At around 8 p.m. on June 15, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally deigned to release a message of congratulations in honor of author David Grossman for winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize a day earlier. Grossman is the first Israeli to win what is often considered the most prestigious literary award in the world after the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He received the prize for his novel "A Horse Walks into a Bar," the story of a 57-year-old standup comic from Jerusalem, the only child of Holocaust survivors and something of a loser. First published in 2014 and since translated into 22 languages, the book describes a local Israeli reality that is not political.