Next Wednesday, the first day of this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, it will be exactly three years since the terrorist attack by the Palestinian Hamas on the south of Israel. The first books were written about this October 7, 2023 - and what followed it - soon afterwards. The Israeli National Library recently accumulated a total of 2,100 titles that have since been published around the world. In Israel alone there will be five hundred new releases in 2025. They come from all genres, including children's books and biographies, novels and non-fiction books.
October 7th is also gradually being treated in German-language literature. If the German Book Prize is awarded to the best German-language novel of the year on the Monday before the start of the fair in Frankfurt's Römer, “Anton and Alma” could also win: In her second novel, the Jewish Berlin writer Dana Vowinckel tells a complicated love story from today, which comes to a dramatic head under the impression of October 7, 2023.
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The “Jewish Nine-Eleven”
The “Jewish Nine-Eleven”, is what Maxim Biller called the day in his new novel “Black Saturdays”. It is about a man who is similar to the Berlin writer and who, in the face of the terrorist attack and the Gaza war, looks at his own Jewish life with anti-Semitism and at the same time looks back at the 3,500-year history of hatred of Jews.
Both books are standout titles this year. Both have found strong narrative forms for dealing with anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the Middle East conflict and war - and also for how they are talked about and written about, right up to the present day.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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October 7th and the violence that followed it have left their mark on the literary world - beyond turning the events into books.
Last July, a report from the authors' association PEN America brought together voices from the Israeli book industry and the Jewish literary community: from writers who were advised by their publishers to remove Jewish characters and references to Israel from their manuscripts so that they would sell better abroad. From literary agents who could hardly send a Hebrew book to international publishers for translation, especially in the USA.
Which is difficult, because books, no matter where they come from, usually only find their way into other languages via the United States. A translator from Hebrew reports on twenty to thirty book projects in which he has been involved: to his knowledge, not a single one of them has been sold internationally.
Big names continue to be translated, younger voices are not
This does not apply to non-fiction books or contemporary witness reports from the Gaza War. They continue to be translated, worldwide. But in the current situation, new literary voices in the Hebrew language have almost no chance in the United States, and not only there. Stars like the Israeli writer David Grossman, a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for years, continue to be translated, but his younger colleagues do not.
In the German-speaking publishing world, things are a little different, or so the Israeli publisher Orna Landau from Tel Aviv reports. But she has now also founded her own agency in order to be able to offer the books from her publisher Bookstop internationally in a more targeted manner.
Agencies travel to the trade fair with half of the previous offer
Orna Landau will now travel from Tel Aviv to the Frankfurt Book Fair to promote her titles. Her Jerusalem colleague Deborah Harris, who looks after authors such as David Grossman, explains that her team will come to the fair with a range of titles that is only half of what it used to be.
But the boycott also works in the opposite direction. As we can hear from the agency industry, many international authors no longer want to be published in Israel, and only very few dare to do so. If you ask the two agents from Israel whether the PEN report has changed anything in the situation for their authors, Deborah Harris says no. Orna Landau thinks it is at best possible that it could have slightly increased the number of appointments she has made with her new agency in Frankfurt.
Which voices are heard and which stories are ignored? Anyone who visited the Frankfurt Book Fair last year passed a protest camp on the green strip opposite the main entrance: readings and discussions were held at the “Palestinian Liberatory Book Fair” in order to “break the suffocating silence” about the suffering of the Palestinians “through confrontation,” as the organizers explained it.
The Israeli book industry will also be represented in 2026 by the non-profit “Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature” (ITHL), whose stand has been moved to Hall 3, where this year's book fair guest country, the Czech Republic, is also presenting itself. Last year, the ITHL stand was all about authors and their books; this is where publishers who publish in Hebrew present themselves.
Is it anti-Semitic to talk about “genocide”?
In any case, one result of the PEN report on the situation of such publishers was that the president of PEN America, the writer Dinaw Mengestu, resigned from his position after the publication in July. In protest against this, Mengestu said that boycotts were not recognized as an expression of political freedom of expression, but were instead being suppressed. That seems absurd considering what the report wanted to say. But it fits with the tense climate and the dispute over the alleged suppression of freedom of expression.
This dispute is often about individual terms. Is it anti-Semitic to call the Netanyahu government’s actions against the Palestinian population “genocide”? Reputable international law experts use the term and debate its legitimacy; it is not just demonstrators in Palestinian scarves who use it.
Dispute over terms
Weeks ago, there was a brief discussion about the appointment of the literary scholar Maha El Hissy to this year's German Book Prize jury. El Hissy was also accused of having spoken of Israeli "settler colonialism" and also of the genocide in Gaza in a series of articles about Palestinian literature. The German Book Trade Association, which awards the prize, refused to recall its juror and underlined El Hissy's professional suitability.
When there are arguments about language and concepts, about differences and ambivalences, literature has something to say, but it itself always becomes a case. The Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, who lives in Berlin, is also releasing a new novel for the 2026 Book Fair: “Deception” tells the story of a woman and a man from the occupied Palestinian territories in the 1980s and 1990s, an oppressive story of self-assertion, including linguistically.
Hope for an end to the Netanyahu government
When Shibli's last book "A Minor Matter" was to be awarded the Litprom Association's "LiBeraturpreis" at the 2023 book fair, just days after October 7th, the award ceremony was canceled and Shibli was accused of "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic narratives". Instead, authors at the fair read from the novel, which retells the true story of a Bedouin woman who was raped and murdered by an Israeli border patrol in 1948. Among those who read from Shibli's novel at the time was her colleague Dana Vowinckel.
The Jewish Berlin author is currently on a reading tour with her new novel - and is experiencing firsthand how the audience receives the story of “Anton and Alma”. Anton is a Jew from Schöneberg and the son of an American father, Alma comes from the eastern district of Biesdorf and wants to convert to the Jewish faith, then the Hamas terrorist attack impacts their lives.
Her readings, says Vowinckel, are primarily about how the war changes the relationship between the two, and less about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. "I'm a little surprised that the question of my own position on the state of Israel or Zionism doesn't play a major role, although that was very central to me when I was writing," says Vowinckel, who recently explained in this newspaper that "it can no longer be denied in any sense and reason that a genocide is taking place in Gaza." But she thinks it's good that the conversations always stayed close to the text. “I think it’s also because the novel refuses to take a clear position, at least that’s my hope.”
"Despair about the world situation"
Before the publication of “Anton and Alma,” Dana Vowinckel was very worried about how her novel would be received, but now she has experienced “great goodwill” and “a will for understanding.” And she says: “I’m glad that my own desperation about the world situation might be conveyed somehow.”
The new novel by David Grossman, which will be published in German in 2027 and “Wörter, wo sind du?” is a family story and is not explicitly about the war. “I don’t know of any author in Israel who doesn’t protest against this government,” says his agent Deborah Harris. But she and her colleague Orna Landau observe a kind of paralysis, a struggle for the right words at this time - or an unconscious change in style, also in order to do justice to the market.
“Many,” says Deborah Harris, “are now also writing for television and film.” The global success of the Israeli secret service series “Fauda” (Netflix), the fifth season of which begins on October 7th, seems like the big exception in the boycott, but perhaps that just shows what a need for these stories there is among audiences worldwide.
