Over at Tablet, Tal Kra-Oz talks to Israeli novelist Shani Boianjiu about life after the publication of her first book, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. Boianjiu joined us for a Twitter Book Club a few weeks ago, where she discussed being 25 and told us she definitely wasn’t the voice of a generation.

Kra-Oz chats with Boianjiu about her newfound literary acclaim, her childhood friends, and what’s going to happen when her book gets translated into Hebrew:

Sitting in a café in northern Israel, many of her friends having been called up for reserve duty in Gaza for operation Pillar of Defense—and facing the real possibility that she could be mobilized—Shani Boianjiu, 25, reflected on her childhood. “I really sympathize with people in the south,” she said. “We spent our daily life under the constant threat of attack, and only occasionally did that get any coverage. Now when half a rocket falls in the center of the country, that gets all the attention.” Though born in Jerusalem, Boianjiu grew up a two-hour drive from Tel Aviv, in Kfar Vradim, a small village in western Galilee. Just six miles from the border with Lebanon, it is one of the “frontline communities” that suffered Hezbollah rocket attacks throughout the 1990s. Kfar Vradim is part of Israel’s so-called periphery, in a country whose center is the narrow strip of land around Tel Aviv—40 miles long and 10 miles wide between Hadera and Gedera.

That feeling of remoteness pervades Boianjiu’s childhood memories as well as her novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which was published in English last September to great acclaim. Episodic in nature, the novel revolves around the lives of three young Israeli women—Lea, Avishag, and Yael—during their last years of high school and through their military service and civilian life after being discharged.

Shani Boianjiu Goes Home Again [Tablet] Previously: Culture Kvetch: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth

The post Hanging Out With Israeli Writer Shani Boianjiu appeared first on Jewcy.

Join us and the Jewish Book Council at 1:30 p.m. EST today for what should be a fascinating Twitter Book Club with Shani Boianjiu, the author of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. In the novel, the 25-year-old Israeli writer weaves together the compelling tale of Lea, Avishag, and Yael, three friends from a small village near the Lebanese border as they begin their service in the Israel Defense Forces.

Use the hashtag #JLit to follow along with the discussion, and don’t hesitate to jump in with questions of your own—just make sure you include Boianjiu’s Twitter handle (@ShaniBoianjiu) and #JLit.

Before our chat, don’t miss:

• Jacob Silverman’s Culture Kvetch column about Boianjiu’s novel and the unique challenges of being a successful young writer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s review of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.

• Boianjiu’s three blog posts for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribe series.

• Boianjiu’s New Yorker fiction, published this summer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s contemporary Israeli literature book list.

Previously: Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership

The post Join Israeli Novelist Shani Boianjiu for Today’s Twitter Book Club appeared first on Jewcy.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, the first novel by Shani Boianjiu, a 25-year-old Israeli who writes in English, has much to tell us about life in the Israeli military. The Israel Defense Forces is perhaps Israel’s most mythologized institution and, to outsiders, its most opaque. For young diaspora Jews, the IDF is often encountered through the sweatshirts purchased in a tourist shop—a popular method of vicarious identification—and by discussions with the occasional veteran, every one of whom, it can seem, has served in an elite unit. (The process of mythologizing, after all, also depends on non-Israeli Jews looking admiringly at a symbol of Jewish power.)

Boianjiu’s novel (some critics have referred to it as a collection of stories) digs beneath the hasbarista image of IDF service and offers a somber look at the depression and alienation that can arrive when one transitions from being an 18-year-old high school student to a soldier charged with securing your country’s periphery or enforcing its occupation of the West Bank.

The book is largely the story of three young women—Lea, Avishag, and Yael—friends from a small village near the Lebanese border. We get some impression of their life at home, where Avishag’s brother, Dan, committed suicide not long before she was drafted, but much of the novel is about their refracted, vastly different experiences. Lena joins the military police (she lobbied for a higher-status assignment, but her request was denied) and works at checkpoints in the West Bank. Avishag is sent to the Egyptian border, where she monitors surveillance feeds and does guard duty in an observation tower. Yael is a weapons instructor at a base near an Arab village, whose boys frequently sneak in to steal equipment.

It is a novel of contrasts, where the trivial and the tragic, gossip and gunplay, messily intermingle. One of the characters falls for a fellow soldier and they engage in furtive sex at their base; the next day, he’s sent to Lebanon and dies. Weeks of unending banality at the Egyptian border are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a car trafficking women, or of an African migrant shot while trying to cross into Israel.

Boredom, in fact, is the dominant theme—the book has this in common with the Gulf War memoir Jarhead—along with the ways in which it colonizes the mind, destabilizing these characters’ sense of self, making them long for some extreme sensation (love, terror, violence) to slice through the ennui. It’s that destabilization of the self, combined with the traditional insecurities of youth, which makes Yael, Avishag, and Lena blend together. They do have some individuating qualities—Lena is beautiful and cold; Avishag is scarred by the death of her brother, though Yael, who loved him, is as well—but in many ways are indistinguishable. It’s one of the novels deficits: the storylines may vary, but the characters peopling them do not.

All three women are suspended somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. IDF service is an interregnum in which they are supposed to find themselves, but for them the uniform promises a sense of purpose that it can’t deliver. This is reflected in the prose, a mashup between the lyrical and the chatty, blog-speak meeting finely tuned confessionalism. Consider the opening to a chapter narrated by Yael: “One day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.”

