This week sees the visit of three of Israel's most prominent writers to Dublin - Aharon Appelfeld, Nava Semel and Etgar Keret. They're in town to take part in "Writing Israel" - an evening of readings and discussion - at the Irish Writers' Centre and a conference entitled "Representing the Shoah in the 21st Century" at TCD.
Currently, Israeli literature, and Israeli arts in general, are thriving, with a diverse range of voices and viewpoints making themselves heard. Literary commentator Yigael Schwarz has noted that the early narratives of the "State generation" - writers Amos Oz and A.B Yehoshua - have now been augmented by a chattering chorus of new voices articulating alternative and contrasting visions of Israeli society.
This transformation has been on-going since the 1980s, as writers born and bred in the State of Israel, came of age and began to look long and hard at the society they grew up in. Romance, suspense, intellectual whodunnits, urban angst, and feminist narrativesnow all have their place in Israeli writing.
Before, there was a sense Israeli literature should be serious with a capital S, dealing with the "Big Themes" - war, Zionism, the building of a pioneer society. Now the new generation of writers can be - and indeed often are - more critical of Zionism and Israeli society. Some free themselves altogether from the notion of exploring Israeli identity and look to newer genres, wider trends, the effects of globalisation, say, or technology.
These three very different Israeli writers visiting Dublin highlight the current diversity of Israeli letters with Appelfeld representing the old guard, Semel, the second generation and Keret, the sassy new wave.
Aharon Appelfeld is the grand old man of Israeli letters and internationally acclaimed for his writing on the Holocaust. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, and now nearly 70, he emigrated to Israel in 1946 after being sent at the age of eight to a Romanian work camp and then spending the rest of the war in hiding. His mother was shot and Appelfeld was only reunited with his father some 20 years after they were separated by the war.
HIS books are explorations of dislocation and displacement, tender reconstructions of the lost culture of European Jewry, "sagas of Jewish sadness". Within them, there are echoes of Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Nava Semel was the first Israeli writer to really break the taboo surrounding the Holocaust and its effect on second generation children of Holocaust survivors, with her book Hat of Glass. She says: "A lot of our writers have confronted the issue but maybe I was the one who put the key in the door for them, to go into what I call the dark corridor."
Semel sees her work as a continuous exploration of the conundrum of survival. Her fiction is an attempt to understand how survivors managed to draw on extraordinary reserves of strength, to experience the horror and yet maintain a sense of joy in life. Semel says her impression from a very early age that there was always another reality stems directly from her experience of growing up in a home where both parents and children needed to protect one another from different and horrific truths.
It is this idea of a parallel universe, realities within realities, that informs her fiction, plays and children's stories. Survivors of the Holocaust themselves, she says, are the greatest inspiration, and she is in some way an emissary, "breaking their silence for them".
Etgar Keret, born in 1967, is the hero of the Israeli New Wave. Immensely popular in Israel, his books are already on the national curriculum. Something of a Renaissance man, he cites Raymond Carver as a key influence. Keret is both prolific and multi-talented, using fiction, comics, multimedia and film to explore his many preoccupations. His stories have been published in 15 different languages, and his film, Skin Deep, won several prizes at international festivals, as well as winning the Israeli equivalent of an Oscar.
There will be an interview with Aharon Appelfeld on the Arts page next Friday.
"Writing Israel" takes place at the Irish Writers Centre, 19 Parnell Square. Dublin 1 on Thursday March 15th at 8 p.m. "Representing the Shoah in the 21st Century" takes place at TCD, from Monday, March 12th to Wednesday, March 14th.