The six linked short stories at the core of Merav Fima’s lovely collection Late Blossoms are set in the Jerusalem literary salon of painter Anna Ticho between 1925 and 1967. Each story imagines a visit from one historic female artist or poet who “shaped the emerging State of Israel’s literary, artistic, cultural, and intellectual scenes.”
Each of these women – Rachel Bluwstein-Sela, Zelda Schneurson-Mishkovsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Leah Goldberg, Nelly Sachs, and Ticho herself – was born in Europe. All suffered childlessness, child loss, and/or unrequited love, and all except Sachs (a Holocaust refugee who lived in Sweden) struggled to acclimate to life in the nascent Hebrew-speaking nation.
The first story describes how Ticho, a gracious woman who worked alongside her beloved husband in his ophthalmology clinic, found her way back to painting, which she’d studied in Vienna prior to her immigration.
Despairing of finding something picturesque to paint amid the “muddy streets and slums” of the desolate Jerusalem of her day, she discovers an old coin embossed with the image of an olive tree. This inspires her to train her sights on the urban flora outside her window.
“I should celebrate the richness of the landscape and its variegated colors, starting right here in my own garden,” Ticho decides, progressing from olive trees to wildflowers to “sparkling drops of water and burgeoning green leaves.”
Ticho's nature paintings
Her acclaimed nature paintings are on display to this day at the Ticho House branch of the Israel Museum.
Fima’s literary style captures pathos beautifully and tenderly, a perfect complement to Ticho’s gently pleasing visual style.
In a passage depicting a young Zelda listening to Rachel the Poetess reading her works at the salon in Russian-accented Hebrew, Fima writes that Zelda “was transported by the woman’s voice to higher realms – a mystical experience akin to or even more powerful than reading the words of the prophets, and sharing in their vision of the divine.… Her words seemed to be composed not of letters and sounds but of colors and shapes. Zelda closed her eyes and, with every word emitted from the woman’s mouth, a different color imprinted itself in her mind’s eye.”
Fima’s fondness for Jerusalem is obvious to the reader.
Born in Israel and raised in Montreal, the author did a junior year abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then returned to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at Bar-Ilan University. She subsequently lived in Jerusalem for six years and worked as an editor at the Israel Museum. After marrying and giving birth to the first two of her four children in the Negev town of Omer, she and her family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where she completed a PhD in creative writing and continues to live today.
In her introduction to Late Blossoms, Fima notes that she researched the lives and works of the historical figures in the book but took “poetic license in constructing the encounters between them, in order to explore their most profound emotions and experiences as women and as migrant artists.”
Those fictional encounters work well – perhaps too well, as the reader may forget they are fiction.
After reading the shower of insults that Fima has S.Y. Agnon delivering to fellow 1966 Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs, I wrote to Fima asking if there’s reason to believe that the real-life Agnon felt antagonistic toward Sachs. She replied that she found such evidence in the memoirs of artist Nahum Gutman. But it doesn’t sit well with me, especially considering a famous photo of the two smiling at each other at the Nobel ceremony as Sachs adjusts Agnon’s bow tie.
Poetic license
Of course, Fima is entitled to poetic license and should be commended for giving the reader a fanciful yet plausible and eminently readable view into the minds and hearts of her subjects. I found only a few minor flaws in this fine work, such as a twisted metaphor about a “sacrificial lamb sent out of Jerusalem to the Valley of Hinnom,” presumably meant to describe the scapegoat sent to the wilderness outside the city.
Although this collection could have stood firmly on the legs of the six linked stories alone, Fima chose to bookend them with one unrelated story before and three after.
Of these four stories, I most enjoyed “Rose among the Thorns,” which masterfully weaves the biblical Song of Songs through a contemporary first-person tale about a warm Sephardi family in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.
Here we do find a point of commonality with a core story: In an afterword about the representations of Jerusalem in the works of Lasker-Schüler, Fima writes that this pre-state Expressionist poet and painter was inspired by the Song of Songs and interpreted it “as a prophecy of the restoration of Jerusalem.”
On Sunday, January 25, Fima will be one of three featured authors at Literary Modi’in’s first event of 2026, a Zoom book talk that includes Lihi Lapid and Mikhail Iossel. Fima’s second book, a mystical Sephardi migration novel titled The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree, is due to be published next year.■
Late Blossoms
By Merav Fima
Vine Leaves Press
195 pages; $18