A literary agent on selling Israeli fiction overseas:
I can tell you there is no market more challenging than America’s. I sell more books in China and Japan than in America . . .
Could be, and perhaps it’s the quality of the translations into the Chinese. My girlfriend read Roman Russi (蓝山) by Meir Shalev several times, and she’s on her third read of Hatsotsrah ba-Wadi (瓦地的小号) by Sami Michael right now.
Ironically, it could well be that both these novels were translated based on English renditions (Blue Mountain and A Trumpet in the Wadi, respectively), not the original Hebrew. Crafty publishers in China often don’t list the language of the original work; instead, they identify the author by nationality, leaving you to guess which language the Chinese edition is based on. A quick look on the web shows that the translators of Roman Russi (于海江，张颖) and Hatsotsrah-ba-wadi (李慧娟) translate almost exclusively English books, so it’s unlikely that any of the three knows Hebrew well enough to translate it.
Bruce Humes 