Nava Semel

Semel was born in Jaffa in 1954 to Margalit, also known as Mimi, and Yitzhak Artzi, both Holocaust survivors.[3][2] Her parents came from Romania.[7] Her father was a former member of the Knesset, and her older brother was the singer Shlomo Artzi.[2][7] Her parents’ experiences and the lives of their Israeli-born children became central concerns of her writing.[8][4]

She attended Herzliya Gymnasium, served in Galei Tzahal, and worked at Israeli Television.[1] She completed a master’s degree in art history at Tel Aviv University.[1][6] From 1980 to 1988, she worked as a journalist and critic of art and cinema.[1]

Semel married Noam Semel, who was identified in a family memoir as the chief executive of the Cameri Theater.[7] She also lived in New York during his service as cultural consul, an experience she later connected to the perspective on Israeli identity in her novel Isra Isle.[9] The couple had three children.[2]

Semel’s literary and dramatic work encompassed novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, opera libretti, songs, and translation.[3][2] She published numerous books and plays and translated many plays into Hebrew.[2] Among her works were Hat of Glass, And the Rat Laughed, Isra Isle, How Does Love Begin?, and Australian Wedding, as well as the plays The Child Behind the Eyes and Bride on Paper.[2]

Her writing repeatedly returned to Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors and their efforts to reconcile Israeli identity with the scars of the past.[8][4] She explained that her subject was not simply the Holocaust itself, but the ways its memory changes within people and shapes their identities.[4] She feared that, after the deaths of survivors and then their children, the Holocaust might recede into a vague myth; she regarded art as a means of transmitting emotional memory to future generations.[4]

Hat of Glass, published in 1985, contains ten short stories examining how parents’ Holocaust trauma affects their children and enters everyday life.[8] The collection drew on the testimony of Semel’s mother, a concentration-camp survivor.[10] Its stories turn toward individual and family experience, tracing the movement of trauma between generations rather than confining remembrance to a national narrative.[8]

The story “A Hat of Glass” portrays a survivor grandmother’s anxiety about transmitting traumatic memory to those who come after her.[5] In one passage, she says that “on the children’s heads, my anguish and torment sit like a hat of glass.”[5] Semel’s position as a daughter of survivors thus extended into writing about the third and succeeding generations.[5]

And the Rat Laughed appeared in 2001 and combines story, fairy tale, internet poetry, futuristic fantasy, and diary.[8] Its narrative moves among the Holocaust past, the Israeli present, and the year 2099.[8] At its center is a Jewish woman who survived as a child after being hidden in a potato pit in Poland and who recounts her experiences to her granddaughter decades later.[8]

The granddaughter interviews her nameless Tel Aviv grandmother for a school project, raising the question of what happens to memory when it depends on its “original owner.”[5] The novel also addresses the sexual abuse of children hidden during the Holocaust and complicates conventional ideas about rescue and remembrance.[8][10] It became a bestseller in Israel, achieved success abroad, and appeared in an English translation by Miriam Shlesinger published by Hybrid Publishers in 2008.[5][8]

The book was adapted into an opera in 2004.[11] The production premiered at the Cameri Theater in April 2005.[6] A recording dated approximately 2005 documents a Hebrew production with English subtitles, conducted by Ori Leshman and directed by Oded Kotler, with the Moran Choir under Naomi Faran.[12]

Semel’s theater work also addressed experiences outside Holocaust remembrance.[6] The Child Behind the Eyes centers on a mother of a child with Down syndrome and her fears on the night before he starts school.[13][6] The production ran in Israel for eleven seasons and represented Israel in the 1987 Prix Italia competition.[6] It was produced as a BBC radio play in London and broadcast by stations in France, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, Romania, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Poland.[13] It won Austria’s best radio drama award in 1996.[6]

Isra Isle drew inspiration from Mordecai Manuel Noah’s plan to establish a Jewish polity on Grand Island near Niagara Falls.[9] Noah purchased one-third of the island in 1825, and Semel’s novel imagined what might have happened had his plan succeeded.[9] Semel connected the novel’s broader perspective on Israeli identity to her own years in New York.[9]

