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April 12, 2013

The art of asking questions

BETH KISSILEFF JNS.ORG

Shimon Adaf is a Renaissance man, adept in poetry, prose and music. Ultimately, however, his fiction writing – which last month won him Israel’s top literary prize – boils down to yet another skill, what he calls the “craft of asking questions.”

“Someone says, this thing: why is it? What gives it meaning? Wherever I am, I am just asking questions,” he said.

Adaf was recently announced as the winner of Israel’s annual Sapir Prize, which carries an award of 150,000 shekels (about $42,000 Cdn) for Mox Nox (Latin for Night is Upon Us). The book is the second volume in a trilogy whose other two volumes include both Hebrew and Latin titles, Kfor/Nuntia (Frost/Messenger) and Arim Shel Mata/De Urbibus Inferis (Lower/Infernal Cities). The inspiration for the trilogy came from the “clash between the Jewish world and outer world, defined in Jewish tradition as the kingdom of Rome,” which oppressed the Jews and destroyed the Second Temple, he explained, with bilingual titles serving to bridge the cultural conflict.

In addition to the cash reward, the Sapir Prize comes with two translations of the author’s work, into Arabic and a language of the author’s choosing. Adaf’s literary agent is currently seeking an English translator for Mox Nox, which tells the parallel tales of a boy confronting his painful childhood on a kibbutz and his coming of age as an author.

Adaf, 41, is multi-talented. He translated into Hebrew the works of 20th-century American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (for publication) and 17th-century English poet John Milton (for personal consumption). On the stage, he appears at literary events playing guitar and sharing vocals with the bass player in his three-person band or reading from one of his three published volumes of poetry or six published novels. In conversation, Adaf discusses the work of Maimonides, Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce and John Berryman with aplomb.

The Sapir Prize has been given out by Israel’s national lottery, Mifal Hapayis, every year since 2000 (except 2009, when it was rescinded due to a conflict of interest by one of the judges who was the uncle of the winner’s editor). The prize is modeled on England’s Booker Prize, with publishing houses submitting up to 10 works apiece by Israeli citizens and a jury winnowing the submissions to a list of five.

“What’s beautiful about this prize is its continuing power of propelling books into the consensus,” said Neta Gurevitch of Yediot Books publishing house.

Adaf is the head of the literary writing track at Ben-Gurion University, where he teaches in the department of Hebrew literature. He was raised in a Moroccan family in Sderot that was “very religious” and was expected to become a rabbi, he said. He learned to read and write at an early age and studied with his father, who entered him in academic contests. His affinity for writing emerged from his “first contact with the world,” which was “studying.” For Adaf, the process of studying is to “learn how to ask questions.”

As a teacher, “I don’t have answers for my students, I give them a key to ask questions about their work,” he added. Adaf frequently asks his students about their identity: “What makes [one] Jewish?” In Israel, it is a “question that is rarely asked,” but one that he tries to tackle in his writing.

“Is a knowledge of Jewish scriptures enough to build identity around? Does keeping mitzvot make you Jewish? Being circumcised?” he asked.

Adaf admires those who grapple with these issues in other cultures and contexts, such as Maimonides, or the German writers and philosophers Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig. He finds inspiration in Maimonides for the way he was able to “meet the world” of medieval philosophy. For example, in Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides converts aspects for Jewish consumption from a world unfriendly to Jews by “taking elements and making [them] Jewish.”

Adaf is interested in “Jewish identity in a post-national world,” he said, “a reality I think we are heading towards.” He added, “A traditional way of thinking can provide us with a way to define ourselves.” He does this for himself by writing parts of his novels in mishnaic Hebrew, “using many parts of Gemara [Talmud] as points of reference.”

Compared with his literary contemporaries in Israel, he said there are many “whose quest is similar,” but that they don’t tend to influence one another. Naming writers who he considers to be his peers – Shva Salhov, Dror Burstein, Ophir Touche Gafla, Nir Baram – he added that he doesn’t think there is any one “form, a style or a model of representation that is predominant in Israeli literature.” Adaf said that he is very much influenced by world literature, naming Roberto Bolano and W.G. Sebald as favorite writers.

Adaf demurred when asked whether the attention that comes with winning the prestigious Sapir Prize will change him. “In a way, the winning is an external event,” he said. “My work is a process that just goes on.”

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