Who would've guessed an article about a road that American scientists built by the South Pole could launch the career of a promising British-Israeli author of short stories? The article, "The highway at the end of the world," appeared in 2004 in the New Scientist, describing a 1,600 km long pathway scientists use to transport supplies to their camp whenever hostile weather conditions preclude the use of planes and helicopters.
Stories like this were tailor made for Tania Hershman, a 38-year-old writer who was born in London and now lives in Jerusalem. "Somehow I imagined: a road through the snow, well, there must be a roadside cafe. And this is where the story started," she said about the title tale of her debut collection, "The White Road and other stories," which was published last month. "The story is about a woman who fled the U.S. because of personal tragedy and sets up a roadside cafe in the middle of nowhere," Hershman said. "That's just one example of how I try to be inspired by facts but then take them somewhere else and see what happens with it."
Before this creation would lend its name to Hershman's collection of 27 short stories, she got her first break when BBC Radio 4 broadcast it on its Afternoon Reading program. Things have taken off since that moment, she says. The prestigious radio program recently broadcast another of her tales, and she has won several literary prizes, including three in one day.
Hershman first wanted to write a book of fiction when she was seven years old, but she long thought it would remain a childhood fantasy. Still, she kept close to writing, immigrating here right after earning a degree in journalism. "Everyone was quite surprised when I made aliyah, both family and friends - I was quite surprised as well," Hershman said in an interview this week. "I had never been here for more than three weeks at a time, but I felt very at home here, straight away. I really can't explain it."
For twelve years, Hershman made a living as a science journalist writing for British and American journals and Web sites. Many of her articles featured innovations in the then-booming Israeli hi-tech world. "For a while," she recalled, "I was the only person writing about Israeli startups in English for magazines around the world. I loved it, it was fantastic."
But after a few years, Hershman's childhood dream resurfaced. She started going to writing courses in Britain and America and produced her first short stories. "What I really wanted to do was somehow combine my love for science with my love for fiction," she said. Once, she saw an ad for a course that would change her life. "It was a course on how to put science into fiction and poetry, and here I thought I was the only person in the world who wanted to do this. Ironically, she added, "I don't read science fiction, that's not really what I'm doing." Rather, she stressed, "I like to call it science-inspired fiction."
Although all her writing teachers advised her against writing short stories - because they are difficult to sell - she stood her ground. If you don't want to write a novel, they said, you must at least have some kind of theme. So Hershman decided to make science her theme. Half the stories in "The White Road" are written with specific articles from the New Scientist in mind, such as "Sunspot," and "Express."
Her science-fiction - which has nothing to do with conventional sci-fi - makes for the wordier short stories in Hershman's collection. The other stories are so-called flash fiction, or prose poems: very brief short stories, many of which contain about or even fewer than 100 words. "If you can't say it in a page and a half, you're taking too long," Hershman said of the idea behind this form of literature. "So this is my philosophy: try to get it as short as possible." Indeed, Hershman said that with time her stories are getting shorter and shorter - a novel is not in sight, though she is currently working on writing a movie script.
What is curious about her debut, though, Hershman admitted, is that none of the stories are set in Israel and only two have a Jewish angle - one being about a rabbi who meets an angel in a car park. Yet she says her writing was inspired by living in Israel. "Especially my job as a science writer inspired me a lot," she said. "People unfamiliar with the world of science maybe don't know that it requires an immense amount of creativity and imagination for an inventor to come up with a new technology. I think I was inspired a lot by the creativity and imagination of Israeli entrepreneurs."
Hershman is "not a big fan of England," she said, but still considers herself an English writer. But is she also an Israeli writer, or a Jewish writer? "I am thinking a lot about this question. What is a Jewish writer? I am Jewish and I write, so maybe - I don't know, it's not up to me to say whether I am a Jewish writer or not," she mused with the unscientific imprecision of a true writer.
