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• 2n0-7
fter garnering Hadassah's
Ribalow Prize and the
Reform Judaism Prize, both
awarded for Jewish fiction, earlier in
the year, British author Tamar Yellin
has been awarded the largest-ever
Jewish literary prize, the Sami Rohr
Prize for Jewish Literature, for her
novel The Genizah at the House of
Shepher.
The award, which carries a grant of
$100,000, will be presented Monday,
May 21, at the Pierre hotel in New York
City.
The Sami Rohr Prize might be the
closest thing in the Jewish community
to the MacArthur Awards (sometimes
nicknamed the "genius" grant), in
which talented individuals are recog-
nized by the MacArthur Foundation
for their creativity and accomplish-
ment and given no-strings-attached
grants of $500,000. Individuals cannot
apply, but are instead recommended
by an anonymous team of nominators.
For Jewish writers, $100,000 is
quite a windfall. Many Jewish literary
awards have modest, if any, honoraria
attached.
The Sami Rohr Prize, established
by Sami Rohr's children and grand-
children to celebrate his 80th birthday,
is presented to an emerging writer
whose work, of exceptional literary
merit, stimulates an interest in themes
of Jewish concern.
"I'm filled with joy when I think
about it," Tamar Yellin says in an inter-
view, from her home in West Yorkshire,
England. "It gives me a feeling of self-
confidence to be recognized in this
way. It's a real boost."
When asked about how the lat-
est award might change her life, she
replies, "I'm carrying on with my writ-
ing. I'm working on a new novel."
She explains that thanks to her
supportive husband, she was able to
give up teaching several years ago and
devote her full-time energies to writ-
ing. She continues to visit schools in
northern England as a "Jewish Faith
Visitor," teaching about Judaism in
schools where there's a large Pakistani
Muslim community and many of the
children have never before encoun-
tered a Jewish person.
"It's very important to connect
with them, for them to meet someone
Jewish and to learn about our tradi-
tions, to break down the barrier of
ignorance," she says.
Yellin describes her home as "Bronte
country, Wuthering Heights country"
Every morning, she goes walking out
on the moors, where she does a lot of
her creative thinking.
The daughter of a third-generation
Jerusalemite father and a Polish immi-
grant mother, she studied Hebrew and
Arabic at Oxford. In her novel and
stories, she writes of identity, com-
munity, belonging and exile, which, as
she explains, are themes that grow out
of her experience of being Jewish in
England.
The Genizah at the House of Shepher,
based in part on her own family's
Jerusalem experience, is a story of
love, mystery, wandering and the
pull of sacred texts. Yellin's writing is
richly layered with humor, folklore and
midrash.
In an interview via e-mail, Rohr
explains that he sees the prize as "a
subsidy for future writing. Very often
great talent is lost because of the press
of the day-to-day need to earn a basic
living. The prize should alleviate this
pressure, giving the winning writer the
necessary 'oxygen' and peace of mind
to progress in his writing:'
Rohr, who was a real estate devel-
oper in Bogota, Columbia, for more
than 30 years and now lives in Miami,
has had a lifelong love of Jewish writ-
ing. His favorite Jewish books are the
works of Lion Feuchtwanger and, in
Yiddish, the work of Israel Joshua