(Esau is a saga of several generations in a family of bake...)
Esau is a saga of several generations in a family of bakers spanning the period from World War I and the inception of the British Mandate in Palestine through the mid-seventies in Israel.
(A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: a ...)
A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: a universal story of passion and personal destiny. When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts the attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife - the most beautiful woman in the village - because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers.
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner
(It's a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top houseke...)
It's a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth. Here we meet Shalev's amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family s biggest enemy in their new land: dirt.
Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible's Intriguing Firsts
(Meir Shalev describes the many "firsts" of the Bible - th...)
Meir Shalev describes the many "firsts" of the Bible - the first love and the first death, to the first laugh and the first dream -providing a fresh, secular, and surprising look at the stories we think we know.
(On the perimeter of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, with the Car...)
On the perimeter of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, with the Carmel mountains rising up in the west, Meir Shalev has a beloved garden, "neither neatly organized nor well kept," as he cheerfully explains. Informed by Shalev's literary sensibility, his sometimes riotous humor, and his deep curiosity about the land, My Wild Garden abounds with an appreciation for the joy of living, quite literally, on Earth.
Meir Shalev is an Israeli columnist and author, who is hailed as one of the greatest modern-day writers of Israel and has even been called the Hebrew Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his use of magic realism. He has written for both juvenile and adult audiences, and his work has been praised for its larger-than-life characters.
Background
Meir Shalev was born on July 29, 1948, in Nahalal, Israel. He is the son of Yitzhak Shalev, a poet, and Batia Shalev. He grew up on Nahalal, the first moshav (cooperative farming community) in Israel, where life was rustic and simple. Military leader Moshe Dayan had the only phone on Nahalal, and his daughter Yael remembers being sent by her father to tell Shalev's father that his son had been safely born. Shalev speaks warmly of his grandmother and her influence on his writing: "She was a temperamental woman, but she was a great storyteller," he says. "She was full of tales about the old days on the moshav." These stories became the setting for Shalev's groundbreaking first novel, The Blue Mountain.
Education
Meir Shalev studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received honorary doctorates from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Meir Shalev joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1966, taking part in battles of the Six-Day War and the War of Attrition. During his service, he was wounded in a military accident. After graduation from the university, he began a career as a researcher, screenwriter, host, and producer on radio and television, and a contributor to Israel's leading newspapers. His long-standing column in Yedioth Ahronoth's weekend supplement applies humor and sarcasm to the critical treatment of government policies, in particular in the areas of education and culture, nature and the environment, and religion and state.
His first published book was a children's story, Michael and the Monster of Jerusalem, published in 1982. He wrote three children's books before he even ventured into the world of adult fiction. The impetus came from his memories as an avid young reader when each book offered a kind of magic and escape from reality. "No novel for adults, even the best ones, moved me or excited me the way a good children's book did when I was 5 or 6," said Shalev. "A book is the creation of the writer and the reader, and there is this magic in children's stories." Shalev has written 14 children's books, including the popular series about Kramer the cat (although his personal favorite is How the Neanderthal Discovered the Kebab). Some are written for one of his children or grandchildren; others were drawn from an incident or conversation. He also tends to write children's books as a break from writer's block. For Shalev, it's also getting to work on the punctuation, collaborating with the illustrator, and reading the final product to kids, who, he says, are wonderful critics as they know instinctively how to sense the story's direction and whether the book is any good.
A Snake, a Flood, and Two Arks spent months in the Number One spot on children's bestseller lists, and critics raved about the stories and drawings by Italian artist Emanuel Luzzati. The book contains simplified versions of some of the best-known Biblical stories, including the Garden of Eden, Joseph and his coat of many colors, and the Tower of Babel. Newspaper reviewer Yael Dar said, "The language has been simplified without sacrificing the complexity of the plots. He has added bits of his own: descriptions of nature, character traits, concealed thoughts and even humor." Perhaps Shalev's best-known juvenile book is My Father Always Embarrasses Me. In it, Mortimer Dunne speaks of his mother, a TV journalist, with pride. But when it comes to his father, Mortimer sings a different tune. His dad never gets him to school on time, wears horribly inappropriate clothing, and - worst of all - tries to kiss him in front of his classmates. When Mortimer's school hosts a baking contest, it's Dad who shows up with a plain brown cake, and Mortimer is sure he's in for the ultimate humiliation. What happens next is, instead, what allows Mortimer to learn that his father, a writer, was embarrassed by his own father because he was only a baker. My Father Always Embarrasses Me is a humorous twist on role-reversal.
