Non Fiction Authors From Israel

"She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit."

"None of us had actually been thinking about a journey at the moment when it really began; and yet that moment was accompanied by the hollow rumbling of wheels and the whistle of a locomotive piercing the silence of the night. (p5)"

"Later she used to say: The place where everything almost ended. She meant the long, gray stone building on the circular plaza planted with trees. But why that place? After all, there were other places equally, if not more deserving of that description. And yet, thirty years later, it was that place she went to see, only that one place. (p226)"

"She had already begun to resemble her mother, and would surely have relived her mother's life-a fine home in a small town, pretty children, pretty dresses, the annual trip to a health resort-if the sentence of time hadn't made tragic heroes even of those least suited to play the part."

"The man made a small chink for himself in the outside wall of the barn; through this chink he could keep an eye on a scrap of the world: the meadow in front of the peasant's fenced-in yard and a strip of road."

"Each day and night of those weeks could fill a book, if only the pen could take on this burden of despair and helpless loneliness."

"What our cousin experienced, locked up in that room, will remain forever a mystery."

"This time was measured not in months but in a word-we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action,' or the second, or "right before the third.""

""I always wanted to paint. Always, before the war, that is. But I was thirteen then." ("Splinter")"

"...everybody thinks I'm crazy, but I'm not. I know-every crazy person says that, but really, there's nothing wrong with my head. If only God would make me crazy! It's my heart that's sick, not my head, and there's no cure for that. ("Crazy")"

"It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of the trees and flowers was magnificent. We couldn't hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying-just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken. ("Jean-Christophe")"

"The moment when the silhouette of an SS-man appeared in the pointed arch of the pigsty and his hand carelessly brushed the apple tree, dried by the summer heat-that moment gave us a taste of suspension in that limbo between life and death. ("A Dog")"

"Once again it was quiet, too quiet after what had happened. ("The End")"

"She went back into the room and carefully locked the door to the balcony, as if she could lock out all the evil events of the night. ("The End")"

"The death of Tsaritsa would have remained one of a million anonymous deaths were it not for the fact that it happened on a beautiful, mild day. (I've only imagined that the day was mild; much of what I'm going to say-but only the details, not the event itself-is the product of my imagination.) It happened in the very early evening, when the trees cast long shadows and the air was saturated with a light blue haze that was growing deeper and darker by the minute, although it was still long before nightfall. Tsaritsa's death happened at just the hour best suited for strolling, the hour that lures people onto the streets after a hard day's work. (first lines of "The Death of Tsaritsa")"

"Julia emerged from her reverie and repeated: "By then it was too late." She asked whether I remembered Emanuel, who had escaped from Lodz and wound up staying in the ghetto. Because when she said "it was too late," she was thinking of him. Then she said one more sentence (which she didn't finish) about sudden love in the dying ghetto, powerful and tender, torn from life, the love that Eugenia...I didn't ask any more questions. ("Eugenia")"

"Finally she says, "What I remember best is the silence. But you can't talk about silence. Silence is the opposite of talk," she explains."

"She says, "Other people suffered so much.... But no one beat or tortured me.... I never saw a German.... But still it's as if they killed me. Because I'm not the same person. My name, my date of birth-they're not mine. The doctor said it's shock. I don't know what happened before then, or what I was like. So it's as if I didn't exist.""

"Because many places that year had posted signs that said NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED, the only amusements left were strolls along the river that flowed through the clean, Germanized town."

"September came, and with it the war; the radio spoke a strange new language of exhortations and abbreviations."

