Eighteen years ago, Israeli author Ruby Namdar arrived in New York, not knowing that he had just taken the first step of an incredible literary, cultural and personal journey. The novel The Ruined House, winner of the 2014 Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, was an artistic response to Namdar’s wonderful experience of discovering America, American Jewry, and American Jewish literature. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin, The Ruined House was recently published in the U.S. by Harper Collins and was recognized by the New York Times as a “masterpiece of modern religious literature.” The renowned critic Adam Kirsch (Tablet Magazine) called it “a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.”
In this talk Ruby Namdar will discuss his sources of inspiration, his new-found relationship to the great Jewish-American authors of the previous generation, and the rewards—as well as the setbacks—of living in one language while writing in another.