Israel In Translation

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads Between Life and Death, the final novel of Yoram Kaniuk, who died in 2013. The celebrated book is a type of auto-fiction in which real life and memoir blend with style and language and humor. It's a stream of consciousness journey that takes place when the narrator, also named Yoram Kaniuk, lies in coma after surgery. "After these things—after disease and after death and after pain and after laughter and after betrayal and after old age and after grace and love and after a foolish son the heaviness of his mother and a woman of valor who stayed with me in beauty in the abyss—after all that I woke up into a half sleep and stayed there four months. And it was bad and it was good and it was sad and it was lost and it was a miracle and it was what it was and it wasn’t what it wasn’t and it could have been and I recalled it was night. A night sealed up in its night. I spent it in bad dreams and woke up dazed with sleep, I was healthy, in my house at 13 Bilu Street, and