"Sometimes even I would return from work, open the door, and feel as if I were seeing a stage on which the last act of a play was about to begin at any moment. (p18)"

"I heard the gentle click of Aunt Julia's knitting needles. No one knew what she was knitting, but we all knew why. (p18)"

"It's hard to reconstruct those days, to push through the nebulous expanses of memory. The fog thickens and thins, the picture blurs and clears. All the bits and pieces must be assembled into one continuous whole, and the task is difficult, and, above all, painful. (p33)"

"It suddenly seemed to me that the further away we got from Poland, the more complicated everything became-nothing was getting easier. We were dragging along all the obstacles we had overcome, and they were spawning new ones, and no sooner did we overcome these than they gave birth to even more. I looked at the young, pink-faced woman, and I could hear her musical, childlike laughter, and her voice, saying, "The important thing is to find a boyfriend." Would she give us away? (p66)"

"After he left, no one laughed out loud anymore. Quiet snickering, muffled by blankets, rippled through the room. And those laughing whispers frightened us more than the hysterical screams. (p93)"

"The only things we didn't discuss were the things that mattered most. Those we circled around, avoided, pushed away. (p135)"

"For the first time, I decided to break our most sacred rules, to let someone in on our secret. Perhaps I was too weak to bear one more blow alone. (p173)"

"If the police didn't show up before then. Always that little word: if. (p178)"

"To be able to one day change a harsh reality, we need to know how to define what needs to be changed and how to effect change. To cope with situations in life-both personal and public-we need to have a real picture of these situations and of their possible outcomes. We need to know the price of each and who will pay it in the end. To know that every act and every error has consequences. To reduce to a minimum the possibility that someone-the regime, or the press, or the local leadership-will deceive us, cram us with false "facts" that are appropriate to whoever is making use of them. To make quite sure that, in the highest possible percentage of cases, we can make our own decisions and not let someone else think for us. All these things require a constant and precise mapping of reality. In other words, they require information about what exists and what is possible."

"The word "teacher" does not mean a person who "presents" a lesson (what an awful expression!), who is responsible for the pupils' being able to quote a few details and dates. A teacher-if he or she is also an educator-is responsible for seeing that most of the pupils in his or her class leave school as autonomous individuals, capable of independent thinking and decisive and discriminating behavior. For a person to be able to make autonomous decisions (read: to be a proper citizen), he needs to have as much information as possible. Not myths. Not legends. Not lies. Information."

"An immense freedom, vast beyond human measure, hung over everything. The days had no rules and the laws of nature themselves seemed suspended. There was no longer any need to rise for work in the morning. There were no masters and no slaves. There was only the desert, which held no threat, and the gullies among the rocks. And the fresh, boundless mornings with the thinnest of mists rising from the thorn trees and from the flowering star thistles in the plain. The silence was palpable. There was no end of sky. (p 16)"

"if the limits of my language are indeed the limits of my world, I cannot think of a world more open to exploration and discovery, more intriguing and satisfying, than Hebrew."

"At some point we will have to decide whether Hebrew in the next thirty or three hundred years will serve merely as a channel of immediate and basic communication, as a language at the top of a pyramid, without any pyramid beneath it, a claustrophobic language not much different from Esperanto, or whether it will embody an entire non-Western culture that we know is worth preserving. Since language shapes us more than we shape it, this decision will be essentially about our own identity. It seems more and more certain that this will be a matter of a conscious decision."

"They kept leaving all the time. One from a town, two from a family, they fled the settled districts of the land of Egypt to join those who had left before them. They did not go far: no further than the nearest oasis or the first gully that had a spring. They sought only to put the sand between themselves and Egypt, to get away from its lords and officials. No more than that. (first lines)"

"After Auschwitz, absolute justice has no meaning; the Nuremberg trials did not bring a single murdered child back to life. We do not expect absolute justice today, perhaps not an absolute anything. The preferred term now is "beneficial justice," one that would do most reasonable good to all parties concerned. Conflict management has taught us that presenting each other with lists of grievances will not bring about any justice at all, and that it is the feasible, rather than the absolute, to which we should aspire. The astute listener will of course understand that the moment we use terms like "cooperation" and "conflict management" we have given up the old or neo-Marxist vocabulary of power struggle as the sole human motivation. Thus do linguistic changes, new semantic habits, usher in a different era."

"We know more about a foreign politician or entertainer than we do about the man across the road."

