Hillel Halkin | Granta

Hillel Halkin

Hillel Halkin is a writer, critic, and well-known translator whose journalism and essays from Israel have regularly appeared in publications like Commentary and The New Republic for over thirty years. His first book, Letters To An American Jewish Friend, the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award, caused spirited controversy. His much-acclaimed Across The Sabbath River: In Search Of A Lost Tribe of Israel, received the 2002 Lucy Dawidowicz Prize for the writing of history. A Strange Death: a story discovered in Palestine was published by Public Affairs (US) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) in 2005, and AB Yehoshua called it ‘ a personal adventure into the past whose skilled, gripping prose moves back and forth between the documentary and the imaginative…An artful treatment of history worthy of the highest praise.’

Publications

Melisande! What Are Dreams?

Hillel Halkin

An inspiring novel; a philosophical love story; a moving ode to a woman, as joyful and celebratory as it is elegiac. The narrator is a man in his forties, a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy known as Hoo. He has been given the nickname by Mellie, the woman he addresses in this book while exploring his memories of their years together and apart. The two of them have known each other since high school in New York in the 1950s – and perhaps, Hoo thinks, much longer than that. Only as the novel unfolds do his reasons for writing to her, and the full nature of their relationship, become clear.