The Prize

Mati Shemoelof
Pardes Publishing, 2021
237 pages
Language: Hebrew
Genre: Novel, satire

In 2016, the German government announces a new literary prize for writers in Hebrew from around the world: the Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature, accompanied by the extraordinary sum of €750,000. The prize is intended to revive Berlin as a center of Hebrew literary culture, recalling the vibrant Hebrew publishing scene that existed in the city before the Second World War.

The first winner is Hezi Murad, a writer from Dimona of Iraqi-Jewish background who has moved to Berlin after falling in love with a German woman, Helena. Living on the edge of financial security and supporting himself through temporary jobs, including washing dishes in a restaurant, Hezi has written a novel about his family's history in Baghdad, Staying in Baghdad. Its central figure is his grandfather, who chose to remain in Iraq rather than migrate to Israel.

The announcement of Hezi's victory immediately produces a political and cultural storm in Israel. Writers, academics, journalists and cultural figures attack the prize and question the legitimacy of awarding a major prize for Hebrew literature outside Israel — particularly when the prize comes from Germany. Hezi is accused of betrayal and anti-Zionism, his Israeli publisher distances itself from him, and social media fills with insults and threats.

What begins as a dream of literary recognition quickly becomes a nightmare.

The Prize is a wild and deliberately excessive satire of the literary industry: writing, publishing, editing, translation, literary prizes, grants, public relations, media appearances and the competition for cultural recognition. At the same time, it is an intimate novel about migration, love, class, family, sexuality, failure and the difficult question of where a person belongs.

At the heart of the novel is a conflict over who owns Hebrew.

Hezi writes in Hebrew while living in Berlin. His existence challenges the assumption that Hebrew literature must belong exclusively to the State of Israel or be produced within its borders. Through the fictional Berlin prize, Shemoelof imagines another possibility: Hebrew as a diasporic language, capable of creating literary centers outside Israel and of carrying Jewish and Mizrahi histories into new geographical and cultural spaces.

This question becomes even more complicated because Hezi is a Mizrahi, or Arab-Jewish, writer. His book about Baghdad challenges a conventional Zionist narrative of Iraqi-Jewish history. His story therefore crosses several borders at once: Israel and Germany, Hebrew and German, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identities, homeland and diaspora, migration and belonging.

Berlin itself becomes one of the novel's central characters. The city is not presented simply as a place of freedom or escape. It is a contradictory space in which migrants can reinvent themselves while also confronting language, history, class and exclusion. Hezi lives among different versions of Berlin: the city of contemporary migration, the city of Jewish history, the city of German memory, and the city of nightlife, drugs, precarious work and cultural ambition.

Language is crucial to this experience. The novel repeatedly moves between Hebrew and German, including the broken German spoken by migrants and refugees from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The imperfect language of the migrant becomes not merely a sign of deficiency but a new cultural form. Hebrew itself is displaced, translated and transformed by its encounter with German.

This linguistic tension is also reflected in Shemoelof's poetry, particularly in his writing about Hebrew and German and in the later poetic work that explores the collision between the two languages. In The Prize, language becomes a territory without a stable owner.

The novel also tells a parallel story through Helena, Hezi's German partner. Helena grew up in a bourgeois family in Stuttgart and was once a gifted pianist with the potential for a successful musical career. Instead, she repeatedly abandons the privileged paths available to her and works with refugees and migrants. She becomes the person who helps Hezi apply for literary prizes and grants, even filling out applications and constructing recommendations on his behalf.

Her relationship with Hezi mirrors many of the novel's larger tensions. He comes from a working-class immigrant family and tries to move upward through literature; she comes from privilege and repeatedly turns away from it. Their relationship brings together different histories of migration, class and belonging, but it also exposes the difficulties of turning political ideals into intimate life.

The prize promises Hezi freedom. Instead, it destabilizes everything.

His sudden social mobility becomes almost impossible for him to absorb. The money, publicity and recognition that were supposed to liberate him instead intensify his insecurities, addictions and destructive impulses. Helena, meanwhile, confronts her own sense of failure and the opportunities she has deliberately abandoned. The couple's desire to create a family becomes another attempt to find stability in a world in which neither of them knows quite where to go.

The novel therefore operates on several levels at once. It is a satire of the literary establishment and its obsession with prizes, publicity and cultural capital. It is a novel of migration and diaspora. It is a critique of the idea that Hebrew literature has only one legitimate geographical home. It is also a story about two people trying, and repeatedly failing, to build a life together.

Critics have particularly noted the novel's treatment of language and migration. Literary scholar Lina Baruch described the broken German of the migrants and refugees in the novel as one of its central literary achievements, asking who can claim to be the "owner" of German in contemporary Berlin. Other reviewers have emphasized the novel's combination of Mizrahi identity, Berlin, diaspora and Hebrew literature, while noting the way Shemoelof transfers the tensions between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identities into the European diaspora.

Yaron Avitov described the book as a "migration novel within a migration novel", pointing to the parallel between Hezi's life in Berlin and the story he writes about his grandfather who chose to remain in Baghdad. Other critics have highlighted the novel's dark humor, its depiction of Berlin from the perspective of an immigrant, and its mixture of literary ambition, drugs, sexuality, precarious work and self-destruction.

Dr. Yemima Hadad emphasized the novel's contemporary atmosphere: a world without a stable moral compass in which its characters repeatedly ask themselves where to go, whether to remain together, and whether love can still provide a meaningful form of orientation.

At the center of The Prize is therefore a deliberately absurd question that becomes increasingly serious: what happens when a language, a literature and a person refuse to stay inside the borders assigned to them?

The fictional prize is not simply a literary prize. It is a provocation. It asks whether Hebrew can exist beyond Israel, whether Jewish cultural life can have more than one center, whether a Mizrahi writer can occupy a central place in a Hebrew literary culture that has historically been shaped by other identities, and whether Berlin can become a site not only of German memory but also of new Jewish, Arab-Jewish and diasporic cultural production.

Written with satire, absurdity and emotional intensity, The Prize is one of Mati Shemoelof's most direct explorations of the questions that run through his work: migration, Mizrahi identity, Jewish-Arab identity, Hebrew outside Israel, Berlin, memory, belonging and the possibility of creating a cultural home somewhere between Baghdad, Haifa and Berlin.

Recognition and Media

The Prize was also selected as a finalist for the Shulamit Aloni Prize, a literary award established in memory of the Israeli human-rights activist and former minister Shulamit Aloni. The prize recognizes literary works connected to Hebrew or Arabic culture that engage with human rights, social justice and shared life. In 2022, The Prize was among the six finalist works in the literary category.

The novel also received significant attention in Israeli literary media. It was discussed on “Ma SheKaruch” (What Is Bound), the literary radio program hosted by Maya Sela and Yuval Avivi on Kan Tarbut, where the novel became part of a broader conversation about contemporary Hebrew literature, literary institutions and the place of writers living outside Israel.

Listen to the “Ma SheKaruch” item with Maya Sela and Yuval Avivi

The connection between the novel, the Shulamit Aloni Prize and the media discussion around it is significant. The Prize imagines a Hebrew literary culture that refuses to remain confined to one national territory. Its inclusion among the finalists of a prize associated with human rights, social justice and shared life adds another dimension to the novel's central questions about language, migration, identity and cultural borders.

Book details

Title: The Prize / הפרס
Author: Mati Shemoelof
Publisher: Pardes Publishing House
Year: 2021
Language: Hebrew
Genre: Novel