Michal Govrin – författare

From one of Israel''s most celebrated writers, an ambitious and heartbreaking novel, winner of Israel''s Akum Prize for the Book of the Year, that examines through one woman''s life the Jewish story and the state of Israel in the most intimate way possible.   Ilana Tsuriel was a beautiful, brilliant Israeli intellectual and architect, the estranged wife of a prominent Holocaust scholar and the daughter of a legendary founding Zionist. At the beginning of Snapshots, she dies in a tragic car wreck, leaving her husband, Alain, to piece together the woman he thought he knew from the documents she left behind. Snapshots is assembled from her notes, photos, and drawings, which reveal Ilana''s passionate, turbulent, wandering life of love and creativity around the capitals of the world. They portray a woman torn between her life in the United States and Israel; a woman who, during the first Gulf War when missiles were falling on Tel Aviv, struggled with the desire to protect her family yet still engage herself and her children with her homeland. They also uncover a secret, troubled love affair with a Palestinian man, a daughter''s efforts to come to terms with her father''s weighty legacy, and plans to build a "Utopian Monument" for peace in the history-laden hills of Jerusalem.   The result is a whirling, wrenching portrait of a woman grappling with every element of her identity, at the center of a novel that has already been feted with prizes and celebrated as a masterwork of contemporary Israeli literature.

The Israeli author’s poetry, essays, and stories on the haunting legacy of WWII “swirl mystically out of history and into dazzling floods of wonder” (Don DeLillo, author of White Noise).   In this portrait of the artist as a young woman, one of Israel’s most acclaimed contemporary writers weaves together a kaleidoscope of fiction, poetry, and essays. Populated by both fictional and real people, each tale is in some way a search for meaning in a post-Holocaust world.   Reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, characters irrationally and humanely find reason for hope in a world that offers little. Essays describe Govrin’s visits to Poland as a young adult, where her mother had survived a death camp, but had lost her husband and their child, Govrin’s half-brother. Capturing the depths of denial and the exuberance of youth in a multiplicity of voices, this haunting collection “joins the few serious books that try through artistic means to face the unspeakable” (Aharon Appelfield, author of Badenheim 1939).

But There Was Love—Shaping the Memory of the Shoah proposes a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality. It derives from the four-year workings of a group of researchers and artists at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute led by Michal Govrin. The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.