The event is organized by Czech Centre Tel Aviv in cooperation with Czech Embassy.

Magdaléna Platzová is the author of six books, including two novels published in English by Bellevue Literary Press: Aaron’s Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist translated by Craig Cravens, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist translated by Alex Zucker. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. A citizen of the Czech Republic, she has taught at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and now lives in Lyon, France.

Based on the real-life story of Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Aaron’s Leap is framed by the lens of a twenty first-century Israeli film crew delving into the extraordinary life of a woman who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz. Aided by the granddaughter of one of the artist’s pupils, the filmmakers begin to uncover buried secrets from a time when personal and artistic decisions became matters of life-and-death. Spanning a century of Central European history, the novel evokes the founding impulses, theories, and personalities of the European Modernist movement (with characters modeled after Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel) and shows what it takes to grapple with a troubled history, “leap” into the unknown, and dare to be oneself.

When a Czech historian becomes convinced he’s the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past—from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law. Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships—one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation.

First held in 1963, the Jerusalem International Book Fair is a unique biennial event, renown not only as a business Fair but also as an upbeat Literary Festival. Many heads of renowned publishing houses, agents, sales personnel, foreign rights representatives, editors and authors take part. The Fair’s prestigious Editorial and Agent Fellowship Programs invites a group of young promising and talented editors and agents to attend the Fair providing them with an opportunity to meet their international contemporaries, exchange ideas and learn from each other about challenges. The Fair aims to promote Israeli literature in international publishing and also to expose contemporary international literature to the Israeli public.