Guest of the ilb 2007
Pnina Moed Kass
was born in Belgium in 1938 and grew up in New York. She has been
living in Israel, her country of choice, for nearly forty years. After
studying political science and art history in the USA she worked in
music and advertising. She wrote for various magazines and taught
English at a high school in the USA and later in Israel. Her literary
work comprises short stories that have appeared in numerous newspapers
and anthologies, and screenplays, lyrics, stories for illustrated books
and the novel »Real Time« (2004), which caused a sensation.
Unrelenting in its description, Moed Kass' novel
presents a mosaic of characters whose lives intersect on a bus in
Jerusalem at a horrific moment – 11:47 on the morning when a bomb
explodes on a bus. The author masterfully merges their destinies into a
poignant document of everyday life in today's Israel: sixteen-year-old
Thomas Wanninger searching for answers to his grandfather's Nazi past;
his contemporary, a young Palestinian named Sameh Laham, who works
illegally in an Israeli restaurant; Vera Brodsky from Odessa; Holocaust
survivor Baruch Ben Tov, and a Palestinian doctor who works at an
Israeli hospital. Hour after hour, minute after minute, Pnina Moed Kass
follows the events using a technique of multiple perspectives before
and after the suicide attack, depicting a haunting portrait of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. »Like tangled string when you pull at it,
it gets tighter«, reads the novel. The interior monologues are
excellently and theatrically interspersed with conversations, radio
announcements and the police investigation, paramedic reports, medical
findings, television commentaries and eyewitness accounts. The novel
achieves great persuasive power particularly because the author refuses
to ignore any perspective. She sheds light on the nightmare of everyday
life in Israel as well as on the suicide bombers’ motives and the
debasing conditions of life in Gaza. In the lead characters' streams of
consciousness before and after the attack their true motives are
revealed and given new meaning: What do secrets, hopes and dreams mean
after such a calamity? Through the comment-free montage of these
reflections Pnina Moed Kass builds up a striking picture of horror amid
the insanity of terror. »At times I wondered if I was writing
something, or just recording it«, the author said, who decided to write
this novel after the worldwide wave of terrorism on September 11. The
»Frankfurter Rundschau« listed it as one of »the most exciting teen
books of the last years«.
The novel, written in English, has since been
published in France, Germany and soon in Italy. The work received the
Sydney Taylor Book Award (2004) as well as the National Jewish Book
Award (2005). It is on many recommended reading lists, foremost on that
of the American Library Association (2006). In addition, Moed Kass has
published a series of picture books in Hebrew. The author has three
sons and three grandchildren. She lives near Tel Aviv.
© international literature festival berlin
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