Five books that put you in Israel. Three are by writers from Israel and set there, starting with A Tale of Love and Darkness and Arabesques. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Israel's only Nobel laureate in literature is S. Y. Agnon, who shared the 1966 prize with the poet Nelly Sachs. Most writers in Israel work in Hebrew, which was revived as an everyday spoken language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Palestinian citizens of Israel also write in Arabic. Many Israeli writers are translated into English, and war, occupation and the making of the state run through much of their work.
David Grossman's The Yellow Wind, translated from Hebrew, is 1987 reportage that travels the West Bank on the eve of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising. Ari Shavit's My Promised Land tells the country's story through personal accounts, from early Zionist settlements to Dimona. Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, by an American journalist, links an Arab family and a Jewish family through one house in Ramle.
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Oz recounts his childhood in 1940s Jerusalem, the founding of the state, and the intellectual, immigrant-shaped family life behind it.
A Palestinian Arab Christian narrator from the Galilean village of Fassuta weaves family history, Israeli identity, and the 1948 upheaval into layered storytelling.
A mother hikes through Galilee to avoid news of her soldier son's army operation, showing how war and military service shape Israeli family life.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Israel.
An Israeli woman and a Palestinian man fall in love, showing how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli identity follow people abroad.
Dramatizes the Zionist movement and Israel's founding, from the 1947 Exodus ship and Cyprus camps to Palestine's Jewish settlements and the 1948 war.
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