Description: "This volume reproduces the translation edited and published by Ibis Editions in 2008."
Brief description: S. Yizhar was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, born in Rehovot in 1916. A longtime member of the Knesset, he is most famous as the author of Khirbet Khizeh and the untranslated magnum opus Days of Ziklag. He died in 2006.
Review Quotes:
"This narrow focus gives the book its extraordinary emotional force . . . Two things give Khirbet Khizeh lasting significance. The first is the intimate, personal scale on which it's composed . . . The other source of the power of Khirbet Khizeh: its connection to the present . . . [In Khirbet Khizeh] Yizhar Smilansky offers an answer, one that, over the years, has proved only two accurate." --Dexter Filkins, New York Times Book Review
"[A] war novel that refuses all the pieties of that genre and develops into an anguished--and unresolved--meditation on Jewish history and the meaning of exile. Almost every episode screams out its relevance for today." --Robyn Creswell, The Paris Review "[This] classic of modern Hebrew prose... immediately becomes required reading for anyone interested in the history of Israel and Palestine... Ever since the Bible, the Land of Israel has been a subject of poetry and longing for Jewish literature, and Yizhar continues that tradition in a prose that is--as the afterword by David Shulman points out--full of untranslatable biblical echoes... The consequences of what happened at places like Khirbet Khizeh are still headline news, which makes this short, powerful book less a work of history than a work of prophecy." --Adam Kirsch, The Christian Science Monitor "Khirbet Khizeh resonates as both historical experience and art." --The Times Literary Supplement "An exhilarating masterwork . . . Readers should rush to share its still-shocking wisdom." --The Independent "Astonishing." --The Economist "[Startling]. . . a slender masterpiece. . ." --Eyal Press, The Nation