a world in which Kafka would feel at home. The characters that inhabit this world-reckless she-goats, morose fish, somnambulistic theologians, and poignant old ladies, not to mention dying dictators and dead poets-have nothing in common save for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition. In her introduction, Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love, confirms, "Only a master could make such originality feel inevitable. The only question is why so few people have had the chance to read her." These edifying stories, with all their sadness and humor, are a writer's tour de force and a reader's delight.

Set in the early days of the Jewish state, Yankinton tells the stories of refugees from the Holocaust and antisemitism who struggled to build new lives in Israel. Through the eyes of a young Orthodox Jewish girl growing up in Tel Aviv, we watch a colorful mosaic of characters from Soviet revolutionaries to weapons runners during the War of Independence. Faced with the difficulties of the traumatized adults around her, from panic attacks to suicide attempts, the girl seeks moments of wonder among the struggle and tragedy. We join her as she moves through the Tel Aviv streets, avoiding the spots exposed to Arab sniper fire; seeks literature of the wider world in a city awash in translations of Soviet propaganda novels; and navigates the idiosyncrasies of the adults around her. With her, we listen in on political discussions, reminiscences of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet revolutionary songs accompanied by balalaikas. We track the lives of the couple for which the novel is named. Mrs. Yankinton smuggled grenades in her baby’s carriage during Israel’s War of Independence; for years after, she would end every day standing at attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came over the radio. Mr. Yankinton, whose arrest as a revolutionary in Soviet Russia foiled his plans to study medicine, became the proud curator of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky’s complete works. In this rich mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv, Shihor muses on the vital significance of the act of remembering and of the search for flashes of magic in the darkness.  

Jerusalem in the early 1990s, just before the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Peace Accords and was assassinated by a rightwing ideologue shortly thereafter. Naomi, a former architect from secular Tel Aviv, has just married Jochanan, a religious doctor who emigrated from Sweden. Days of Peace follows Naomi through Jerusalem as she meets a rich cast of characters, from an Arab beggarwoman in a park on a Sabbath afternoon to a professor of biblical archaeology on a life-long quest to produce a hand-lettered edition of the Bible. Kaleidoscopic scenes of the city pass before our eyes: a ritual bath, a wedding hall, carpentry workshops, bookstores, Hadassah Hospital, a former leper colony and more. As Naomi's marriage deteriorates, she travels to Poland, where the sorrow over those lost in the Holocaust intertwines with her nostalgia for the early romance of her now-faded marriage. But while the drama unfolds in the divorce court back in Jerusalem, Naomi is on her ultimate search--to find her place in this historical city. Written in deceptively simple, almost conversational prose, Rachel Shihor's latest novel is a poignant, layered portrait of a city and a young woman's quest to find herself.