A Writer Walks Into a Bar, and Israel Celebrates

It doesn’t happen often, but Israel’s headlines allowed themselves a moment of national pride when David Grossman, one of the country’s leading novelists, won the Man Booker International Prize for his novel “A Horse Walks Into a Bar.” As Haaretz celebrated, Grossman, long-known for his left-leaning politics, was “the first Israeli to win the prize, one of the most important annual literary awards,” for fiction translated in to English.

Even newspapers on the far right celebrated the extraordinary accomplishment. Israel Hayom, the controversial Sheldon Adelson-backed paper widely seen as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, boasted that Grossman’s “works have been translated into 36 languages” and listed his many international awards.