1959 -
Israeli author.
Suissa was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and emigrated to Israel in 1963. He grew up in Jerusalem, where he studied in an Orthodox school. Later he moved to Paris and studied mime, taught theater, and performed with a mime troupe. He now lives in Paris and Jerusalem.
Akud (The bound, 1990), Suissa's only book, consists of novellas that cumulatively form a variation of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child of an immigrant North African family uprooted and replanted on the outskirts of Jerusalem - for that matter, on the margins of Israeli society. Rich with ornamental details, fantasy, and ethnic authenticity, the novel relates the development of a child whose disintegrating family has had its very foundations undermined by its transplantation. Pitted against the slogans of Eastern European Zionism and mainstream Israeli culture, the impotence and irrelevance of the family is portrayed boldly. Both the original home and the new home seem to be driven by violence and oppression, which breed a devastating alienation. Suissa's language and the structure of the novel are arabesque in pattern and logic, baroque in style, and modern in psychological sensitivities.
Bibliography
Gover, Yerach. Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in IsraeliHebrew Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Shaked, Gershon, ed. Hebrew Writers: A General Directory. Israel: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1993.
— DONNA ROBINSON DIVINE
