Project Description
Girl Soldier Paulina Tuchschneider
Poland/Israel
Paulina Tuchschneider was born in 1987 in Poland. In 1989 she emigrated to Israel on the first plane from Warsaw to Tel Aviv. She is a serial deserter: she abandoned the army, her art studies and also her film editing studies. Today she is a video editor on Hamakor (The Source), an acclaimed Israeli investigative series, and an avid fan of current affairs and documentary film. Paulina lives in Ramat Gan, with her cats and her partner. She is the author of several short stories that have been published in various magazines. GIRL SOLDIER is her first novel. The author was awarded funding from a major Israeli foundation for writing the script and producing a short film based on the book.
© Paulina Tuchschneider//
Girl Soldier
In Girl Soldier (“חיילת”), Paulina Tuchschneider lends her voice to the tragicomic (anti)heroine to give an account – with an astonishing frankness in which irony, humour, the scatological and the sordid are interwoven – of her traumatic time in the Israeli army while doing her military service, compulsory for Israeli men and women.
In the background, the dull rumble of the 2006 Lebanon conflict, in which Israel fought against Hezbollah, its declared enemy. In the foreground, an undeclared enemy, and therefore more insidious and lethal, less recognisable because it comes from its own side. A friendly fire, in short, that is transfigured by the excesses of superiors and the outrages of equals, with the consequent and incessant anxiety attacks of the protagonist, exacerbated by the tedium of the routines, the guards and the stenches of all kinds: from the perspiration in the dormitories to the fried food during the kitchen shifts. But in the midst of this oppressive and hostile environment in which humiliation and scorn, in all its possible forms, are commonplace, the worst degradation is the lack of intimacy, and ultimately the suppression of individuality. In Girl Soldier, an irreverent, anti-war book, devoid of any patriotic glorification, Tuchschneider addresses the question of the mental health of those over whom the threat of imminent war continually looms. A novel approach that has earned the author critical acclaim in Israel.
RIGHTS
NOVELS
Girl Soldier (“חיילת”)
Tel Aviv: Nine Lives Press 2022 (4th edition)
Complete English translation by Tamar Cohen available (proofread by the author, copy edited by Kit Maude)
Argentina: Gog & Magog 2023 · Spain: Periférica 2024, 104 p. (translated by Esther Cross)