Meir Shalev's first novel for adult audiences was The Blue Mountain, originally published in Hebrew. The first English edition was published in 1991 by HarperCollins. The story takes place in a socialist kibbutz in Palestine that was established by a group of Ukrainian immigrants. Baruch, a grandson of one of the founders, narrates the book by drawing on anecdotes, family history and legend, and pure rumor. The characters are uniquely individual - from an uncle who disappears along with his bull, to a gifted horticulturalists who is unlucky in love - yet remain believable.
Shalev's next adult novel, Esau is a contemporary treatment of the traditional Biblical tale of lost inheritance and sibling rivalry. Esau, the protagonist, grows up in Palestine in the late 1920s, early 1930s where his highly critical father runs a bakery. Esau's brother, Jacob, marries Leah, the woman Esau loves and inherits from the bakery. A resentful Esau immigrates to the United States and becomes a gourmet food columnist who is unable to sustain a meaningful relationship.
The Loves of Judith was also published under the alternate title of Four Meals. During the lull between the two World Wars, Judith comes to a Palestinian village, mourning the disappearance of her daughter. Three village men find themselves hopelessly in love with Judith; Moshe Rabinovitch is Judith's employer and a widower; Globerman is a deceptive cattle dealer who spends his afternoons socializing with Judith, and Jacob Sheinfeld is a shy canary breeder whose wife leaves him over his intense love for Judith. When Judith gives birth to her son Zayde, she is determined to raise him alone in a cowshed, and so she does. Fiercely independent, she refuses to confirm the identity of the boy’s father. The Loves of Judith is structured around four meals Zayde shares with Jacob over a period of three decades. As with previous novels, this one has been praised for its quirky-but-believable characters. The name Zayde means "grandfather," a name Judith intentionally gave her only son so as to ward off the angel of death. Because of this and other oddities, Zayde, over the length of the novel, spends his time trying to discover and uncover the mysteries his mother left behind after her untimely death.
Meir Shalev's books have been translated into more than 20 languages and have been bestsellers in Israel, Holland, and Germany. He is the recipient of many awards; he was also decorated as Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The 2019 Russian-Israeli-British drama Esau s based on Meir Shalev's novel of the same name.
(A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: a ...)
1994
Religion
In his books, Meir Shalev uses biblical themes from time to time, or biblical phrases because, according to him, they are part of the Hebrew language.
Politics
According to the 2014 interview, Meir Shalev's outlook on the future of Israel is far from rosy. He believes that Israel has a leadership vacuum and is disillusioned with the current state of the country. He sees himself as a person on the Left, but admits that the leftist solutions appear increasingly unrealistic. Shalev diagnoses the problem as "a lack of a true leader with vision."
Views
Meir Shalev can't write outside of Israel as he needs his language and atmosphere, even though it's not a very relaxing atmosphere. He feels losing powers when he leaves Israel. Shalev is a man with deeply held convictions and opinions about both the art of writing and Israel. He never mixes fiction with politics, instead, his whimsical and satirical novels are grounded in the history and legends of pre-state Israel. He also doesn't believe books should be moralistic and educational.
According to Shalev, memory is the source of all literature. Novels are a mixture of things a writer remembers and how he cultivates memory with his own imagination. Memory is very creative: it doesn't just accumulate and store up; it creates stories that simply never happened. The process of making up stories begins in memory long before it emerges in writing.
Quotations:
"I am a dictator in my writing. I tell my characters what to do. There are writers who say they talk to their characters and that their characters tell them who they are and what they want to do. That’s not me. I am in control. The book is my kingdom."
Interests
traveling in four-by-four vehicles
Sport & Clubs
motorcycling
Connections
Meir Shalev is married and has a daughter and a son.
Father:
Yitzhak Shalev
Yitzhak Shalev was an Israeli poet and novelist. Born in Tiberias, he became a teacher in Jerusalem. His first poems were published in Moznayim and Davar and subsequently appeared in a large number of newspapers and literary journals.
Mother:
Batia Shalev
Cousin:
Zeruya Shalev
Zeruya Shalev is an award-winning Israeli writer, who has published six novels, a book of poetry, and two children's books. Her novels Love Life, Husband and Wife, Thera, and The Remains of Love have received critical acclaim both in Israel and abroad. They have been translated into 21 languages and were bestsellers in several countries.
