Nicole Krauss And Zeruya Shalev On Israel, Jewishness And Defying Reader Expectations
Nicole Krauss and Zeruya Shalev are friends — and authors whose work is deeply bound up in their Jewish and Israeli identities. But both struggle with the pressure to represent those identities.
In Nicole Krauss's 2017 novel Forest Dark, an Israeli scholar asks a Jewish-American writer, "'You think your writing belongs to you?'" The writer, whose name is Nicole, responds, "'Who else?'" and the professor shoots back, "'To the Jews.'" This scene springs from Krauss's own life. Like the fictional Nicole, Krauss struggles often against readers' desire for her to speak not for herself, but — somehow — for her entire religion.
The Israeli writer Zeruya Shalev, a longtime friend of Krauss's, faces perhaps an even more difficult challenge abroad. Her work has been translated into 21 languages, and she tells me, whenever she encounters readers from outside Israel, they ask her to explain her infinitely complex country. "I've gotten
