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Politics of the Everyday

Novelist Yael Hedaya explores the daily struggles of modern Israelis

by
October 13, 2008

There’s a fairly well-established canon of Israeli writers in the United States. There’s Amos Oz, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld. Their work is not light. It grapples with the shadow of the Holocaust, Jewish-Arab relations, history, and morality. But in recent years the work of younger Israelis—among them Etgar Keret, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Yael Hedaya—has begun to appear in translation. Like that of her peers, Hedaya’s fiction does not carry the weight of the world, or a nation, on its shoulders. It’s more about day to day intimacies and anxieties, about loneliness, about desire.

Nextbook visited with Yael Hedaya in her home on a moshav just outside of Jerusalem. She spoke about making her novels political in their own small way, raising three children and still finding time to work, and writing for the hit television series Betipul, which inspired the HBO series In Treatment.

Photo: Efrat Eshel.

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Sara Ivry is the host of Vox Tablet, Tablet Magazine’s weekly podcast. Follow her on Twitter @saraivry.