Israeli Authors Discussion Group

For the last session of the year, we’ll be reading Iddo Gefen’s Jerusalem Beach. 

Iddo Gefen’s debut collection of short stories, Jerusalem Beach, will “surely fire up readers’ neurons,” according to one reviewer. This is a particularly apt description, given that the author is also a scientist who conducts neurocognitive research, exploring how storytelling can improve our understanding of the human mind. Sharply observant, tender, and imaginative, Gefen’s literary voice is unique among younger Israelis writers in that he skillfully captures the deep emotional complexities of entire novels in only a dozen or so pages. He casts a wide net: An 80-year-old grandfather joins an army platoon of geriatrics looking for purpose in old age. A scheming tech start-up exposes the dire consequences of ambition. An elderly couple searches for a beach that doesn’t exist. Readers seeking the next important voice in Israeli fiction will applaud these thirteen stories by an author whom Ayelet Gundar-Goshen hails as perhaps “the best Israeli short story writer since Etgar Keret.”