Israeli author Suzane Adam is joined by her translator Becka Mara McKay for a reading from her novel Laundry and a conversation about the translation process.

Laundry is a novel of psychological suspense that focuses on family relationships and the aftermath of childhood trauma. Introspective Ildiko revisits her childhood in the 1960s in a small, village in Transylvania. Now, after her immigration to Israel and the process of growing up and adapting, the repressed nightmares from the past return and threaten to destroy the bonds of love and security she has built in the intervening years. As her story unfolds—and with it the parallel stories of her family—we come to understand the mysterious, violent event that begins the novel, and to see how Ildiko’s story has come full circle. Laundry is a psychological thriller driven by characters whose lives were shaped by the Holocaust.

Suzane Adam was born in Satu Mare, Transylvania, and came to Israel at the age of ten. She published her first novel, Laundry, in 2000, followed by Mayamiya in 2002 and Janis’s Mother in 2004. In 2006, she was awarded the Kugel Prize for Janis’s Mother. Her work has been translated in German and English.

Becka Mara McKay’s poetry and translations have appeared in ACM, American Letters, and Commentary, Columbia, Controlled Burn, Cranky, eXchanges, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, small spiral notebook, TWO LINES, and elsewhere. In 2004 she received a fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Cosponsored with Magers and Quinn Booksellers, The Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel, and Words Without Borders.

Jenna is an intern with Open Letter, a former intern for literary agent Meredith Bernstein, and an incredibly good proofreader.

Her review opens:

Suzane Adam is an renowned author in Israel and received the Kugel Prize in 2006 for her novel, Janis’s Mother. Adam’s first novel, Laundry, her first novel to be translated from Hebrew into English, is a novel that captivates from the first page with a mysterious narrator and even more elusive plot.

The novel begins en media res with a narrative that hints towards a tragic event that has occurred and the confusion and concern that it has caused to those observing its aftermath. The structure of the novel progresses into a story told from the beginning, a story that will explain the recent tragic event, which is both the novel’s opening and its conclusion, but begins when the main character is a five-year-old with curious violet eyes. The narrative itself is clear and seems almost effortless in its moving pace and mesmerizing plot, a seamlessness which the reader may contribute to both Adam and her translator, Becka Mara McKay.

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The novel begins en media res with a narrative that hints towards a tragic event that has occurred and the confusion and concern that it has caused to those observing its aftermath. The structure of the novel progresses into a story told from the beginning, a story that will explain the recent tragic event, which is both the novel’s opening and its conclusion, but begins when the main character is a five-year-old with curious violet eyes. The narrative itself is clear and seems almost effortless in its moving pace and mesmerizing plot, a seamlessness which the reader may contribute to both Adam and her translator, Becka Mara McKay.

The novel depicts Ildiko, a quiet, introspective woman, curled on her couch, unmoving and silent, after she returns home from the hospital under vague circumstances. The narrator states: “For two days I’ve been trying to persuade her to speak, but she won’t, she can’t. There is so much despair in her eyes.” The reader is already questioning what could have happened to this woman, but the reader soon learns that Ildiko does intend to speak, and more than she has ever done so:

She is making pleats in the edge of the blanket, fold upon fold, her hands shaking, I’ll tell everything, from the beginning, she says in a voice I don’t recognize. It’s not me she’s talking to. I’m afraid to move, I don’t want to disturb her concentration. Slowly, slowly, minutes pass, she lifts her head up, fixes her gaze on a corner of the ceiling. Syllables, letters. Sentences take shape from the words she is speaking. I hear; I don’t understand, wait, from the beginning? No, from the end, the end is so terrible, she should start at the end, what is she talking about? Words, flat, monotonous, one after the other. She’s reciting from inside herself, a story no one knows . . .

Her loved ones realize that Ildiko hid more in her quiet, unassuming manner than they could ever comprehend. Ildilko is an observer, first and foremost, highlighted by her interest in painting as a way for her to reflect on the world without actually engaging in it.

This novel is Ildiko’s breaking of the ever-present silence and submissiveness of her life, her inability to speak to others about her traumatic experience. Silence is a pervasive theme incorporated throughout the novel with all of the characters. Ildiko’s parents, survivors of the Holocaust, live their life by the motto: “What happened, happened.” They refrain from recounting their tragedies simply because they are in the past. In a similar fashion, Ildiko keeps silent about her horrific childhood incident of being dragged to the slaughterhouse by Yutzi, her family’s adored “foster-child.” Ildiko’s silent fear of Yutzi and her threats are mollified when her family emigrates from Transylvania to Israel, a mimicry of the author’s childhood emigration, when Yutzi’s reign of terror over Ildiko is forced to end. Ildiko and her parent’s silence is the silence of survivors, a silence that must be broken in order to truly leave the past in the past; a silence that threatens their very being until the internal has been manifested in a form that can be understood, so that people can understand that what happened, happened, but needs to be told, and from the beginning.

This month we’re reporting on the war at home, with international dispatches on domestic conflicts. Here homeland security is both threatened and maintained, as couples tie the knot but long to cut the cord, and double lives are singled out. From Norwegian train stations to Greek port towns, in Armenian saga and Mayan myth, households are besieged but also defended as the family turns on its nuclear power. Kjell Askildsen, Constance Delaunay, Juan Forn, Espido Freire, Lena Kitsopoulou, Hagop Oshagan, Miguel Angel Oxlaj Cúmez, Mercè Rodoreda, Astrid Roemer, and Olga Tokarczuk keep the home fires burning (or burning down the house).

As usual, there are a number of great pieces included, such as the Rodoreda stories ( and ) and which was translated by Becka Mara McKay and published by Autumn Hill Books.

We’re prolonging summer with another month of flip-flops, as international writers contemplate the reversals of various fortunes. On the air in Sarajevo and under the radar in São Paulo, in chilly garrets and overheated classrooms, tables turn, lives go topsy-turvy, and the only order is “Ģ����ý-face!”

Some great authors featured in this issue, including by Vladimir Sorokin (this is an afterword to The Queue, which is coming out this fall from NYRB, and which is fantastic), by Danilo Kis, and by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (I love, love, love repeating Machado de Assis’s name . . . just rolls off the tongue in a exotic, fun way).

There’s also an excerpt from Suzane Adam’s which recently came out from Autumn Hill Books, and a review of Ana Maria Shua’s from the ever interesting, White Pine Press.

There are a number of other pieces as well, all worth checking out.