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Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
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Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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"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debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art.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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 9, 2014
ISBN9780374713850
Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
Author

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.

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Rating: 4.011628 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It'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 stars
    5/5
    An 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 stars
    4/5
    "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.

Book preview

Khirbet Khizeh - S. Yizhar

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