One day but also thirteen days—vague and then exact. Beautiful—an adult’s word. But “it was the best:” that’s how a teenager talks. Yet in the next sentence she reminds us she is a woman.

This miscegenated style is ultimately very effective for Boianjiu, as it reflects the kind of story we are being told. Boianjiu’s hybrid English—informed as much by American pop culture (Dawson’s Creek and Mean Girls get referenced) as by any formal instruction—produces some small, pleasurable dissonances, the kind that can only come from a non-native speaker. Avishag at one point remarks that “it is time to start caring about someone who is not myself,” which is a challenge for all three of these characters. An American would probably use the more conventional “other than myself,” a phrasing that would be digested without notice, like the chips at the bottom of the bag.

So why did Boianjiu write this novel in English, rather than her native Hebrew? In interviews, she’s explained that, following her IDF service, she studied English and social anthropology as an undergraduate at Harvard. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which began as her senior thesis, came together practically by accident. She was writing stories for class and a professor put her in touch with Andrew Wylie, one of publishing’s biggest agents.

Boianjiu’s career soon took off, well before this book was released. In 2011, she was selected for the National Book Award’s 5 under 35 prize, reportedly on the recommendation of Nicole Krauss, who has been a champion of Boianjiu’s work. It’s understandable why Krauss is a fan. Like her American admirer, Boianjiu leans towards direct, emotionally raw prose, she makes use of repetition, and the novel, even in its overall bleakness, is shot through with whimsy (like the sandwich shop in which customers can request any ingredients they can think of). There’s also an element of, if not outright surrealism, then a blurred vision, one that derives from the characters’ brokenness, their inability to fully engage with the world.

Early success has a tendency to attract both irrational criticism and unearned praise. It also makes for odd bedfellows. Some journalists have compared Boianjiu to Lena Dunham, a pairing that seems to have little merit except that both are female creatives in their mid-twenties. Perhaps Dunham is just too easily invoked—and too SEO-friendly—to resist. Recently, a rather cynical article in Haaretz called Boianjiu the “Cinderella of Kfar Vradim,” and deemed her the product of marketing hype (there really hasn’t been much).

Some of the venom seems to stem from the fact that Boianjiu writes in English, thereby bypassing the smaller Israeli market, but like Aleksandar Hemon, her decision to write in a second language has proven an artistically sound one. Debating the commercial or ethical merits of that choice is a rather dull side pursuit. Instead, better to conclude that Boianjiu has produced an impressive first novel, flaws and all. That she has done it at a comparatively young age only means, I hope, that she will have more time to perform the same feat again.

Boianjiu will be participating in a Twitter Book Club with Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council November 20 from 1:30 to 2:10 p.m.

Recent Kvetches: Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’
Watching the Anti-War Documentary ‘Tears of Gaza’
The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’

The post Culture Kvetch: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth appeared first on Jewcy.

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with the Jewish Book Council on their great Twitter Book Club series. We’re huge fans of the JBC (we love their Prosen People blog), and are excited to team up with them.

Here’s the deal: Every month or so, we’ll have an exciting author on Twitter with us discussing his or her new book. You can ask questions directly (we will be!) or just follow along in real-time our brand new hashtag #JLit. Check out the transcripts of some our favorite Twitter Book Clubs past: Nathan Englander, David Bezmozgis, and Dara Horn.

Tune in Tuesday, October 23, when Doreen Carvajal will be answering questions about her new book, The Forgetting River. We’ll be tweeting up a storm from 1:30-2:10 p.m., and we hope you will be too! Until then, you can find the full archive and game day rules here.

Twitter Book Club Schedule:

October 23, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Doreen Carvajal, The Forgetting River

November 20, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

December 12, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

(image via Shutterstock)

The post Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership appeared first on Jewcy.

With a September and October that the New York Times has dubbed “one of the most crowded literary traffic jams in recent memory,” even the most voracious of readers may need a Guide for the Perplexed to navigate the abundance of Friday night reading options.

Yesterday alone saw the publication of three major new releases, including the latest from Jewish Literary Superhero Michael Chabon, that are bound to be on people’s minds this High Holiday season. Don’t have time to read all three before Rosh Hashanah? Here’s a handy guide:

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, by Hanna Rosin:

From a wildly popular 2010 article in the Atlantic titled “The End of Men,” to last week’s attention-grabbing excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, is finally here.

The book explores what Rosin argues is an unprecedented gender role reversal in America. Women, it turns out, have pulled ahead of men in many categories—the two most interesting of which are work and sex. Drop some knowledge at Rosh Hashanah dinner with this Vox Tablet podcast that asks whether the same is also true in Jewish communal life.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu:

In a debut novel that Vogue called “searing,” Shani Boianjiu writes about three Israeli women who are conscripted to their national service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Boianjiu, an Israeli of Romanian and Iraqi descent, grew up in a town near the Lebanese border. She wrote movingly about her own experience in the Israeli army in Sunday’s New York Times.

While you’re at it, here are three Israeli writers she recommends you check out: Sara Shilo, Eli Amir, and Galila Ron-Feder Amit.

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon

Chabon’s new work of fiction includes a variety of eccentric characters all struggling with love, friendship, and money. Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, described it as a “rich, comic new novel” by an author who has “made a career of routing big, ambitious projects … with superlative results.” Adam Kirsch called it “typically stylish, but overwritten.”

Read an excerpt, or just listen to one:

Happy reading!

(Image via Shutterstock)

The post Three Books Published Yesterday That You Should Read (Or Read About) appeared first on Jewcy.