Alice Bialsky (b. 1968) is a Russian-born Israeli author, documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, and a member of a vibrant group of Russian-language writers in Israel. While many of these writers are well-known to Russian-speaking readers worldwide, they often remain less familiar to local Israeli audiences. Bialsky immigrated to Israel in 1990; she writes in Russian and her books were translated into Hebrew by Yael Tomashov.

The social and familial context to which Bialsky returns in her books are described with an intimate familiarity that subtly reflects the author’s unique perspective at the intersection of two cultures and languages. Her first novel, The Crown Not Heavy (2014), is partially autobiographical and centers on Alissa, an 18-year-old Jewish Muscovite determined to break into Moscow׳s underground punk scene in the tumultuous late 1980s, just before the Soviet Union׳s collapse. Through her protagonist׳s nonchalant perspective, Bialsky delivers a richly nuanced and captivating account of coming of age and rebellion against the oppressive Soviet regime.

Her second novel, Superfluous People (2018), expands its focus while staying within Alissa׳s family orbit, particularly examining the story of her father—a scientist and adventurer who arrives in Tashkent in the 1970s seeking a different life. Based on the author׳s own father, this character is portrayed as a charismatic, picaresque figure: a gambler and storyteller prone to wild exaggeration.

A complementary narrative thread and perspective on his adventures unfolds through his wife׳s character. Bialsky׳s portrayal of power dynamics between men and women as an intersection of different forms of rebellion and coping, combined with the resourcefulness of her characters and the very act of storytelling itself, offers an indirect yet penetrating observation of contemporary challenges in an era marked by democratic erosion and rising conservative and sexist voices.

Photography: Masha Rubin

Roy Chen (b. 1980) captured the attention of Israeli readers with his third book, Souls (2020), a delightful picaresque novel chronicling the transmigratory adventures of one particular soul—Grisha’s.

Travelling from one body to another, Grisha׳s journey spans epochs and geographies, beginning in a remote Eastern European shtetl and continuing through Venice, Morocco, and beyond. Each reincarnation is recounted in Grisha’s voice, adapting its tone and style of narration to the specific context in which he lands. Hovering over this sprawling monologue is the skeptical voice of Grisha’s mother, who dismisses her son as a liar and a slacker, insisting that one can only live once. Defying the constraints of a single, linear life, Grisha instead opts for multiplicity, living his lives in the plural—within the only medium he believes allows for such freedom: literature, and specifically by employing the polyphonic possibilities of the novel.

In sharp contrast to the feverish verbosity of Souls and its protagonist’s insatiable appetite for excess, Chen’s next novel, Great Uproar (2023), serves as its intimate mirror image, or a brooding twin. The novel follows the journeys of three women in search of silence, striving to escape the relentless noise of modern life. Yet even here, Chen harnesses the polyphonic power of the novel to challenge rigid notions of identity and explore what lies beyond the so-called “real”—venturing into uncharted realms beyond the illuminated sphere of the known and familiar.

A prolific playwright and long-time dramaturg at the Gesher Theater, Chen brings a distinctly theatrical quality to his literary works, showcasing his rare talent for dramatizing the living speech in all its varied forms. His contributions to literature and theater were recognized with the Agnon Prize in 2023.

Photography: Polina Adamov

Tehila Hakimi (b. 1982) is a mechanical engineer by training. She made her debut in 2014 with the poetry collection Tomorrow We Work, which garnered widespread acclaim from readers and critics alike.

Hakimi’s poetry challenges the traditional notion of the lyrical subject as a voice speaking from a private and isolated space; hers is the voice of a besieged subjectivity, constantly unsettled and violated by the gusts of a noisy, digitized reality governed by algorithms and market forces.

Hakimi’s poetry stems from a world where the borders between interior and exterior, work and home, have dissolved, and the poet has become enmeshed in the workspace down to the most intimate fibers of her being. Yet she is determined to wrest a lyrical voice from the course of an endless workday, channeling it through bureaucratic forms, office memos, job interviews, and online dating platforms.

In her subsequent works — the graphic novella In the Water (2016) and the prose collection Company (2018) — Hakimi further examines how economic and class realities in a neoliberal world encroach on her protagonists’ lives, eroding their humanity.

