First-time novelist Michael Tregebov, left, has gained international recognition. Tregebov’s novel, The Briss, published by New Star Books, was recently short-listed for best first book in this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Although he didn’t win – the winner was Shandi Mitchell, the author of Under This Unbroken Sky – he’s quite pleased.
“Actually, I was surprised my book was even published,” said the Winnipeg-born writer. “After so many rejections, one more surprise was nothing I couldn’t handle.”
Described by the Globe and Mail as “aggressively funny and stealthily horrific,” The Briss is about a Canadian Jewish medical school dropout who visits Israel, falls in love with a Palestinian woman and impregnates her. The affair arouses the ire of his father, a Zionist and veteran of the 1948 War of Independence in Israel.
“At the narrative level, what interested me was the way political conflicts in families are sometimes the sublimation of other conflicts,” said Tregebov in an interview from his home in Barcelona.
Tregebov, 55, said that Israel has played a major role in his identity.
“For my grandmother’s generation, Jewish identity was defined in relation to the major political events of the day: socialism, anarchism, Yiddish culture versus Hebrew, assimilation and so on. Zionism was still very isolated from the mainstream.
“For my parents’ generation, in Canada, Jewish identity was defined in relation to the issue of assimilation.”
But after the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish identity became inextricably linked to Israel’s fortunes, he added.
“What is happening now is that changes inside Israel are causing new turbulence in that identity. A small example: I have two Israeli friends, hardened Zionists born and raised in Israel, who refuse to visit Jerusalem because they can’t stomach the religious Jews. When they told me this, I almost fell off my chair.
“And American policy is shifting, which is very important for the region and for how Jews will define themselves in relation to Israel.”
Long before The Briss struck pay dirt, he wrote for himself, for the drawer, producing an assortment of unpublished manuscripts, one of which was similar to The Briss in terms of tone, time and place.
Tregebov began writing at the age of 14. “First, little plays for the theatre school in Winnipeg, then poems, then novels.”
He earned a BA degree at the University of Manitoba, majoring in English literature and minoring in economics. In 1978, he completed an MFA degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
Shortly afterward, he read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was so overwhelmed that he decided to learn Spanish and read it in the original language.
Tregebov has lived in Spain since 1983 and has made a living as a translator. “I mostly translate texts about chartered accountancy and tax and corporate law,” said Tregebov, the translation director of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Barcelona.
He also works on literary translations, having translated the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer into Spanish.
Recently, he finished translating William Carlos Williams’ classic, Kora in Hell, into Spanish.
Tregebov is currently writing a novel whose working title is The Poorest Jew in America. “It’s somewhat self-explanatory, I’m afraid,” he said ruefully.
