Nava Semel is one of the foremost voices of the Israeli "second generation," children born to Holocaust survivors. She was the first to subtitle a book of fiction "Stories of the Second Generation." Indeed, this collection, Kov'a zekhukhit (Hat of Glass, 1985), found the Israeli readership ill prepared for its theme; neither the concept nor its semantics were taken for granted in Hebrew at that time. Thus, although the book enjoyed a warm reception by the press in general, the two major Hebrew newspapers, Yedi'ot akharonot and Haarets, chose to ignore it.

Though accurate, the "second generation" classification does not exhaust the overall thematic trajectory of Semel's subsequent work, in which she has explored various genres (plays and librettos, poems, essays, books for adults and for children), as well as the inner worlds of a variety of "others," characters marginalized in any society for several reasons, such as mental...