Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel

Ory Bernstein has published twenty-two books of poetry, as well as prose, essays, and children’s books. He was awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Bernstein belongs to the Generation of the State, the literary generation that emerged in the 1950s whose most prominent writers are Natan Zach, David Avidan, Dahlia Ravikovitch, and Yehuda Amichai. Raquel Chalfi, a poet from the generation after Bernstein, has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Prime Minister’s Prize, the Ashman Prize, the Bialik Prize for Poetry, and the Brenner Prize. She has published fourteen books of poetry. Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, in 1972 to parents of Moroccan origin and now lives in Jaffa. He has published six novels as well three books of poetry. He is widely recognized as an important new voice in Israeli literature. Amos Oz states, “Shimon Adaf’s voice is one of the most interesting and original in contemporary Israeli Literature.”