Israeli Reading Habits: Foreign Books in Translation

Yehuda Ammichai's poetry in five volumes. One of the few popular Israeli poets. Many more poetry in translation to Hebrew in book shops

The Hebrew language is both a mystery and a wonder. The ancient Hebrew with roots in Aramaic goes back about 5,000 years. It is the last surviving language from an fertile crescent where culture seem to have started 10,000 or more years ago. Today Hebrew is a renewed version of the biblical version. Still, every school child can read the bible and understand the language fairly well. It is the daily language used for everything in life from professional publications to negotiating prices in the market.

Hebrew literature and poetry is read by a very small number of people, in Israel itself six million people speak Hebrew on a daily basis. In the rest of the world it is less than a million. The market for books in Hebrew is small. Most Israelis prefer to read in Hebrew, even foreign language books. English is the most popular second language in Israel and a minority of Israelis read in English, especially fiction for enjoyment. There are over a million Russian speakers in Israel and they read mostly in Russian. Russians do not have a large enough market to translate into the language from other languages. Add to this the long isolation of Russians from world literature, it turns out that Hebrew is the preferred language for English, French and German top selling books. Israelis, Russian, Ethiopian and even English readers end up with Hebrew translations of books from around the world.

Israelis like to read. They don't just like to read but love to read about the world. Israel is small and homogeneous so stories from around the world are exotic and mysterious. Stories about lifestyle and events, about people and what makes them behave as they are. There is something boring about a life lived with the same people and the same way of doing things. Like cabin fever in Alaska on a grand scale. To break from the regular life here, Israelis take trips into lives elsewhere with a book, a cheap alternative to a trip abroad. To satisfy the hunger for foreign literature, lots of books are translated to Hebrew. So books in Hebrew come from a huge range of languages, maybe even wider cultural range than American and Germans find in their corner book shop. Of course you can find Japanese and Scandinavian authors in most good American book stores.

No Amazon in Hebrew! No Hebrew Book Shopping on the 'Net

Yes, there is no Amazon in Hebrew and there is not even a good online shop from Steimatzki or Tzomet Sfarim. In a country where there are more university graduates than most countries and one of the highest density of Internet users (go west as far as France and Germany and east as far as Japan to find more educated and Internet users.) That means that Israelis, the reading kind, need to get to a book store. In urban areas like Tel Aviv this is not a problem. If you are in a small village away from the center it's a long trip to a good book shop. Shops change their displays continuously, they are too small and there are too many new books to keep displays static. If you visit one store on a regular basis you see one or two shop workers moving books at the central display. Shelves are constantly moved, you miss a week and "your" section is up one shelf. There are a few big shops in Tel Aviv and many small crowded ones all around the central (Dan) region. Even the large malls, Azrieli, Dizengoff and Givatay'im have small busy shops. The isles between the central displays and the stacks are narrow and part of the shopping experience is dodging baby strollers and deep in their own world readers. It makes for a nice buying experience if you like crowds and people to chat with about a book. It is easy to get someone's opinion just by asking a seller or someone looking at the stack next to you. Maybe Israel is the last holdout of small book shops. All over the world it seems like the Internet is gobbling up the mainstream book business, here we still get to browse shelved and sneak a preview read of a book.