Sixty Years Late and Timely All the Same

By TODD HASAK-LOWY

KHIRBET KHIZEH
By S. Yizhar
Translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck
Afterward by David Shulman
134 pages. Ibis Editions. $16.95.

If you’re a reader who follows Hebrew literature in English translation, it seems reasonable to assume you’re getting a fairly accurate picture of the best this literature has to offer. You likely think that Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman are Israel’s leading writers, while Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon dominated the decades prior to their emergence. Another dozen writers or more—including Appelfeld, Castel-Bloom, Kenaz, Keret, Matalon, Shabtai, and Shalev—round out the field. While one could do much worse, this model contains at least one glaring gap. S. Yizhar (1916-2006), the first accomplished modern Hebrew writer for whom Hebrew was his native language, a writer who produced a considerable body of work, is arguably the greatest of all Israeli prose writers. Yet no more then 10 percent of his writing is available in English. For this reason alone (and there are a few other reasons as well), any reader interested in Hebrew literature, Israeli culture, and even Israeli history should pick up a copy of Yizhar’s brilliant and courageous 1949 novella, Khirbet Khizeh, which is finally appearing in English for the first time.

As it turns out, Yizhar’s strengths as a writer are precisely what have prevented him from reaching the international audience his work deserves. From his first publication in 1938, Yizhar wrote beautifully dense, rich, swirling impressionistic prose, complete with ample neologisms, slang, obscure nature terms, and often jarring allusions to the Hebrew Bible. Translating even a short paragraph by Yizhar, and here I speak from experience, can be a humbling nightmare. For this reason, it’s hard to imagine, despite the occasional rumor to the contrary, that the work for which Yizhar may be best known, his 1,000-plus-page novel Days of Tziklag, a book which covers a mere seven days during Israel’s War of Independence, will ever make it into English.

In this regard, Khirbet Khizeh is not representative of what Yizhar’s oeuvre has to offer. Set sometime during the winter of 1948-1949, and thus during the last stages of Israel’s first war, the bulk of Yizhar’s novella narrates an easy-to-follow external event in linear fashion. Of course, it is this event—the conquest and destruction of a fictional Palestinian village named “Khirbet Khizeh” and the expulsion of its inhabitants—that makes this text not just a fascinating piece of literature (“fiction” may not be the best term here), but a crucial document in Israeli history or, at the least, Israeli collective memory. Indeed, the ongoing story of this story’s reception—a widely discussed bestseller in 1949 became a much more controversial text when a film adaptation was made of it in the late 70's—is nearly as interesting and instructional as the novella itself. One need only consider the enormous uproar that greeted Benny Morris’ 1987 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, a work whose main claims concerning the Israeli army’s active role in the emptying of Palestinian villages have largely been accepted in academic circles, to get a sense for just how remarkable Yizhar’s novella truly is. Perhaps more than any other work of modern Hebrew fiction, Khirbet Khizeh stands as a text that can be neither fully integrated into nor fully forgotten by Israeli society. In this regard, while the English translation is late in appearing, it would be wrong to say that it has arrived too late.

The picture of Israel’s War of Independence provided here by Yizhar stands in stark contrast to the perhaps still-dominate and one-dimensional view of this war, which begins and ends with the image of a fledging Israeli fighting force repelling, against all odds, a host of invading Arab armies. Narrating an episode taken from the final stages of what was actually a rather long war that included periods of calm, Khirbet Khizeh instead describes a group of weary, cynical soldiers from the Israeli army executing a military operation that has them methodically conquering a Palestinian village and expelling its inhabitants. Over the course of 100 pages, Yizhar patiently details the day-long operation through the eyes of a young soldier, as he and his unit fire upon the village, clean out its nearly empty streets, round up the remaining villagers, and finally load these same villagers onto transport trucks that will take them far away, never to return. The soldiers’ face-to-face encounters with these residents—mostly women, children, and the elderly, as men of fighting age had fled in advance—are marked by contempt and acts of cruel humiliation. The reader sees how even in the case of the Israeli army, with its highly touted “purity of arms,” that it didn’t take long for the corrupting nature of military power to take hold.

Were this the extent of Yizhar’s narrative, Khirbet Khizeh would still be an important text in the history of modern Hebrew fiction. But it is the other half of this story, in which a soldier-cum-narrator struggles with his relationship and responsibility to this operation, that allows this novella to transcend its status as a historical document of sorts and become a potent treatment of individual responsibility in the face of injustice. Yizhar’s fiction, in keeping with the literature and even culture of his generation, often gave expression to a “first-person plural” sensibility. Especially in his earlier works, the reader finds a clear illustration of how the socialist Zionism of the 30's and 40's, as an all-encompassing ideology, blurred the boundaries normally separating the identity of the group as a whole from that of its particular members.

As such, the moment Yizhar’s unnamed narrator remarks early on, "I don’t know why a feeling of loneliness suddenly thickened in me," we see a crack open between the protagonist and the larger unit, a steadily widening fissure that will parallel the disturbances of the external plot for the remainder of the narrative. This rupture marks nothing less than the sudden, traumatic separation, and indeed sudden opposition, of Zionist and ethical codes in the eyes of the protagonist. For Yizhar’s narrator—and for Yizhar himself, as he would disclose in numerous subsequent interviews—the march toward statehood had previously been viewed as a perfectly moral and self-evidently just process. But over the course of this operation, the protagonist-narrator finds himself having to choose between the Zionist and the ethical. Only this may not be his to decide either, since he tells his story some time after these events, some time after he has already failed to prevent these injustices. In the end, the protagonist both condemns the collective on moral grounds and nevertheless still includes himself within it. Near the end of the story, another soldier impatiently informs the distraught protagonist, “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here.” Here the reader encounters the physical, spatial repression that will and indeed did follow operations such as these. Impotently opposed on the day of the operation, Yizhar’s protagonist ultimately represents himself as both a moral witness and an immoral actor, a complicated and precarious identity that speaks to both Yizhar’s moral courage and his mastery of narrative techniques. There is no shortage of lip service given these days to the notion that literature has much to teach us about history. While shining light on a crucial and troubling moment in Israeli history, Khirbet Khizeh, unlike a standard historical text, also engages the question of the individual’s responsibility for and possible responses to this same event.

Finally, some praise for Nicolas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck’s impressive translation. Like the best translations, theirs succeeds in both sticking reliably to the original while also taking on a life of its own. This is most evident in the way they capture the unnerving tension between the terrible events and experiences Yizhar describes and the disorienting beauty of his writing. Yizhar’s trademark sprawling, lyrical paragraphs are regularly peppered with potent phrases describing the immediate aftermath of irreversible destruction: “the emptiness of sudden catastrophe,” “the sound of silent desolation,” “a roar of injustice.” Their translation presents us with Yizhar at his most accessible, while still maintaining the unsettling quality of his prose. In the end, reading Khirbet Khizeh is a haunting experience, as this landmark text confronts us with a story we may well wish to forget or even deny. But more than this, Yizhar’s novella compels us to think soberly about how much has been lost while also wondering what, thanks to the sort of stubborn remembering that demands action, can still be salvaged.