Hebrew authors Smadar Shir, Hava Pinhas-Cohen, Dorit Silverman and Adiva Geffen reveal how they override real-world conflict and help readers see through it and discover the possibilities of life. By Kritika Dua
In a land of turmoil — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is known to all — stories of hope, love, friendship, peace, and happiness also have a voice. Hebrew authors Smadar Shir, Hava Pinhas-Cohen, Dorit Silverman and Adiva Geffen have attempted to do the impossible, examine the human condition through stresses and stains and share their feminine viewpoint in transcending limits.
Smadar Shir
She is a popular children’s book author and a songwriter in Israel. Shir has published around 400 books for toddlers, infants, and teenagers. Around 25 years ago she wrote a song about a birthday party where everybody was looking for the cake, a metaphor for the end of the search. It became a hymn all over Israel.
She is also an author of eight adult novels, some of which were translated into English. Her book, The Tenth, which was awarded numerous prizes, was translated into English first and is currently being translated into Chinese. The novel is based on a true story that she covered as a journalist and talks about an 11-year-old boy, who went swimming by the beach with his family and then to a restaurant. A terror attack hit the eatery, leaving his mother dead and father injured. He woke up at a hospital after two to three weeks of comatose consciousness, during which he had undergone nine serious surgeries and was awaiting the tenth operation of plastic surgery. He faced a serious dilemma — would he want to stay all his life with scars which would remind him of the attack or have the plastic surgery, trying to vanish the painful memories and start life anew. The book is left open-ended. Shir said, “I wrote this novel as I wanted to throw light on instances which only people from Israel can write about.”
She started writing at the tender age of 15 and has been productive for 45 years now. Shir recalled, “When I started to write for children, I thought that I would like to keep the children in Israel in a warm basket, where nothing will touch them, to keep them in a happy and peaceful environment. Israeli family is closely knit. Slowly as my children grew up, I realised that I have a responsibility as an Israeli mother which is different than any other mother in the world as when the children turn 18, both boys and girls go into the army, the former for three years and the latter for two years. I have six children, one of my daughters was accepted in a special course to become a pilot in the airforce. But I was worried and didn’t want to send her into an environment filled with danger. Then I realised that I have the responsibility to write about things that are unique for Israelis, but these things should be said and heard (like my novel The Tenth). Other people around the world sometimes don’t believe in which condition we are running our life. On the flipside, I write children stories which talk about hope and pray for peace in Israel.”
Hava Pinhas-Cohen
She has several feathers in her cap, an award-winning poet, translator, editor of poetry books, teacher of creative writing and literature lecturer. Cohen has published around ten books of poetry. “I am writing and publishing since I was very young and the themes are mostly taken from the life around us. There were years when my work was concentrated on life as a young woman and then as a mother raising children where I wrote about special and intimate moments with my children and also about moments of fear, being loved and the domestic life. You can’t be in Israel without being attuned to what’s going on in politics if there is an expected war or any kind of conflict and that element is also in my writing at times. But my poetry is not journalistic though I am a journalist. Poetry should be more about metaphysics, metahistory and the writing should survive even when the event becomes history.”
Talking about the moments of pain and anguish in her journey, Cohen said, “I lost my father when I was an eight-year-old and when I was still young with four children I lost my husband and later my brother, so the question of dealing with death always stayed with me. Death is a subject for writers in the beginning of history, the question for me was how to make it more abstract in a way that the private events get elevated. So, that was part of being an artist, how to make it different.”
Recalling a memorable feedback, Cohen said, “Once a man came to me and said that his wife had died recently. My book, Orpheus Poetry, was next to him all the time when he was dealing with the truth and he got some power to deal with the situation owing to it.”
Dorit Silverman
A writer, literary critic, and researcher, with 19 books to her credit including short stories, novels, children’s books, research titles and academic publications, she is the vice-president if the Hebrew Writers Association.
Dorit Silverman’s celebrated work Castration was translated into a movie and she recalls the experience of witnessing the printed black words into pictures miraculous. Said she, “I had a journey with this film. The first five times I saw it on screen, it was a miracle to me as the imaginary places I created came alive. They found out a cave with a spring in a desert, exactly how I created it in my work of fiction. The uncanny similarities between the two was surreal. I wrote a feministic novel, thought what is the most patriarchal society around me and found out that it was Bedouins who castrate their women so they won’t have the pleasure and will only do their job of having children. And I wrote it in the 80s but the moment it was published, a lot of directors wanted to do a film out of it and at last, almost after 20 years, they succeeded to raise the money and a film was made on it.”
She added, “The director, script-writer, and producer all were male who changed my work into something else altogether. The film starts with a written message that Muslims took their girls to Asia and castrate them. We in this film fight their fight. But this was also patriarchal as they showed the woman as a successful writer who falls in love and gets married to a Bedouin man. In my work, they castrated her metaphorically as a universal situation of all women. In the film, they show the woman who comes in Egypt’s Sinai Desert to look for her daughter. The daughter like her also falls for a Bedouin man. The mother tries to save her daughter, she scars her daughter’s lover, puts fire around him and runs away before they can castrate her daughter. The lover gets depressed, crippled and disappointed sits in the desert. They turned my work into something else as in the book the daughter is castrated and tries to kill herself but is saved by Israeli soldiers. In my work, the tragic fate is for the woman but for them, it is for the man. The name of the film itself reeked patriarchy as it was called Taharah, an Arabic word which means purifying, indicating that they are purifying the woman by castrating her.”
Adiva Geffen
She pens suspense novels and is also a playwright. Geffen has published 21 books. She weaves compelling characters and captivating scenarios in her work in which suspense, humour, passion, and joy co-exist.
Geffen revealed, “My stories are based on what I see around me and what I experience as a person. I take it out and use the stories which are inside me. I can wear a mask through my writing and critique about the society, government, city and everything else. That’s what I like about my profession.”
Said she, “The detective solves the puzzle and catches the person who did the bad thing. It’s not like that in life, the people like my novels as they know that the detective will do a good job and curb the evil in the world. And the character of the detective also evolves through this process, otherwise it’s not a satisfying story. In my work, women are not the victims, they are the detectives.”