A Literary Look at Life in Haifa

In many respects, these are auspicious times for Israeli fiction in the United States. Earlier this year, Dalya Bilu’s translation of Gail Hareven’s “The Confessions of Noa Weber” won a noteworthy new award for translated books, emerging from a fiction long-list that included titles originally published in more than a dozen countries. More recently, Dalkey Archive Press, a publisher known for fostering literature in translation, launched a Hebrew Literature Series.

This good news notwithstanding, many U.S. publishers seem to be unwilling to gamble on books in translation at all, let alone on books published originally in Israel. For those of us eager to read stories by and about our Israeli cousins, each new translation should be cause for celebration. But in the case of Rina Frank’s “Every House Needs a Balcony” (HarperCollins, $24.99, 336 pages, translated by Ora Cummings), celebration is tempered with considerable confusion.

One wants to fall in love with the book. The American publisher assures us that this debut novel was a “runaway bestseller” in Israel, and that it is “based on the author’s own life.” Indeed, the novel’s heroine and its author share a name (as do, apparently, their respective older sisters). Both the protagonist and the author were born in Haifa to Romanian immigrants in 1951. Both grew up in the impoverished, volatile Wadi Salib neighborhood. Several characters exert an intense pull on the reader’s emotions: the heroine’s Sephardi father and Ashkenazi mother, for instance (the identifications matter greatly in Wadi Salib), and, later, her infant daughter, Noa, who battles life-threatening illness from birth.

But reading this book can be frustrating. First, the novel tells two, alternating stories. It opens with the first-person voice of the child-narrator Rina (whose name we don’t see in print until quite near the novel’s end). The second chapter brings us to third-person narration, with the little girl from the book’s opening having evolved into a young adult referred to only as “she.” The young woman soon meets a Barcelona-born man (“the man”) with whom she falls in love. Eventually, “she” marries “the man”; these are baby Noa’s parents.

Sometimes, the alternating chapters have visible links. For instance, a chapter in which “she” travels to Barcelona to meet “the man’s wealthy family closes with a description of the family’s luxurious home, including “a bath and shower that he alone used each morning,” which causes “her” to remember “the once-a-week-bath she used to share with her sister.” The next chapter, “Dirty Thursday,” brings us back to that specific childhood routine. More often, however, readers may be wondering why the author chose to juxtapose these two threads. They’ll also likely wonder about the book’s abrupt conclusion.

They may further struggle to follow the many characters who appear, disappear, and reappear from chapter to chapter and storyline to storyline. It is particularly difficult to track the whereabouts of the sister character, Yosefa (also nicknamed “Sefi” and “Fila”) as an adult: Sometimes, as when Noa is born, she seems to be living in New York, but not too many pages later, when Rina tells her husband that she wants to move closer to Tel Aviv, it’s at least in part because Rina will then be “close to my sister; it’ll help me with Noa’s care.”

Then there’s the matter of translation. Let me preface these comments with an admission: Apart from basic prayers I’ve essentially memorized anyway, I cannot read Hebrew. Which means that I cannot fully evaluate the work of translator Ora Cummings. I cannot, for example, adduce whether the struggles I encountered—correctly matching characters to their appropriate pronouns in sentences such as “His mother sat at the head of the table, her usual place, and his father to her left, her son to her right, and she next to him”—result from the author’s choices or the translator’s decisions. Nor can I be certain that the repeated phrase “she thought to herself”—something most beginning fiction writers are taught to avoid in favor of the more self-evident “she thought”—is, in fact, a product of the translation.

What I can say is that the translation seems geared more to readers of British English than to Americans, and that repeated references to the human posterior as “bum,” not to mention the repeated usage of “swish” as an adjective or an allusion to a “bespoke dress,” do not provide as smooth a reading experience as some U.S. readers might desire. Which is too bad, because despite its problems, “Every House Needs a Balcony” is a worthy book. For many U.S. readers more familiar with tales set in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, it provides a lens into the history of life in Haifa. Following Rina’s childhood and young adulthood also allows us to revisit key moments in Israeli history, including the Sinai campaign and the Yom Kippur War. Time will tell if “Every House Needs a Balcony” will find the success in this country that it found in Israel, but I can’t help thinking that such an outcome is unlikely.

Erika Dreifus is the author of a short-story collection, “Quiet Americans,” which will be released in early 2011.