"We may well be entering a new oral age, for we now have the means to preserve information possessed by no previous generation. We have audio and video cassette libraries, computers, memory banks-everything is taped and recorded. Immediate communication fills our space now more than the function of preservation. Who writes a letter, when you can phone? The air is full of sound-from transistors, cassettes, and TV sets. It is full of music and songs and various forms of oral communication, often of a low common denominator. True, the technical possibility of transmitting such sounds has created new borders."

"The ways of the world began to turn upside down about one hour after sunrise. (first line of "Prophet")"

"It is probably true that the generation born in Palestine sixty years ago was the first since the Dispersion whose parents spoke Hebrew as an everyday language. Also, for the first time in two millennia, there was no longer a division between the mother tongue spoken at home and the male language of study and ritual. This is no minor matter, for from a psychological point of view, Hebrew at that point stopped being only a language of learning and ideas and became a language of feeling."

"Hebrew, a synchronic language, holds certain precise ethical and philosophical value concepts that belong only to Hebrew and to Judaism and that are really untranslatable."

"She no longer sought fortune-tellers, but relied on herself, on her own two arms, as if she had only now discovered their true strength to support. To sustain. (chapter 9 p180)"

"In an era when patriarchal, hierarchical, patronizing attitudes have lost their importance, when we do not accept the patronage of one culture over another, when women are no longer treated as inferior beings, and when children have their legal rights, management and cooperation are prevailing over war. The horizontal society of equals rather than one of perpendicular hierarchical groups, a society that creates worldwide networks, is the society of peace. Minorities struggling for recognition have taught us that assertiveness is good, while aggression is dangerous; that empowerment is good, while the abuse of power can be catastrophic; that discrimination is not to be tolerated. We now describe situations rather than groups at fault. All these constitute a modern dictionary of terms unknown to our grandparents."

"We would lie numb, waiting for the night's Operation Cauldron to end, the leaden silence to return, the hollow grief."

"Generally, we translate only one level of a language, the top of the pyramid, leaving very different levels concealed below."

"Language has two functions. One is to make communication between people possible. The other is the preservation of knowledge. Without language it would be impossible to prove any scientific truth or to learn from the experience of the past. All languages fulfill these two functions. And yet different languages have developed in such ways that each one represents the peculiar mind-set of those who speak it. A child who learns a language-that is, learns to speak at about the age of one-is already learning subconsciously the system of thinking peculiar to his language, and also its mental categories."

"Elias no longer hesitates. More and more he throws himself into their affairs. All the energy that had been dammed up in him while he had struggled to make up his mind now bursts loose. Even his movements have changed: his stride is taller now, quicker, firmer. No longer does he amble lazily along on tall legs. His long mouth is not the brown wound it used to be, having lost much of its sadness. Like that of any new convert, his zeal outdoes itself. (chapter 9 178)"

"If people visit books as they do tourist sites, looking for the famous passages they have heard about, looking for the best-seller they were told about, just to be able to say "I was there," then we have missed the whole point of literature."

"Our history is not only the history of a people, but also the history of a language...Some parts of our tradition are widely known; others are less known because it is so difficult to translate from Hebrew. Whole theories were built upon incorrect translations from Hebrew. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," as most translations have it, does not exist in the Bible. The original commandment is "Thou shalt not murder," which is entirely different. A whole ethos has been created in other cultures because of a fallacious translation of a commandment written originally in Hebrew."

"One has to love, Sara, she says softly, one has to love, human beings are so pitiful, we can't prevent a single death, all we can do is stave it off a little. Give comfort. "That's what Dr. Bimbi says too, but he sees that staving off as a sign of human strength." "Oh, no," Thérèse recoils. "Human beings have no strength. We live like flowers, by the grace of God." (chapter 7 p146)"

"With the waning of the patriarchal society, we have also freed ourselves from the tyranny of the past and do not feel obliged to prefer that tense over our present, here and now. In Hebrew, writing in the present tense was considered bad form only half a century ago; now it is prevalent, almost as a kind of protest language. But other languages have undergone the same process: the present, previously used mostly in slang and street parlance, is now completely legitimate in literature, and not by accident. We are important; the here and now is important; we need no more obey blindly the supremacy of the past."