“How the world turned white and the streets filled with people and there were sidewalks and paved roads instead of dirt and sand. And we saw cars and hardly any animals. And pale women strolled in short pants and people ate standing up and plastic bags were thrown away or blew in the wind instead of sand and the air was full of the smell of gasoline instead of the buzz of flies…”
When Dalia Betolin-Sherman was very young her family arrived in Israel from Ethiopia, and an amazing transition took place in her life. Her book, How The World Turned White, is based on her personal recollections.
This collection of short stories won the prestigious 2014 Ramat Gan prize for debut literature. Not only is Dalia Betolin-Sherman the first Ethiopian woman to publish a Hebrew literary work; her work is being hailed as a rare gem of modern fiction.
Her family came to Israel in 1984 when Dalia was five and her observations about the passage between the two worlds, between her life in Ethiopia and the new reality in Israel, are presented from the point of view of a growing Ethiopian girl in Israel. It opens a window into the life of this otherwise insulated immigrant community.
As time passed, little Dalia became a genuine Israeli and student, learning not just Hebrew, but the culture of her new world and its societal norms. The precocious teen qualified for university entrance, enrolled in Ben Gurion University’s school of social work and graduated with a B.A. in the subject. She continued her studies at Bar-Ilan University’s Studies of Literary Skills, earning an M.A. with honors in Hebrew literature.
Writing seems to be a talent Dalia Betolin-Sherman was born with. She says she writes intuitively, freely, and only afterwards understands the meaning of what she has written. Her admission is reminiscent of a well-known American author’s remark: “How should I know what I am thinking until I see what I have written?”
Dalia has done something never before accomplished in Israeli literature: She has succeeded in affording the reader a glimpse into the private world of an Ethiopian family in Israel and into the maturation process of Ethiopian girls from the perspective of class, race, culture and gender.
One of her short stories includes an incident revealing Ethiopian girls’ reactions to a remark about their color: “A voice cut us off and we hear ‘kushit’ [“black,” in Biblical Hebrew] from afar. On the other side of the street stood a girl and my sister yelled at her: ‘I am not a kushit − I am brown,’ but the girl hurried away and we ran after her and pushed her to the side, against the wall, and I firmly told her to whisper the right color…”
Now a mature married woman and a mother, Dalia Sherman-Betolin has fully arrived in the white world. She can confidently walk on the paved sidewalks of Tel Aviv as a shining representative of her community, a highly acclaimed Israeli Hebrew author and intellectual.
Most of all, Dalia Betolin-Sherman serves as a role model for other Ethiopian women and girls in their strive to achieve success in their ancestral home in Israel.