July 25, 2010

Broadcast Date: 
Jul 25 2010

More summer reading: We rebroadcast interviews with Yaacob Dweck, the co-translator of Khirbet Khizeh, a 1949 novella about the cleansing of  Palestinian village, and with Adina Hoffman, author of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. Plus we remember Harvey Pekar.

Episode segments
  • Khirbet Khizeh
    Israel/Palestine, Arts & Culture, Occupation, Literature
    Yaacob Dweck translated Khirbet Khizeh with Nicholas De Lange. Dweck is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University
    Alisa Solomon

    Khirbet Khizeh, a novella by by S. Yizhar, is about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army. Published in 1949, just months after the 1948 war, it was an immediate sensation and source of intense controversy in Israel. But although it has long been considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, it has not been translated into English until now, thanks to Ibis Editions.

    For information on how to order a copy, click here.
    This interview was first broadcast on October 26, 2008.

  • My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness
    Israel/Palestine, Occupation, Literature
    Adina Hoffman, the author of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press) is also the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Broadway Books) She is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press that publishes translations from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and the other languages of the Levant. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Raritan, Tin House, the Jewish Quarterly, and on the World Service of the BBC. She and Peter Cole are currently writing about the Cairo Geniza.
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness Adina Hoffman has written the first biography of a Palestinian writer published in English. We talk with her about Taha Mohammed Ali, a self-educated peasant whose village, Saffuriyya was destroyed in 1948, and who became a souvenir shop owner in Nazareth and a unique poetic voice. Our segment includes some readings of Taha Mohammed Ali's poetry by him, with his translator, Peter Cole.

    This interview was first broadcast on August 2, 2009.

  • Remembering Harvey Pekar
    Obituaries
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and Nan Rubin

    The famously eccentric comic book writer and graphic novelist, Harvey Pekar, died on July 12th. The best known of Pekar's autobiographical comic art series, American Splendor, was made into a 2003 film starring Paul Gimatti.  Beyond the Pale contributor Nan Rubin caught up with Pekar last year at a program at New York's Center for Jewish History.  We broadcast some of that exchange.

    Pekar's collaboration with Paul Buhle, Yiddishland, will be published next spring by Abrams Comic Arts.