I'm grateful for this wonderful group of women whom I call friends! I painted this cartoon of us after our parish fundraising auction.
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Blog: Monday Artday (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Blog: Maria Madonna Davidoff - Artist Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Very early just before dawn
a fairy appeared to have a tea party with me.
This is another painting for my Fairy Series which
you can view in my blog.
Blog: Maria Madonna Davidoff - Artist Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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" Self Portrait of myself at Eight":
This painting is part of " The little Girl Series " They were started when my mother just passed. When someone you love very deeply is gone, there will always be an emptiness inside you. I felt very very empty and sad when my mom died and very, very alone. My mother always told me that I will always be her little girl. These paintings are a tribute to that period of my time with her as a child.
Blog: justZHM (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Pero su asombro fue grande al ver que su príncipe no subía, por que seria?
Oh pobre Rapunzel…quien lo diría…que tu príncipe de ti se olvidaría porque Zanahorias comía?!
Y es que la bruja, que mucho de magia sabía y de tonta nada tenía, descubrió que Rapunzel algo escondía.
Así que utilizando tanta inteligencia concluyo el cuento con una simple ocurrencia;
Un sembradío de zanahorias conjugaría del cual el príncipe comería
Pues su glotonería allí lo llevaría y de su adorada princesa se olvidaría.
Blog: justZHM (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: LGBT, translation, israel, translation, light fell, evan fallenberg, hebrew, jewish culture, hebrew, israel, light fell, evan fallenberg, LGBT, jewish culture, Add a tag
Light Fell tells the story of Joseph Licht, a literature professor who is about to host a reunion with his with five sons and daughter-in-law for his 50th birthday. With him we look back at how Joseph arrived at the day of this event: his realization about his sexual orientation, his brief and tragic love affair with a married rabbi (I fell in love with Rabbi Rosenzweig too, I have to admit) and the repercussions these self-discoveries bring to his life. We follow Joseph through his struggles with identity, self-worth, spirituality and parenthood, and in the end we are lifted up with him as he achieves tremendous personal growth and rebuilds bonds with his sons.
Besides being beautifully written, the characterization is brilliantly rendered, and the conflicts are so realistic you can physically feel them as you rush to turn the pages. I was so drawn into the complexity of the parent/child relationships, that even after I put it down I continued to think about them, as if they were people I actually knew. In addition, I was impressed with the courage it took to write something that could be considered controversial. When I read the last word of the novel, I held it to my chest and said out loud, “I love this book.” There are few times in my middle-age life this has happened, and I knew I had to interview Fallenberg and help introduce people to this ground-breaking and gorgeous novel.
To give you some background, Evan Fallenberg , is an Ohio-born writer and translator who has lived in Israel since 1985. In addition to being the author of Light Fell, his recent translations include Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy (winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem. He is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He was a MacDowell Colony fellow in 2002 and is the father of two sons. I had the pleasure of communicating with Evan via email between our homes in sunny dry Israel and snow storm-ridden Vermont.
The father/son relationships in Light Fell are so realistic as to be almost painful. Is this parent/child relationship something you write about often in your work?
I'm definitely intrigued by parent-child relationships – how we are shaped by our parents, how we accept and rebel and accept and rebel, how often we run as far as we can from our mothers and fathers only to smash right back into them, like children running circles in a forest. My characters have histories, which I always plumb, and whether or not I ultimately include what I learn about their parents and grandparents, I feel that I myself need to know where they came from in order to understand who they are and what decisions they will make.
Once I was grilling a novelist friend about her family. She knew very little about them and I found that astonishing. Then suddenly I realized that her five or six fine novels were bereft of family histories. Her characters are all very much of the present. Mine carry the past on their shoulders.
As a translator and a novelist can you speak to how the two different skills draw on you creatively?
When I'm working on the translation of a very fine novel – and I have had the privilege of working almost exclusively on those in the past few years – then the parts of my brain and soul that I use are very close to the parts I muster for writing. It's the same creative excitement, the same feeling of discovery. For the very best of them I am pushed to my limits to come up with fresh new idioms and images. But there is a price to pay for this: so far I have been unable to translate and write during the same period of time. It's one or the other.
Have you translated your own work, or has it been translated by someone else?
