Book List

Given its recurring relevancy, it’s a wonder that an English translation of the 1949 Israeli novella Khirbet Khizeh, described in an afterword as a canonical text and part of the standard curriculum in Israeli high schools, has not appeared until now. The author, longtime Knesset member Yizhar Smilansky, known by the pen name S. Yizhar, fought in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War that ended with the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from cities and villages in Israel. His novella describes one such brutal expulsion. Yizhar is also the author of a thousand-plus-page novel called Days of Tziklag about the 1948 war, and this skillful and entrancing translation of Khirbet Khizah, eminently worthwhile in its own right, makes a strong case for seeking out the lengthier work.The soldier-narrator at the center of this incrementally unfolding tragedy shares with his platoon-mates a sense of revulsion for the battered Palestinian villagers, which underscores the injustice of the soldiers’ mission. Their reaction to two old women, abandoned at a roadside, is not exactly sympathetic: “What could you do with them but spit in disgust, and gag, and not look, and run from here—the horror!” The horror is not unrelieved, and never far off. Yizhar jams magnificently lyrical descriptions of nature hard up against passages of marshal reality. Thus an idyllic description of a peaceful rural valley “warming itself in the after-rain sun, gazing in total silence toward the light and the gold, throbbing” is instantly upended by an exchange in which an Israeli soldier curses the Arabs for the beauty of the places they “have,” and a comrade responds with the correction “had,” adding, “It’s already ours.”