Suddenly You Find Yourself Helpless

I sat with Israeli author, Yishay Ishi Ron, at his home in Kfar Saba this past summer. To prepare, I read his novel ⁠Dog⁠, which was deft, spare, and deeply moving in Yardenne Greenspan's beautiful translation. (Yardenne joins me later this season.) Dog follows Geller, a decorated soldier who returns from Gaza, descends into heroin addiction, and ends up on the streets of Tel Aviv. Ishi wrote it before October 7. It's fiction — but Ishi calls it psychologically autobiographical, and it opens a real portal into the subjects that define his work: trauma, post-trauma, addiction, family, and what moving on can look like from the very bottom. The Hebrew edition of Dog was longlisted for the Sapir Prize. The English edition won two National Jewish Book Awards — for Book Club and Hebrew Fiction in Translation — and the National Library of Israel named it one of the most important contemporary works on post-trauma. It's now being adapted into a feature film by Eran Riklis. I highly recommend Dog and Ishi's new novel, The Girl Who Rode the White Lion, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.