I cannot and will not ever be able to translate my own work. As good as my Hebrew is, I came to the language too late for it to feel natural when I write in it. And if I can't write in Hebrew, I can't translate.
As a child I was terribly jealous of people who were exposed to more than one language and could speak them with ease. I was sorry I hadn't been born in Europe, where I was certain I would have spoken three languages by the age of ten. But in the end, I'm thankful that now, as a writer and translator, I know a smattering of languages but have one that will always stand out, one that will always be richer and deeper than all the others and will always feel like the most home of homes. English will always be the language into which I translate and in which I write.
One day I hope to see my own works translated into Hebrew and other languages. I look forward to being involved in that process, much as I have sat and pondered words and sentences with the authors I've translated.
What is the biggest challenge of translation?
Voice. I'm always obsessed with voice. Each piece has its voice, and when I begin a new translation I wonder how I'll find the comparable voice in English once again. It means becoming somewhat of a ventriloquist, really. Mostly I feel I've found it each time, in each new book, but there was one project I stopped very early on because it was clear to me at once that this voice was so far from my own experience and style that I was simply the wrong person to take it on. I could never have rendered it in a convincing and honest manner.
Your bio indicated you've lived in Japan, Switzerland, Paris and Israel. Just how many languages do you speak? Have you translated in all of them?
When he was a little boy, my younger son used to add a language each time he told someone how many languages his daddy spoke. I put a stop to it at fifteen! In truth, after English I speak a good Hebrew, a very decent French, barely adequate Spanish and miserable Portuguese and Japanese. I translate only from Hebrew to English. Even with French I feel I would miss too many cultural references and have had too little exposure to French literature to be able to knead a text into another language. Anyway, I'm lucky – modern Israeli literature has come into its own, with a huge variety of voices and styles and stories, so I'm at no loss for wildly interesting work.
It is quite a challenge to write a love scene and find the balance between realism and tasteful without falling into graphic, yet you manage to render them artfully in Light Fell. Do you have any tips for those of us who struggle with this?
First of all: thank you thank you thank you. Writing about love is terrifying, because what can you possibly have to say that hasn't been said, and how can you render in words what leaves you absolutely speechless? But there it is, that most awesome, riveting, inspiring, humiliating emotion of them all, which wanders its way into every good book and every good life. There's no getting around it, and no reason to get around it other than fear.
So, as with all fears, the best thing to do is hit it head-on. Write that terrifying love scene first, before you've created all the backstory, before your characters themselves have realized they are going to fall in love. You'll come back to it again and again, but getting it out, on the page, as raw and terrible as it will be in that first draft, at least puts some perspective on it and you can get on with all the other writerly tasks at hand.
Incidentally, getting it on the page early and coming back to it over and over also helps a writer tap into the honesty you need for such a scene. Readers are always particularly aware of phoniness in love scenes, and once you've stumbled over your own infelicitous word or image for the twelfth time you'll finally remove it and plunge yourself into that place where you go to find the realest, truest emotions. Once you've opened that up, you'll remove the artifice and be left with something pure and honest.
You also run writers' retreats in Israel, tell me about them...how does it feel to be a facilitator?
Oh, the retreats are great fun. We get the most wonderful groups of 30 to 35 people each time, people who bring their rich life experience along with a desire to hone their craft. They are inspired and inspiring.
I am planning, with several prominent and excellent writer-friends of mine in Israel and abroad, to hold an international writing retreat in Israel in December 2009. It's only in the planning stages now, but the ideas are mouth-watering…
In the meantime, although I'll be abroad again several times this year for events related to Light Fell, I am hoping to create a writers' center close to home – that is, in a studio in my own back garden. The writing center I envision will offer workshops for writers at various stages in their writing lives as well as sessions with visiting writers and a host of other options I can only dream about at the moment.
Tell us something that's not on the official bio.
