Govrin, Michal 1950-

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Govrin, Michal 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born 1950, in Tel Aviv, Israel; daughter of Pinḥas Govrin; married; children: two daughters. Education: Attended Tel Aviv University; University of Paris, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Jerusalem, Israel.

CAREER:

Writer and theater director. Faculty member at the School of Visual Theater, Jerusalem, Israel, and academic chair of the theater department, Emunah College, Jerusalem, Israel.

Writer in residence and Aresty Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Margalit Prize for Theater Direction, 1977; Tel Aviv Foundation Award, 1984; Kugel Literary Prize, 1997, for The Name; Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Writers, 1998; ACUM Prize, 2003, for Snapshots.

WRITINGS:

Otah sha'ah: shirim (title means "That Very Hour"; poetry), Sifriyat po'alim (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1981.

Le'eḥhoz ba-shemesh: sipurim ḥe-agadot (title means "Hold on to the Sun"; short stories), ha-ḥibuts hame'uḥad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1984.

Seder ha-laila he-ze (title means "That Night's Seder"; poetry), Ha-bamah (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1989.

Gufi milim: shirim (title means "Word's Bodies"; poetry), ha-ḥibuts ha-me'uḥad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1990.

ha-Shem, ha-ḥibuts ha-me'uḥad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1995, English translation by Barbara Harshav published as The Name, Riverhead (New York, NY), 1998.

Ma'aśeh ha-yam: kroniḥat perush (title means "The Making of the Sea: A Chronicle of Interpretation"; poetry, fiction, and art), Karmel (Jerusalem, Israel), 2000.

Hevzeḥim (novel), 'Am 'oved (Tel Aviv, Israel), 2002, English translation by Barbara Harshav published as Snapshots, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2007.

(Editor) Pinḥas Govrin, Hayinu ke-ḥolmin: megilat mishapḥah (title means "We Were as Dreamers: A Family Saga"; autobiography), Karmel (Jerusalem, Israel), 2005.

Author, with Jacques Derrida and David Shapiro, of Body of Prayer, edited by Kim Shkapich, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union (New York, NY), 2001.

Author of numerous stage adaptations and essays; work anthologized in several publications.

SIDELIGHTS:

Michal Govrin is a novelist, poet, and theater director who lives in Jerusalem, Israel. She is noted for many experimental theater works, including That Night's Seder, based on her volume of poems of the same title and performed in 1989, as well as a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett's novel Mercier and Camier. She also translated and directed a production of Sławomir Mrożek's play The Emigrants. Her stage adaptation based on Martin Buber's novel, Gog and Magog, which was performed in 1994, has been hailed as a groundbreaking work in contemporary Israeli theater. In addition, she has directed numerous acclaimed productions, including Beckett's Happy Days and Jean-Claude Grumberg's The Workroom.

Among English-language audiences, Govrin is perhaps best known for her novels. ha-Shem, translated as The Name, received significant attention. The story centers on Amalia, the daughter of a concentration camp survivor and named for her father's first wife, Malinka, a brilliant pianist. Malinka inspired other inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust by taking her own life at the camp rather than allowing herself to be taken to the gas chamber. Amalia grows up oppressed by the memory of a mother figure she never knew, and she tries several times to change her name and thereby change who she is. Using the name Emily, and later Amy, she leaves the United States for Europe, eventually finding her way to Jerusalem. There, she finds meaning in the rituals of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. She begins weaving a Torah curtain to atone for the guilt of having survived when Malinka perished, and of having engaged in promiscuous sex earlier in her life. Amalia endures the Omer Counting, "the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot when, through a regime of purifying prayer, Orthodox Jews hope to help bring about tikkun olam, the repair of the world," stated Alicia Ostriker in a review for Tikkun. During the Omer Counting, Amalia starves herself, obsesses about her guilt and self-hatred, and prays. Engaged to a yeshiva student, she masochistically denies herself the opportunity to get married and enjoy the simple pleasures of life, deciding instead to become a bride of God.

