By David Stromberg
How does a Sephardic Jew whose father’s family has lived in Israel since the Spanish Inquisition come to translate and adapt the quintessentially Ashkenazic Isaac Bashevis Singer for the originally Russian-speaking Jaffa-based Gesher Theatre? According to Roee Chen, it’s done by pretending to be someone you aren’t. “I was 19 and needed a job,” Chen explained. “Someone told me that Gesher was looking for a speech coach. I didn’t know what that was, but I was arrogant, so I went there to tell them that I was the new speech coach.”
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By David Stromberg
The work of Gail Hareven, one of Israel’s most prominent writers of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, is being introduced to an English-speaking audience with the recent release of “The Confessions of Noa Weber” (Melville House). This novel tells the story of the titular character’s struggle between her feminist ideology and her yearning for love and spirituality. David Stromberg, a writer and journalist in Jerusalem, interviewed Hareven, the author of 11 books and a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, about “Confessions,” which will be released in paperback this month.
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