Hakimi’s first novel, Hunting in America (2023), follows an Israeli woman who relocates to the United States for her job. Soon, she becomes embroiled in a corporate hunting ritual. However, this return to “nature” devoid of any primal or sensory vitality, starkly reveals the contours of an oppressive and dehumanizing reality—an existence reduced to sterile repetition and synthetic gestures. Confronted with this grim landscape, the protagonist faces an uneasy choice: to submit to social rituals that erode her humanity or take drastic measures to sever herself from the machinery governing her life. The novel received critical acclaim. Hakimi won the Bernstein Prize in 2015.

Photography: Silan Dallal

Ilana Rudashevski (b. 1965) debuted with her novel Taska (2022), receiving high praise from readers and critics alike. The book won the Sapir Prize for Debut Books, firmly establishing Rudashevski as a promising new voice in contemporary Hebrew literature.

The novel tells the story of a young couple who emigrates from Moscow to Israel in the 1970s, narrated from the perspective of their daughter, now an adult. Avoiding the obvious pitfalls of identity politics and steering clear of trendy platitudes, Rudashevski crafts a finely nuanced realist narrative threaded with irony, portraying migration as a perpetual state of transition and displacement. With delicate precision and without a trace of pathos, the novel delves into complex themes such as generational differences, the contested terrain of memory and its underlying fictions, and the evolving concept of ״home״ which, once uprooted, is bound to return as an endless quest for stability.

The narrator, an architect by profession (like the author), works in Jerusalem’s urban planning department, striving to untangle and reform the city’s dysfunctional planning norms. Her work embodies yet another layer of the immigrant’s ambivalent relationship with the local fabric, its intricacies, and its paradoxes. Under what conditions can “home” even exist? What part of the planned structure must be devoted to the ghosts of the past and to a longing that finds no peace, for it to be truly inhabitable? Boldly and incisively, the novel portrays the process of immigration as a penetrating exploration of Israeli society, with all its tensions and contradictions.

Photography: Chana Netzer-Cohen

Yonatan Sagiv (b. 1979) has earned a prominent place in Israeli fiction with a series of books featuring the character of police detective Oded Hefer. Over the course of three novels to date—No Secrets in Company (2014), Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid (2017), and The Last Cry (2020).

Sagiv masterfully draws on the conventions of the detective genre, crafting engaging plots while simultaneously subverting its typically masculine and somber traditions in a provocative and original manner.

In Sagiv’s work, the figure of the detective is recast as a flamboyant, foul-mouthed gay man, whose narration is as colorful and unapologetic as his character, marked by sharp, acerbic slang. Following a trail, detective Hefer often assumes various guises to infiltrate the higher echelons of power. These encounters, told from the perspective of an inner outsider, infuse the narrative with strong comic effects and provide some of Sagiv’s most incisive observations on the bal masqué of Israeli society.

Sagiv׳s novels can thus be read not only as highly effective exemplars of the detective genre but also as comedies of manners, offering sharp, ironic reflections on local culture, its shared repressions, and collective falsehoods.

In 2022, Sagiv published his memoir Some People Talk Like This, where he describes the physical experience of losing his voice as a lens through which to explore his personal identity struggle. He frames this struggle as an interplay between the loss and recovery of one’s voice. In this compact book, Sagiv combines an intimate narrative with incisive observations about voice, indentity, and representation. The book was enthusiastically received by readers and critics alike.

Photography: Tal Shahar

Carmit Sahar (b. 1967) is an accomplished researcher in physics and computer science who made a striking literary debut with Set Theory (2020), a sprawling tale of timid, boyish love between two youths, which was enthusiastically received by critics.

Alex, the son of a Jewish family in London and the ״black sheep״ among his gifted siblings, all carefully cultivated under the watchful eye of an ambitious mother, is sent every summer to stay with his aunt in Israel. There, he meets Arkady.

The love that sparks between them—first expressed through moments of intense, transgressive violence—is the kind forged between itinerant, uprooted individuals untethered from the anchoring forces of home, family, and language. It is therefore a raw, uninhibited love that burns in clandestine totality, shaping their lives in profound and lasting ways.

Carmit Sahar burst onto the Hebrew literary scene with unusual force. Her writing masterfully oscillates between the sensual and the metaphysical, attuned to the relentless scratching of untamed, libidinal forces beneath the polished veneers of cultural sublimation. Across hundreds of pages, Set Theory sketches a portrait of an era defined by uprootedness and transition, tracing the evolution of human desire as it struggles to adapt to shifting conditions.

Set Theory is the first installment in a developing body of work of Proustian proportions that has already left an indelible mark on Israeli literature.

Photography: Daniel Pikielny