A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found some of the novel's prose sensuous and lyrical, but described other passages as "suffocatingly sonorous" and deemed the narrative "essentially static and claustrophobic." Similarly, Library Journal critic Barbara Hoffert called the book "beautifully written but … slow-moving and ponderous." Ostriker, however, heaped praise on the book. Noting that Amalia's story raises a multitude of unanswered questions, Ostriker stated that the "sheer verbal beauty of Jewish liturgy, prophecy, and philosophy, the richness of symbolism in Amalia's weaving—interlaced with the motif of writing—and the depth of custom and legend shaping her life and this story, are irresistibly awesome." Citing the "ecstatic music and mystery of her writing, her wrestling with memory that invokes centuries past, her ability to evoke hope and despair in a single breath, and above all the spirituality of her vision," Ostriker compared Govrin to the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison, concluding that The Name is a "revolutionary novel that will haunt the reader."

Writing in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, Nitza Keren called Govrin's book "a new poetic approach" in which the writer "exhibits liberation from cultural constraints and psychic obstacles." Govrin "appropriates, explicitly and without fear, the hegemonic text and the status of its writer, thus freeing herself of anxieties that had blocked the way of women authors in previous generations," wrote Keren. "She takes hold of both the pen, traditionally the implement of men, and the needle, traditionally that of women. Thus, she seeks, as she explicitly declares, ‘to intervene, perhaps, in the divine fabric. To become ensnared in His net and to spin His [God's] threads.’" The Name won the Kugel Literary Prize in 1997.

In the novel Snapshots, Govrin juxtaposes a classic love triangle with the tumultuous backdrop of the first Gulf War. Ilana Tsuriel, an Israeli architect living in Paris, is killed in a car accident in Germany just as the book begins. Her husband, a Holocaust scholar, is determined to learn more about his wife as he realizes he did not appreciate her fully while she was alive. He asks her friend Tirtsa to sort through Ilana's papers; the result is a "snapshot" portrait of Ilana, comprised of such records as letters to her father; diary entries, many of them describing her unhappy marriage; an account of her troubled affair with a Palestinian architect with whom she was working on a major memorial installation in Jerusalem; and photographs and drawings.

This "snapshot" depicts Ilana as a complex and morally serious woman concerned about her identity as a woman, an Israeli, and a Jew. Library Journal reviewer Molly Abramowitz appreciated Govrin's efforts in this novel to foster cooperation and understanding between Arabs and Israelis, and praised the author's sensitive depiction of "the Other" and her creation of "fine literary tension" in the novel's themes. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews deemed Snapshots a "complex and layered personal/political novel" that will appeal to readers interested in geopolitical matters. Writing in Booklist, Barbara Bibel described the novel as a "rich portrait of a complex woman" that "effectively blends the personal and the political."

Govrin has also written several volumes of poems, including Otah sha'ah: shirim ("That Very Hour") and Gufi milim: shirim ("Word's Bodies"). Her volume Ma'aśeh ha-yam: kroniḥat perush ("The Making of the Sea: A Chronicle of Interpretation") includes poetry, fiction, and art. Her book of short stories, Le'eḥhoz ba-shemesh: sipurim ḥe-agadot ("Hold on to the Sun"), employs a variety of narrative styles, including realism, myth, and legend.

Pinḥas Govrin, Govrin's father, collaborated with her on his autobiography, Hayinu ke-ḥolmin: megilat mishapḥah ("We Were as Dreamers: A Family Saga"). Govrin edited the book, which recounts Pinḥas's memories of his youth in the shtetls, small towns of Orthodox Judaism followers whose practices remained stable and constant regardless of outside influences; these towns were located in eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book also describes Pinḥas's experiences as a Zionist immigrant to Palestine in the early 1920s. In Palestine, the young Pinḥas helped to establish the kibbutzim of Tel Yossef and Ein Harod, agriculture-based, communal groups.

Govrin teaches at the School of Visual Theater and serves as academic chair of the theater department at the Emunah College in Jerusalem.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 2002, review of Hevzeḥim, p. 741; September 15, 2007, Barbara Bibel, review of Snapshots, p. 34.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2007, review of Snapshots.

Library Journal, September 15, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Name, p. 111; September 15, 2007, Molly Abramowitz, review of Snapshots, p. 50.

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, September 22, 2005, Nitza Keren, "In the Name of the Mother: Women's Discourse—Women's Prayer in Michal Govrin's The Name," p. 126.

Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1998, review of The Name, p. 45; August 6, 2007, review of Snapshots, p. 165.

Tikkun, November 1, 2000, Alicia Ostriker, "What's in a Name?," review of The Name, p. 78.

World Literature Today, March 22, 2000, review of The Name, p. 454.