I was born and raised in Israel, and my nov­el The Peo­ple of For­ev­er Are Not Afraid takes place in Israel. Because of that, many peo­ple won­der why I wrote my book in Eng­lish. Some­one asked me if I had some­thing against the Hebrew lan­guage. One Israeli per­son spec­u­lat­ed online that I chose to write in Eng­lish because I was look­ing for a short­cut into get­ting pub­lished widely. 

That’s not at all true, but the ques­tion of why I chose to write in Eng­lish is a valid one. 

The truth is — it hap­pened by acci­dent. I wrote my first book while I was study­ing at a US col­lege. That’s the only rea­son I wrote it in Eng­lish. It was­n’t real­ly a con­scious choice, and I nev­er expect­ed the book to get pub­lished, so I did­n’t give the deci­sion to write in Eng­lish too much thought.

What­ev­er I write next may be in Hebrew, or it may be in Eng­lish. It all depends on what I feel like doing. I am ter­ri­ble at writ­ing Eng­lish with pen and paper — I nev­er quite got used to draw­ing those strange Latin let­ters, and I need my spell check, so it is eas­i­er for me in some ways to write in Hebrew because I don’t need a com­put­er for that.

Yet I believe writ­ing in a for­eign lan­guage helped my fic­tion. There is some­thing about writ­ing in a lan­guage that does not tru­ly belong to you that is lib­er­at­ing. It is eas­i­er to cre­ate a new world from scratch when the words you are using are not the ones you used as a child, or those you use to talk to the peo­ple you love. Just the knowl­edge that the char­ac­ters and places I was describ­ing belonged to the Hebrew lan­guage meant that by using Eng­lish, I was firm­ly foot­ed in the realm of fan­ta­sy, where any­thing I want­ed to make hap­pen could hap­pen as long as it made sense in the world of the sto­ry.

Addi­tion­al­ly, writ­ing about Israel in Eng­lish meant that I some­times had to trans­late Hebrew phras­es and metaphors. The process of nav­i­gat­ing between the two lan­guages often result­ed in some of the most sig­nif­i­cant parts of my book. My title, The Peo­ple of For­ev­er Are Not Afraid, is actu­al­ly a trans­la­tion of a Hebrew bumper stick­er and slo­gan.

I also found that at times it was advan­ta­geous not to know all the words that I need­ed. I often knew what I want­ed to say, but did not have the words to say it in Eng­lish. This forced me to turn to a dic­tio­nary, then to oth­ers’ fic­tion. To con­sid­er dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties, to exam­ine how the new words I con­sid­ered using were used by oth­ers. When writ­ing in Eng­lish, I am often at a loss for words. I have to fight hard­er for what comes nat­u­ral­ly to native speak­ers. In Hebrew the choice of words is quick­ly obvi­ous to me. I don’t have to dis­cov­er them.

My book is in the process of being trans­lat­ed into sev­er­al lan­guages, and I have found in my inter­ac­tions with my trans­la­tors that they ask the best ques­tions. In my book, I describe the hairs inside a mean base com­man­der’s nose as look­ing like ​“the life lines of spi­ders.” My Croa­t­ian trans­la­tor recent­ly asked me about that image. She want­ed to know whether I meant “ ​‘life lines’, the ones you throw into the water when some­body’s drown­ing or just life + line?”

The truth is I meant both mean­ings, but even I did­n’t real­ize that was the case until my trans­la­tor asked about it. She need­ed to know which of those two mean­ings I meant in order to accu­rate­ly trans­late the text.

Unlike most read­ers, trans­la­tors are forced to care about every word and com­ma. They real­ly read what is in front of them. They press me to explain what I ful­ly meant by every image or dia­logue line. Is it a com­mon Hebrew metaphor? Is it an Amer­i­can fig­ure of speech? Did I just invent that image on my own? Could this or that line be a com­bi­na­tion of a com­mon metaphor and inven­tion? I myself trans­late fic­tion, so I under­stand exact­ly how trans­lat­ing forces you to engage with a text in a way mere­ly read­ing it nev­er does.

I wrote my book in Eng­lish, but when I wrote it I was often trans­lat­ing from Hebrew in my head. Eng­lish was an acci­dent, but not, I think, a bad accident.