Merav Fima

Jerusalem has been in the Australian media lately because our Foreign Minister didn't know (or pretended not to know for political reasons?) that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and has been since 1980. Like the existence of Israel itself, this is contested territory and there's a long and complex history with waters muddied by propaganda claims — so let's not go there.

What's interesting to me is, what might it be like to live a creative life in Jerusalem amid a mix of ethnicities, show more languages and cultures?

Merav Fima is a writer, translator, and literary critic currently based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of the forthcoming Sephardic migration novel The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree (Running Wild Press, 2026). Late Blossoms (2025) is her collection of short stories.

The Author's Note begins by citing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, where she writes that

...it would be interesting to imagine a meeting between the four great English novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. She states that the only thing they have in common is that not one of them bore a child.

This was the catalyst for Merav Fima to imagine just such a conversation between the great female writers, poets and artists — all of them migrants — of Israel's founding generation.

The collection begins with 'Bride Immaculate' a story set in the fledgling State of Israel and the effect of its founding on people of different faiths. The central character is a 27-year-old nun sent from France to care for the ailing convent community, but she falls in love with a young Arab and is exiled from the convent when her superiors find out. Her departure coincides with his abandonment of her, but this is 1948 and he leaves not for the cynical reasons that the abbess had scornfully predicted.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/11/06/late-blossoms-2025-by-merav-fima/ show less