Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
4/5
()
About this ebook
"Exhilarating . . . How often can you say about a harrowing, unquiet book that it makes you wrestle with your soul?" —Neel Mukherjee, The Times (London)
It's 1948 and the Arab villagers of Khirbet Khizeh are about to be violently expelled from their homes. A young Israeli soldier who is on duty that day finds himself battling on two fronts: with the villagers and, ultimately, with his own conscience.
Published just months after the founding of the state of Israel and the end of the 1948 war, the novella Khirbet Khizeh was an immediate sensation when it first appeared. Since then, the book has continued to challenge and disturb, even finding its way onto the school curriculum in Israel. The various debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art. Yizhar's haunting, lyrical style and charged view of the landscape are in many ways as startling as his wrenchingly honest view of modern Israel's primal scene.
Considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, Khirbet Khizeh is an extraordinary and heartbreaking book that is destined to be a classic of world literature.
S. Yizhar
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.
Related to Khirbet Khizeh
Related ebooks
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Perfect Peace: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Song for the Missing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIsrael, Palestine and Peace: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Slopes of Lebanon: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hilltop: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeing There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unlasting Home: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeirut '75 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Disappearance: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sadness Is a White Bird: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Broken Verses: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From Palestine to America: A Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Womb of Diamonds: A True Adventure From Child Bride Of Syria To Celebrity Businesswoman Of Japan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHomes: A Refugee Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Mani: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Coffeehouse: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gardens of Consolation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Was Born There, I Was Born Here Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Parisian Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Things We Left Unsaid: The award-winning bestseller Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Jasmine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Land of Israel: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thirst Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alexandrian Summer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Second Person Singular: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scattered Crumbs: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House in Smyrna Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Fiction For You
Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Thinking of Ending Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prophet Song: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Nigerwife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Khirbet Khizeh
43 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's not KK, it's me: that this book is wise I can agree with absolutely. That it is "still-shockingly wise," as the blurb suggests, is a little bit much. Turns out the Israeli occupation wasn't and isn't all that noble a thing. The prose was decent, but not so good that it took me away from the obviousness of the rest of the book. I'm glad this was written, that it's still in print, and that people are reading it. But I think I just expected too much.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An anomalously lovely account of the evacuation of a Palestinian village by young Israeli soldiers largely unaware of what they are doing to other people's lives. It is connected in various ways to My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: a Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman, about Israeli Arab poet Taha Muhamad Ali.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now", 15 February 2015This review is from: Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel (Paperback)I didn't think I was going to get into this work, with its sometimes meandering sentences, but made a determined effort and read it in one sitting (120 p) and it's absolutely brilliant.First published in 1949, it's narrated by a young Israeli soldier out with his platoon, carrying out orders to clear out the eponymous Arab village, remove the occupants and blow up the houses. Yizhar brings the whole situation to life, with vivid descriptions of the Palestinian landscape and of the soldiers' demeanour:'there was to be no battle for us today...today we were going on an outing.'But as the remaining Arabs are heartlessly 'cleared' onto 'transports', the reader sees uncomfortable similarities with the awful situation of the Jews themselves in Europe just a few years previously. As the narrator, himself opposed to the situation, observes:'the Diaspora...Our nation's protest to the world: exile! It had entered me, apparently, with my mother's milk. what, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?'Very powerful read, and for readers like myself who weren't around in the 40s, very informative. This edition is enhanced by an afterword by David Shulman which explains some of the Biblical references in 'Yizhar's dense web of allusion', and discusses the situation today between settlers and their Palestinian neighbours.