TEL AVIV — Bookstore owner Michal Goldschmidt conceived of her independent English-language bookstore during the last war with Iran, this past June.

Nine months later, Goldschmidt is keeping her new shop, Bookhaus, open for two-to-three-hour stints between sprints to her building’s bomb shelter in Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood with her husband and nearly one-year-old daughter, amid another war with Iran — and more ballistic missile salvos.

“I needed to believe that things would be okay,” said Goldschmidt, who moved from London to Israel shortly before the bloody Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023, to embark on a new life with her now-husband.

Goldschmidt keeps the front door locked and the side door open, as it’s closer to the nearest bomb shelter, a brisk one-minute walk away.

“It’s really nice to see my regular customers, and some who don’t live so close,” said Goldschmidt. “One customer got on the bus for the first time since the war started, and a family from Herzilya came, because they wanted to feel like they were doing something normal.”

Now in its second week, the conflict with Iran began on February 28 with joint US-Israeli missile strikes on military and political targets tied to the Islamic regime. Iran has since unleashed a steady stream of ballistic missile fire at Israeli population centers, with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah joining in with rocket fire at Israel’s north.

Following about six months of preparations, Goldschmidt launched Bookhaus in January.

“Frankly, it’s terrifying,” said Goldschmidt, noting the risks of opening a small business during wartime.

In retrospect, she’s grateful for one of many decisions she made — opening with an inventory of 4,000 books, rather than a smaller supply of around 2,000 books, as recommended by other independent booksellers.

“You don’t know when the next shipment will be,” said Goldschmidt, who imports her books from abroad. “If the airspace is closed, I can’t fly my books in.”

For the moment, however, she’s well-stocked.

Goldschmidt greets customers in her airy, well-curated bookstore, which includes an extensive children’s section, shelves full of literary fiction and lighter fare, as well as Middle Eastern cookbooks, history books about the region, and tomes of current affairs, with window seats and tables that welcome customers to sit down and stay a while.

There’s also a solid Iran section that includes copies of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and the graphic novel “Persepolis,” which have been requested more often than Goldschmidt would have expected, especially in the weeks leading up to the ongoing war.

Following her heart back to her first love

Opening a bookstore wasn’t the original plan for Goldschmidt, an art historian with a PhD who worked as a curator at London’s Tate Gallery. She planned on moving to Tel Aviv to be with her French boyfriend while working her way into Israel’s art world.

As someone who worked hard to build her career in London’s competitive art environment, working at the Barbican Centre and Tate, she assumed following her profession would require a similar kind of struggle in Israel, but one in which she’d ultimately succeed.

She found, however, that the local art world wasn’t all that welcoming and decided there was a limit to how long she could fight for something that could ultimately embitter her to the environment she had always loved.

It turned out that books, one of her first loves, were the right career pivot.

Goldschmidt describes herself as a big reader, someone who has spent her life reading books and perusing book reviews, gifting family members the books that she thinks they’ll enjoy reading.

“My mum hasn’t bought books in ages, I just give her the ones I think she’ll like,” said Goldschmidt. “I didn’t realize it was a kind of preparation.”

And then, like many new Anglo immigrants to Israel, Goldschmidt struggled to find titles she wanted to read.

“It was an itch,” she said. “It wasn’t just about buying a book as much as going into a shop and browsing. I missed the chance encounter of walking into a place, picking up a few books, and buying the one that you’re in the mood for that day.”

Goldschmidt, a Shabbat observer, often reads on a Kindle but only reads printed books on Shabbat — a favorite pastime, especially when she has a pile of books by her side and can choose one that fits that moment.

In Tel Aviv, however, despite several lovely bookstores located further south and others with”tiny but fierce English book selections,” Goldschmidt knew she craved something more expansive, with choices that could allow for different moods and temperaments.

With some loans and her own small stash of savings, Goldschmidt searched for the right space, not wanting to compete with other bookstores. The neighborhood has no other independent bookshops, and those in the vicinity are French and Spanish language bookstores.

“I didn’t want to compete with anyone else, even with a Hebrew bookshop that had an English selection,” said Goldschmidt.

She leaned on friends to read over her lists of titles, checking in with social media and bookselling websites to see what she was missing.

“Now that we’re open, I can finally meet people and see what they actually want or don’t want,” she said.

Goldschmidt regularly engages with customers, who enjoy listening to her story and telling their own.

It has surprised Goldschmidt how successful the children’s section has become in just a few weeks, and how many classics are sold, as well as works of literary fiction.

“It’s partly my biases,” she said, “but I’m not so into the Booker Prize shortlist, and yet a lot of people around here are.”

Plans include a monthly book club and an author talk, as well as a children’s story hour on Fridays and a permit to make and serve espresso and pour wine.

“In an ideal world, if there were a bomb shelter in this building, I’d want to do a children’s story hour,” she said, given the school and daycare closures due to the war. “But I’ll have to hold off on that for now.”

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