I'm just about to cross the street to Café Rimon when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart skips, trips and falls over itself. - Ayelet Tsabari

(Describe your female characters, their sexual aggressiveness.) AT: I like to think my women are badasses. The first person to point that out to me was one of my teachers at Guelph who said he appreciated that my female characters were sexually aggressive, that they wanted sex and went for it. It wasn’t something that I did consciously. I just wrote the kind of female characters I like to read. A part of it stems from my interest in gender dynamics in Israel, in particular the mandatory nature of the army service and how it shapes young men and women. I feel that being forced at such a young age to go into the army—still a male dominated environment—contributes to young Israeli women possessing what’s considered stereotypically male characteristics. It probably also has something to do with growing up and living in a warzone, a place where survival is an issue and the need to defend oneself is so instilled in our minds that people—regardless of gender—feel they need to develop a certain toughness, be on the offensive, even in everyday life.

I often tell students that I understand the need to write something right after it happens, but if you’re trying to craft it into an actual piece of art, a memoir or a creative nonfiction, I always say it’s best to wait...You need some distance to really make sense of it, I think, in writing.

Mizrahi literature has been overlooked in Israel—it’s getting better now, but when I was growing up I never read characters or authors that represented me. It made me feel invisible. There are more Mizrahi authors published nowadays, but Mizrahi literature is still underrepresented in the education system and in the Israeli canon. Unfortunately, Mizrahi authors have been translated a lot less than Ashkenazi authors.