About the Author

Sara Aharoni was born in Israel in 1953. She worked as a teacher, educator, and school principal for twenty years. She also spent four years in Lima, Peru, as an educational envoy of the Jewish Agency. Together with her husband, Meir Aharoni, Sara wrote, edited, and published a series of books about Israel, as well as six children’s books. Sara is the author of the bestselling Saltanat’s Love, based on her mother’s life story and the winner of the Book Publishers Association of Israel’s Platinum Prize, and the Steimatzky Prize–winning novel The First Mrs. Rothschild. Her novel Persian Silence won the Book Publishers Association of Israel’s Gold Book Award.

Yardenne Greenspan has an MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators Association Fellowship, and in 2014 she was a resident writer and translator at the Ledig House Writers Omi program. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin (New Vessel Press), was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Her full-length translations also include Tel Aviv Noir, edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron (Akashic Books); Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (New Vessel Press); and The Secret Book of Kings by Yochi Brandes (St. Martin’s Press). Yardenne blogs for Ploughshares and served as Asymptote’s editor-at-large of Israeli literature. Her writing and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Asymptote, the Massachusetts Review, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.