Omer Friedlander
Israeli Fiction Author
“Notable for its imaginative generosity toward all its characters, both Israeli and Palestinian, and for itscalmly observant insights into the displaced lives of several generations. It is rare to find a novel practicing empathy toward almost everyone it observes, but this one does, brilliantly." — Charles Baxter
“A beautiful debut by a deeply humane writer. Every story is a vivid world unto itself, intensely felt, and often revelatory.” — Nicole Krauss
"Omer Friedlander’s magnetic story-telling confirms a truth: that the great disasters and survivals of history persist forever, enduring in the desirous agonies of particular lives in specific places. Inherited, it all keeps happening forever, in endless variations." — Robert Pinsky
A Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University, Omer Friedlander is an award-winning writer. He is the author of the short story collection The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land (Random House, 2022). Friedlander has earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. He has also earned fellowships from Bread Loaf, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. His new novel The House in Talbiya (2027) is a lyrical multigenerational novel about two families—one Israeli and one Palestinian—and the house that connects them.
Friedlander's short stories have won numerous awards, including the Baltimore Review Winter Contest, Sonora Review Contest, Tom Howard / John H. Reid Contest, Moment Magazine’s Karma Foundation Fiction Prize. He has been a finalist for the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, the Writers’ Trust of Canada Royal Bank of Canada Bronwen Wallace Award, Lit Mag’s Virginia Woolf Award, the Lamar York Prize, Salamander Fiction Contest, and the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize, among others. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Chicago Tribune, One Story, and Granta. His stories have been published in many countries, including the United States, Canada, France, and Israel. The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land has also been published in the United Kingdom, and is forthcoming in other languages, including Italian, Dutch, and Turkish.
Omer Friedlander is the grandson of Saul Friedlander, the Pulitzer-prize winning Holocaust historian. He currently lives in New York City.
Lecture Topics
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The House in Talbiya
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The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land
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Strangely Familiar: Writing About Israel in English
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Out of Place: Storytelling and Setting
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Publishing: Getting a two-book deal with Random House at 26
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Masterclass: Seriously Playful Fiction
About THE HOUSE IN TALBIYA
In Talbiya, the most elegant neighborhood in Jerusalem, stands a majestic villa of white limestone, surrounded by flowers and fruit trees. The house is at the heart of the story of two families: the Palestinian Khourys and the Israeli Glasers. The Khourys, who built the house, are expelled from it during the Nakba, and memories of the lost home haunt the family for generations. For the Glasers, who move into the same house years later, the home becomes a fortress against memory, a way of forgetting the family’s traumatic past in the Holocaust, passed down from generation to generation like an inheritance.
Spanning a turbulent century and ranging from Prague to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Berlin, and New York, this sweeping novel follows four generations of each family –– an unforgettable cast of characters which includes a failed Hebrew poet, a Palestinian actor, an eccentric engineer who builds Israel’s first computer, a butterfly scientist, and a human rights lawyer in the West Bank — offering an intimate portrait of one hundred years of the history of Israel and Palestine.
The House in Talbiya is a vivid family saga of diaspora, exile, loss, and the longing for a home that shines with a generosity of spirit toward all its characters, Palestinian and Israeli. It is about the lives we are forced to live — and the ones we miss altogether.