Four For Meir Shalev

Four For Meir Shalev

  • 11/11/2011
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    Interview Conducted by Sharon Kabalo, Deputy Consul General

    1. Question: Welcome to the ‘Bible Belt’, this is your first time in Atlanta. As someone who regularly reads your columns on Yediot Ahtonot and had read some of your novels, you portray different worlds of content in between medium. The columns – very contemporary, with a social agenda. The novels – worlds of yonder. The columns deal with our societal struggles and the novels are a nostalgic reflection of the personal and the most intimate relationships. Is this statement true and if so, are there meeting points of these two different approaches in your writing?

    Meir Shalev: I try to keep my fictional writing free of political or current affairs. I do not enjoy prose that is political, I feel like someone is trying to educate me. To make a distinction with Political biographies or textbooks. In order to write fine-literature you need time and retrospect. In my latest novel I refer to descriptions of a family through generations and so one needs to look back. My books don’t always talk about the past, I try to depict people’s lives. Family relations, parents and offspring, love relations, betrayal, death. As early as the Bible these novels appear that are very beautiful. The Newspaper is obviously a whole other medium.
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    2. Question: Is there a place in Israel that inspires you more than others? Some of your novels take place in the Yizrael Valley, Jerusalem, the desert. 

    Meir Shalev: Both Jerusalem and the Yizrael Valley are places I am very much attached to. The Valley still affects me deeper. I’ve written a book that takes place in the Negev, “Alone in the Desert”. I really take to the desolate landscape but my memories from there aren’t as personal as they are from Jerusalem and Nahalal. I love many places in the Country that I don’t necessarily write about.

    3. Question: Do you perceive a gap between the Israeli discourse and the way Americans would discuss the same novel? What is the difference between the two readers? 

    Meir Shalev: There is of course a difference. But ultimately, when you put aside the fact that the Israeli reader knows the landscapes and the characters portrayed, ultimately, people talk about the same things – the heroines. My writing is very local. It is the local that translates to the most global perception. People ultimately identify with the small, the personal. In my current visit to the US I notice people are talking to me about my grandmother and asking me not only about the settlement in the 50’s, but about how did my grandmother accept my father for instance. Readers are searching for the human interaction, relationships, and their own self. 

    4. Question: Is there an American poet or author you are particularly drawn to or influenced by?     

    Meir Shalev: Mark Twain has accompanied me from a young age, but the two American authors who’ve inspired me most are Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Melville’s Moby-Dick. As a reader I really love Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Other books I enjoyed a lot are Thoreau’s civil contempaltions; Walden is about a man living on Lake Massachusetts. Also No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and The Road.

    Meir Shalev will be speaking and signing books at the MJCC Book Festival, Saturday November 5th, 9:00 pm