Michal Govrin is a contemporary Israeli novelist, poet, and theater director who writes in Hebrew and lives in Jerusalem, but also spends seven weeks a year as writer in residence at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Govrin belongs to the "second generation" of children of Holocaust survivors. Born in Israel, they owe their lives to their parents' survival and must cope spiritually, emotionally, and mentally with the inherited trauma of the Holocaust. Unlike survivors who were "over there," in Europe, this generation of writers had to represent an historical event that they experienced only vicariously, through their parents' lives. Far from adopting the dominant ideological attitude of superiority of the "new" Sabra over the powerless Diaspora Jew whose history of persecution culminated in the Holocaust, the second generation strove to come to terms with the experience of the survivors.

Govrin, born on 24 November 1950 in Tel Aviv, is the only...