The Israeli writer Meir Shalev, who has died from pancreatic cancer aged 74, was noted for describing the troubled history of Israel’s half century before independence.

He wrote in a style that blended warmth, satire, and vitality.

His subjects were Israel’s pioneers who had escaped the pogroms of eastern Europe, chalutzic-spirited Zionists, socialists and communists who came to a Palestine controlled by the Ottoman Empire and then the British.

He perfectly captured the back-breaking farming work they had to undergo while fighting off Arabs and mosquitos in his first novel, The Blue Mountain, published in 1988, about pioneers in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley, where he himself lived.

Shalev, the author of seven adult novels, eight works of non-fiction and 14 children’s books, has been compared to Mark Twain for his humour and to magic realist writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his poetic imagination. In some of his novels he describes the young idealists who made the promised land in their own image, while combining an intellectual vigour with the tough political and physical reality of their time.

In the opening pages of The Blue Mountain, for instance, we meet the elderly schoolteacher Ya’akov Pinness, beating back “yet another threat. Fruit aphids. State lotteries, cattle ticks, anopheles mosquitos, bands of locusts and jazz musicians swirled around him like dark waves before breaking in a slimy froth against the breastwork of his heart”.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, professor emerita of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described The Blue Mountain as “a comment on the noble but failed utopian experiment of the pioneers”.

Suggesting he had — “almost invented Israeli satire” — she continued: “His writing wasn’t just comic. He had a soul. The tears would come through the laughter.”

Shalev’s writing was illuminated by recurring biblical and mythic themes and his linguistic skills have been highly praised. He would feature women as a source of power behind the men.

His 2006 novel A Pigeon and a Boy, which interweaves the story of a homing pigeons handler killed in the 1948 war with that of an Israeli tour guide in a troubled marriage, won the Brenner Prize, Israel’s highest literary honour, as well as the Bernstein Prize and the National Book Award.

He has been awarded France’s Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, along with Michal Govrin, in 2018. His 1991 book, Esau, a modern take on the story of Jacob and Esau, was turned into a film in 2019, starring Shira Haas, Harvey Keitel and Lior Ashkenazi, and his books have been translated into 30 languages.

While leading contemporaries such as Amos Oz and David Grossman have tended to focus more on the political issues facing Israel and the Palestinians today, Shalev saw his novels in a different light.

“I don’t like to use my art to promote my political views, and I don’t use my political ideas to promote my literature,” he told Moment Magazine in a 2017 interview.

However, far from avoiding contemporary politics, he aired his views in his 30 year-running weekend column in the national newspaper Yedioth Ahronot.

There he readily vocalised his support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, advocating a freeze of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state. Rather than take sides he felt the stalemate was “everybody’s responsibility”.

Shalev lived in the Jezreel Valley but tended to avoid his other home in Jerusalem, preferring to steer clear of the religious piety he found there. He may not have been observant himself, but his love of biblical stories was reflected in two non-fiction books on the subject.

In Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts (2011) he decided that the bible’s first love was not between Adam and Eve or Abraham and Sarah, but Abraham and Isaac.

He was aroused by this powerful and controversial story of filial love and sacrifice because, as he explained: “I don’t think the story is intended to combat the practice of human sacrifice, but rather to demonstrate how the obedience of the Bible’s most obedient believer may lead into the darkest of alleys.”

Many readers loved the lighter touch of his 2011 comic memoir My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir. It describes the author’s maternal grandmother, a socialist pioneer who locks away her gift of a vacuum cleaner for fear it will get dirty from her dusty village.

It is likely that Shalev inherited his grandmother’s narrative gifts as she was a noted storyteller herself and he would have relished her tales of the old days on the moshav.

She had inspired him to write The Blue Mountain.

Meir Shalev was born into a literary family in 1948, the year of Israel’s independence, in Nahalal, the country’s first moshav. His father, Yitzhak, was a published poet, and his mother Batya Ben-Barak Shalev, taught high-school literature.

His uncle Mordechai Shalev was a literary critic and his cousin Zeruya Shalev is also an acclaimed writer. His parents always ensured he read good literature, such as Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem and Charles Dickens. It was a home without censorship.

He was encouraged to read Lolita when he reached 14, the age of the protagonist of Nabokov’s novel, for its literary prose style.

Shalev studied art and psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where the family had relocated, before moving on to the Sea of Galilee community of Ginosar.

Drafted in 1966, before he started college, he joined the Golani Brigade but was wounded by friendly fire while driving an ambulance during the skirmishes that followed 1967’s Six Day War.

Shalev then spent several years producing radio and TV programmes and hosting his own talk show. When he turned 40 he quit his TV job and wrote three children’s books before embarking on his first adult novel, The Blue Mountain.

The inspiration to write came from his early years as an avid reader — “when each book offered a kind of magic and escape from reality”, as he recalled.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog led eulogies on his death from Israel’s ministers and politicians.

He said: “With the passing of Meir Shalev, the State of Israel and the Land of Israel are left without one of their greatest lovers. He was a man with a spirit, whose homeland and our history as a society, as a people and as a nation, pulsated in each of his words”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that he was saddened to hear of Shalev’s death, adding: “Despite our differences of opinion, I appreciated his literary talents and his efforts to make the stories of the Bible accessible to Israel’s children.

Shalev is survived by his wife Rina, their son Michael, daughter Zohar, brother, Zur, a historian at Haifa University, and two grandchildren. His sister Rafaela died in 2020.

Meir Shalev: born July 29, 1948.
Died April 11, 2023