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First, Ram Oren revolutionized they way Israelis read books. Then he revolutionized they way they are published. Two boxes at end of text.
If a witness to one of the many murders that populate Ram Oren's thrillers were to glimpse him at the site of the crime, I doubt they would be able to give more than a cursory description: "Short, compact build. Middle-aged, fair-skinned. Intelligent eyes." The important fact they would easily overlook is that this unpretentious individual is also Israel's best-selling author.
Over the past decade, Oren has written 13 thrillers and two historical books. Together, they have sold close to one million copies. Not bad for a writer whose first two manuscripts were rejected by virtually every publishing house in the country.
Israeli best-sellers existed, of course, before his first thriller, Seduction, was published by Keter in 1994. Yet Oren, who quit his job as editor of Yediot Aharonot's weekly magazine section when Seduction reached sales of 120,000 copies, was the first Israeli author to consciously take on the crafting of a best- seller in the American sense of the term.
The Israeli literary establishment was quick to respond to Oren's commercial success with a series of vehement attacks.
"At the beginning," he recalled when we sat together last week in his Tel Aviv garden, "critics killed my books. Ariana Melamed, who was then the literary critic of the Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir, wrote that Seduction was an impossible book that should not be read. The literature professor and editor Menahem Perry announced on television that my books were a threat to Israeli literature, because if people started reading me they would stop reading Amos Oz."
Seduction was followed almost immediately by Oren's second thriller, Sold-out Game.
"My books," he explained, "invaded the tranquil life of literary critics in a way they weren't prepared for. The more successful the books were, the more threatened the critics felt."
In 1996, following the success of his first two books, Oren took the highly unusual step of becoming a self- published author.
"My decision to become a publisher," he told me, "was spontaneous and entirely self-serving. I wanted to protest against the monopoly of Israeli publishing houses that would never pay an author more...