Anne Sebba meets Israel’s bestselling female author, whose work inspired a peace movement When Shifra Horn, Israel’s top female novelist, was interviewed on an Australian radio station recently she immediately found herself under attack for her government’s policies. “It was extraordinary; the interviewer did not want to talk about my book, which was why I had been invited. Suddenly I found I had to defend my country. But that’s not my role. I’m a storyteller.”
Horn, whose books have been translated into seven languages, says there are times when she does not mind this. “As an Israeli, wherever you are in the world, you cause different reactions; you feel the vibrations, good or bad, people are not indifferent to you. But my books are not political. They are sagas, reflecting through women’s eyes the history of Israel.”
The notion that Israeli writers must also act as politicians and diplomats is hotly disputed in the Israeli media. Journalists call Horn regularly to ask her views because she lives in a frontline area of Jerusalem that is regularly the scene of shootings and mortar bombing. She responds because she understands that those who deal with words have a special responsibility.
“So I try to reflect the Arab side as much as possible because I see them as victims, especially where Palestinian fighters have taken over the houses of Christian Arabs in Beit Jala to shoot better at the Israelis. I feel sorry for the ones who have lost their houses.” But it is, she concedes with a sigh, very disruptive. And draining. “There are times when I want to keep my ideas inside my own head.” Horn insists that her books are about relationships, children growing up and other domestic situations, “issues that concern women everywhere”. In a country where 70 per cent of book buyers are women, perhaps it is not surprising that several of Israel’s most successful novelists are female. “But we write about normal life, that is what we crave. We are far away from writing about the Zionist ethos or the absorption of refugees. We write about emotions in an ordinary domestic setting because we want to maintain normal life. But from time to time between the lines you can hear a different voice, our genuine voice of fear, like the wife whose husband says he is a reservist, but perhaps he is actually going off to have an affair, or
the mother whose son is going off to fight and might be killed. We cannot escape that.”
Horn is a svelte and glamorous forever-49-year-old. Her family has been living in what is now Israel for seven generations. Her father was a Russian refugee who arrived in Israel at the end of the Second World War. After two brief marriages, she met a New Zealand dentist two years ago, with whom she spends as much time as she can. In 1999 her prize-winning first novel, Four Mothers, became a bestseller in Israel and Germany. The book was so successful that a group of women whose children were then serving in Lebanon formed a peace movement called Four Mothers, dedicated to bringing soldiers back from there. They disbanded when they succeeded. Horn followed this with The Fairest Among Women, a book dedicated to “refugees all over the world violently uprooted from their lives in the shadow of war”. The desperation of refugees is also the haunting background theme of her latest novel, Tamara Walks on Water. Published in Israel in March, the same week Israeli tanks moved into Jenin, it shot to No 1 in the bestseller lists and was much praised in the press. “I just felt emptiness and sadness and wondered who on earth would want to read books at a time like this,” says Horn.
Meeting her in London on Jubilee Day is a strange experience. A balloon pops and she jumps, thinking a bomb has exploded. You begin slowly to understand the other big difficulty facing writers in Israel, or any country at war. “It’s impossible to concentrate on writing when you have to concentrate on survival. Where I live in Jerusalem there is daily shooting, and mortar bombs. This is followed by sirens wailing, babies crying and dogs barking. It’s a sort of monotonous music that follows you wherever you go. You try shutting the windows; it doesn’t help. Putting on the radio doesn’t help because then you hear the news that you don’t want to hear. And you get constant phone calls from loved ones wanting to know if you are all right. The only way is to imagine yourself into a sort of cocoon; you try to make yourself bullet-resistant.” Yet a few weeks ago, Horn was invited to the idyllic countryside home of the British writer Jill Paton Walsh, whom she had met at a conference in Rotterdam. “She and her husband (the children’s writer John Rowe Townsend) took us for a walk down to the river at the bottom of her beautiful garden. Swans and ducks swam past and everything was green and tranquil. My immediate reaction was ‘This is where I want to settle down and write’. But then I realised that maybe I needed the stimulation of living in a country of tension and problems; it’s my inspiration for writing.”
Four Mothers and The Fairest Among Women are published by Piatkus books. Tamara Walks on Water will soon be published in English.