Dorit Rabinyan was born in 1972 in Kfar Saba, to a Jewish family who had emigrated from Iran. The stories passed on to her by female relatives introduced her into the family\u2019s past and Jewish life in Iran. After completing her military service as a journalist in the IDF magazine, and then for the Tel Aviv weekly \u00bbHa\u2019ir\u00ab, she published the first of three novels to date when she was just 22 years old.<\/p>\n
In \u00bbSimtat Ha-Shkediyot Be-Oumrijan\u00ab (1995; Eng. \u00bbPersian Brides\u00ab, 1998) a fifteen-year-old girl recounts her grandmother\u2019s life in the village of Omerijan, a \u00bbPersian shtetl\u00ab. Influenced by the Jewish-Iraqi writer Sami Michaels, Rabinyan decided that she would write a novel as a search for her own roots. Rabinyan\u2019s second novel \u00bbHa-Chatunot Shelanu\u00ab (1999; Eng. \u00bbOur Weddings\u00ab, 2011), which topped Israeli bestseller lists for several months, is a family saga in the Israeli narrative tradition. Here too, Rabinyan\u2019s playful and sensuous imagery and polished writing style draws our gaze to world of the \u00bbMizrahi\u00ab (\u00bbOriental\u00ab) Jews: \u00bbIsraeli literature is European. Protagonists with my family background hardly exist. My book finally gave them a voice in Israeli literature.\u00ab Rabinyan\u2019s latest novel \u00bbGader Haya\u00ab (2014; initially published in English as \u00bbAll the Rivers\u00ab, 2017) is the story of a faltering relationship between an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian artist who fall in love in New York. It sparked a heavy debate about censorship after the Israeli Ministry of Education refused to include the book in the national school curriculum for fear that it could encourage inter-marriage between Jews and Arabs and threaten \u00bbthe separate identities [of Arabs and Jews]\u00ab. Rabinyan, who in the wake of this controversy was supported by Meir Shalev, Zeruya Shalev, Amos Oz, among others, saw it as a symptom of the divide between the artistic and political elites in Israel: \u00bbThis is exactly why we read books, to liberate ourselves from slogans, from the great words of politicians.\u00ab<\/p>\n
Rabinyan won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in 1999 and the Israeli Publisher\u2019s Association Bernstein Prize in 2015 for \u00bbGader Haya\u00ab, which was also named one of the 10 best books of the year by the Israeli daily newspaper \u00bbHaaretz\u00ab. Her novels have been translated into a number of European languages. Rabinyan lives in Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10386,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[335,678],"jct-ilb-years":[611],"class_list":["post-39479","authors","type-authors","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-israel","jct-origin-israel-en","jct-ilb-years-2017-en"],"yoast_head":"\n