Novel
המעברה
Not translated into English
Shimon Ballas · 1964
Synopsis
A transit camp of the early 1950s, where Jews from Iraq have been housed in tents and huts. Shlomo Khamara, who has arrived from Baghdad, opens a café there, the Victory Café, whose sign is in Arabic, and learns there the life and the worries of the inhabitants. The characters are young: they seek to leave the camp and enter the country, and fight for their place inside as outside. One demand comes back again and again: that the man who leads them be one of them and speak their language, not a man from outside.
Context
Ballas had first written the book in Arabic, under the title Journal d'une servante; he translated two chapters, then abandoned the Arabic version and rewrote everything in Hebrew, so that the Hebrew text is not a translation. It appeared in 1964 from Am Oved. It was the first novel to speak openly of the trauma of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries; the critics of the day wrote little about it, but it left its mark on the readers and writers who came after. Since 2003 it has formed, with Tel Aviv Mizrah and Yaldei huts, the Tel Aviv Mizrah trilogy.
Who it is for
A novel, with no French edition. It helps to know that the State housed the immigrants of the early years in camps of tents and huts.
Prizes and reception
The first Hebrew novel on the trauma of Jews from Arab countries, and the founding book of what has been called the literature of the transit camps.
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