I eat half a dozen bananas a day, they're sustenance for me and comfort food all in one. I've never recovered from owning a chocolate-brown Triumph Spitfire convertible in my early twenties (which I sold for $2000 when I moved to Israel) and am sorely tempted to buy a roadster now, even though my kids say they'll be too embarrassed to drive with me. I miss the four seasons of my Ohio childhood, but the Mediterranean beach near my house quite adequately dulls the pangs of longing. I studied ballet at the age of forty in order to understand a character in my second novel, and resumed piano lessons recently – after a thirty-year hiatus – because I felt it was time to progress beyond my abilities as a sixteen-year-old
Blog: inspiration from vintage kids books and timeless modern graphic design (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: travel, posters, 1950s, out of print, tourism, israel, modern, graphic design, Mid century, Off our book shelves, Add a tag
Israel -the land of the Bible Tourism posters by Jean David (L) c1954 (r) 195?
produced for the State of Israel Tourist Centre
My Knowledge of Jean David (Sometimes referred to as Jan David) is limited. However, what work I’ve seen from him has been nothing less that stellar. Just look at the posters above. I could easily see someone slanging these at a Flatstock poster convention. Dang, I totally nerd out when I see this stuff. Its just so good.
Looks like the whale is riding a boat of waves. Meanwhile, Jonah is relaxing after downing a keg of Vitamen C. Just look at all that orange!
1950s, graphic design, israel, Mid century, modern, out of print, posters, tourism, travelBlog: inspiration from vintage kids books and timeless modern graphic design (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: birds, stamps, ephemera, israel, 1970s, graphic design, Off our book shelves, Add a tag
Vintage modern stamps from Israel - 1975 Arbor day collection
Ok we’re back. I hope everyone had a great weekend. Pretty chill one here. Watched Dial M for murder by Hitchcock. Tonight it’s either Stray Dog by Akira Kurosawa or Brute force by Jules Dassin.
Now onto the stamps….
Great stuff going on here. Johnny blue bird is eating cherry nugs off a psychedelic tree. Meanwhile on the left, rectangle legs is rolling deep in lollipop marsh.
Blog: justZHM (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: inspire me thursday, mondayartday, inspire me thursday, mondayartday, Add a tag
Note: bookmarks’ winners to be announced soon!
Blog: Books4Ever (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Cotton Malone, library of alexandria, saudi arabia, secret societies, adventure, mystery, quest, israel, espionage, Add a tag
Cotton Malone has retired from the American special forces unit he was in after his work in he Templar Legacy. Now he is running a bookstore and quite content until his ex-wife shows up one day to tell him their son has been kidnapped. An organization wants information only Malone has and are willing to kill to get it. So Malone sets off with his ex-wife to find their son. But soon they stumble onto something bigger than Malone has been art of before. A secret society is trying to destabilize Israel and Saudi Arabia by showing that Israel is not the chosen land of the Jews. Malone, of course, knows nothing of this. The only place that might have the original documents is the Library of Alexandria, long believed to have been destroyed. But it is actually protected by a group of people called The Guardians who issued invitations to view it to a select few. Malone is not one of those few, but uses the keys left to someone else to track it down dragging his reluctant ex-wife with him.
This is a fast-paced, action packed book that is full of intrigue and plot upon plot. Berry keeps you guessing til the last and does not disappoint with a half-finished ending. Everything it resolved to my satisfaction at the end of the book. This is an interesting book in that Malone brings his ex-wife in his jaunt (although not willingly). I like his writing style and the stories he picks to write about. It reminds me of Robert Ludlum.
Blog: Michelle Lana (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Contest Winner, Logo Redesign, MondayArtday, Logo Redesign, MondayArtday, Contest Winner, Add a tag
I won at MondayArtday! I won the contest for re-creating Monday Artday's logo in your "own" style. This challenge was a lot of fun, thanks Bearuh! You guys should come visit Monday Artday, it's super great and everyone is just awesome. Cool activities and themes every week! Visit Monday Artday hosted by Bearuh
Check out my winning piece!
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: History, peace, war, Politics, Current Events, A-Featured, A-Editor's Picks, america, World History, shekh, sharm, hamas, palestinian, israel, shlomo, ben ami, arab, Add a tag
Shlomo Ben-Ami, the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, is an Oxford-trained historian, a former member of the Knesset, Minister of Public Security, and finally Minister of Foreign Affairs. He has been a key participant in many Arab-Israeli peace conferences, most notably the Camp David summit in 2000. In the post below Ben-Ami looks forward and backwards at the peace process. (more…)
this is really cute!! I love the colors in it!
beautiful and colorful illo!