Travel also supplied the starting points for other books.[4][9] During a visit to Italy’s Piedmont region, Semel noticed an attic opening and chimney in a village and asked her interpreter what had happened there; the answer was, “They hid Jews here.”[4] The encounter prompted the novel known in English as Crooked Head or Head on Backwards, and she spent five years immersed in its setting, a farm under Nazi occupation.[3][4] By April 2014, a feature-film adaptation was anticipated.[3]

Australian Wedding developed from a visit to her son in Australia, where she met young Israelis who had chosen to live abroad.[9] She returned with a substantial personal journal that became the book.[9] Reflecting on those encounters, she described Israelis abroad as negotiating their relationship with Israeli identity and identified Hebrew as a force that preserved that identity.[9]

Her final book, Fanny and Gabriel (2017), drew on the story of her grandparents.[2][14] Her grandfather Gabriel Herzig had left his wife Fanny and their infant son for decades before arriving in Israel from the United States in old age.[14] Semel recalled being five when her parents suddenly told her that her grandfather was coming to visit; until then, she had not known she had a grandfather.[14]

She attempted the family story three times, discarding two versions before completing the novel.[14] Rather than make her grandfather a one-dimensional character, she sought to fill gaps in the family account.[14] During cancer treatment, she described writing as a source of support, saying, “I feel that creativity is the best medicine for me.”[14]

Semel received the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers in 1996 and Tel Aviv’s Woman of the Year in Literature award in 2007.[2] Her book Gershona Shona won the National Jewish Book Award in 1990.[6] Other recognition associated with her work included a French prize for women writers of the Mediterranean.[2]

Alongside her literary career, Semel was active in groups of children of Holocaust survivors and voluntarily gave lectures and workshops on Holocaust history.[13] She served on the public council of Yad Vashem.[1] She also served on the board of the Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies in Tel Yitzhak and previously on the board of the New Fund for Cinema and Television.[2]

She was scheduled to participate in an April 28, 2014, event at United Nations Headquarters about communicating the lessons of the Holocaust through the arts.[3] Organized by the UN Department of Public Information’s Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program in partnership with Israel’s Permanent Mission to the UN and the World Jewish Congress, the event was to include her reflections on writing as a member of the second generation.[3]

Semel died in Tel Aviv on December 2, 2017, aged 63, after cancer.[1][2] She was survived by her husband, their three children, and her brother Shlomo Artzi.[2] Her books circulated in Israel and abroad in numerous languages, while her dramatic writing reached stage and radio audiences internationally.[2][6]

Her work contributed to new literary approaches to the Holocaust that combined generational distance from the events with engagement in their fundamental questions.[15] She was also among the women writers whose voices became prominent in Israeli literature after being relatively little heard in the state’s early years, and she wrote children’s books popular in Israel.[16]

The Nava Semel Archive preserves drafts of And the Rat Laughed and Isra Isle, together with correspondence involving Ella Milch-Sheriff, Shlomo Artzi, Ruth Almog, and others.[1] Its holdings encompass manuscripts, letters, and collected materials from her literary activity.[1]

The January 8, 2020, international conference “Depicting Violated Jewish Women During the Holocaust” was dedicated to Semel’s memory.[17] The program listed Sonja Hedgepeth’s presentation “Nava Semel as a Retrospective Voice of Jewish Women in the Holocaust.”[17] Its memorial session included a short film, remarks by Ilil Semel, and a musical and dramatic presentation, alongside contributions concerning her connection to the Remember the Women Institute and discussion of her work.[17]

A January 24, 2021, online conference on post-trauma in literature, art, and representation listed Naama Reshef’s presentation “From Silent Memory to Emotional Memory in Nava Semel’s book ‘And the Rat Laughed.’”[18]

The reception of Hat of Glass reflected resistance to treating the experiences of survivors’ children as a subject in their own right: contemporary newspaper discussion questioned why being a survivor’s son or daughter should be an issue.[19] Many second-generation readers initially recoiled from the collection, which later became an important work in breaking the silence around intergenerational trauma.[8]

Semel’s fiction also addressed sexual violence during the Holocaust, a subject she described in an interview as long taboo and controversial.[10] She said survivors had often remained silent out of shame and a desire to protect their families from the past, with some speaking only in old age.[10] These concerns informed her literary exploration of experiences that survivors had struggled to communicate to later generations.[5][10]