← Back to author list

Ruby Namdar

Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian Jewish heritage. His first book won the Israeli Ministry of Culture’s Award for Best First Publication. The Ruined House won the 2014 Sapir Prize—Israel’s most important literary award—and subsequently appeared in English with Harper. He teaches Jewish literature, focusing on biblical and talmudic narrative, at Bard College and elsewhere.

Ruby Sees Red

Ruby Sees Red

Shai Secunda, Ruby Namdar

"I’m still trying to wake up from this nightmare. I walk in the streets. I see parents with babies. I can’t look. I walk in Riverside Park, I see an older man hugging his granddaughter, and I almost start crying. We have been forced back into Jewish history, into the bloody raw part of Jewish history."

The Ruined House (An Excerpt)

Ruby Namdar

In 2014 Ruby Namdar won the prestigious Sapir Prize for his novel Ha-bayit asher necherav, the first time in the award’s history that it went to a writer not living in Israel. On November 7, 2017, Harper released it under the title The Ruined House: A Novel, in an English translation by Hillel Halkin. The Jewish Review of Books is pleased to present this excerpt from the novel’s opening.