Dan Tsalka was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1936. After the German invasion his family fled to the USSR. Until the age of ten he lived in far away regions of the Empire, Siberia and Kazakhstan. In 1946 he returned to Poland. He immigrated to Israel in 1957 and lived for a while in a Kibbutz. He served in the army, studied history and philosophy at Tel-Aviv University and French literature at the University of Grenoble. In 1967 he published his first novel in Hebrew, making a Conrad-like language crossing. Among his books are collections of short stories, poems, essays, drama and among his prize-winning novels ”A Thousand Hearts“ is considered to be one of the true Hebrew prose masterpieces the 20th century
A Book of Stories:
A beautiful women shakes up the residents of the Third Dune in Nueiba, Sinai, a lost Israeli paradise.
Self portrait at 27 – the author's adventures in Paris, Venice and Rome.
A clerk in Jaffa grocery store writes an enormous book about the solar system, inspired by his love to a courtesan.
New York, 1927. A rundown hotel. The night Shlomo Blumgarten, known as Yehoash, finishes his translation of the Bible into Yiddish.
A Kabbalist manages to trap Samael, the Prince of Darkness, but frees him in a moment of weakness and is damned forever.
A girl chooses a leper hospital in Jerusalem as an object of love.
Heartbreak during the wonderful speeches and equally wonderful food at the annual dinner of the Holy Burial Society.
The decline and fall of a Bedouin tribe. After the Turks and the English, the Israelis have the last word.
A Tel-Aviv lecturer in the philosophy of science is invited to Germany, where a rare adventure awaits her.
An eminent linguist is summoned urgently to the home of the poet and mystic Oscar Milosz to express his opinion about Milosz' ominous interpretation of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.
A misunderstanding at a meeting near the Dead Sea between Sa'di, the great Pesian poet, and a crusader, has uncanny consequences.
Sex and the history of ideas in a one-room apartment in Tel-Aviv. Whose perception is preferable? That of the poet or that of the saint?
Major Shadow – an agreeable and instructive tale about a military genius in the Gulag.
A Spanish nobleman asks Leonardo da Vinci to paint an angel with the face of his wife, whom he killed by mistake, and he encounters astrang refusal.
And other stories….
Several of these stories and novellas first appeared in slightly different versions:
Andre' Deutsch, London
Schocken Books, N.Y
Modern Hebrew Literature
The Jerusalem Post Magazine
The Jerusalem Review
The Tel Aviv Review
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