VICTORY and SORROW Own Volition Or at the Behest of Arab Leaders
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his purity. It cast doubt on the received account ofthe origins ofthe Palestinian David N. Myers refugee problem, according to which Pal- estinian Arabs fled their homes of their VICTORY AND SORROW own volition or at the behest of Arab leaders. Instead, Yizhar painted a vivid portrait ofexpulsion. His story provoked 1J KHIRBEI KHIZEH of Ziklag, which appeared in 1958. The a storm in the newspapers and journals li By S. Yi.h". novel depicted in exhaustive detail the of the nascent state of Israel, with some ii Translated by Nicholas de Lange activities and the emotions of a group of critics lauding the writer's honesty and ij and Yaacob Dweck young Israeli soldiers engaged in a week- courage, and others denouncing his :l (lbit Editions,134 pp., $16.95) long battle in 1948. The decidedly unhe- work as imbalanced and even treason- roic account ofthe soldiers leads one to ous. The historian Anita Shapira has HE sHoRT HISToRY of He' wonder whether Yizhar really belongs to carefully chronicled its immediate re- brew as a modern language the Palmach Generation. As the literary ception and its subsequent appearances has yielded, over the course of scholar Dan Miron has observed, he was in Israeli public culture-for example, little more than a century, an born five to ten years before other mem- as a required text in Israeli schools in impressively long list of literary bers of this generation, and he did not 1964, and as a television movie in 1978. masters-the early twentieth-century share in the euphoric spirit of triumph She shows that the original boldness of Brenner and Bialik; the mid-century and redemption that accompanied the I(hirbet Khizefr was somewhat lost in the Nobel laureate Agnon; and the renowned fewish victory in 1948. controversies over the story's historical contemporaries Amichai, Oz, Yehoshua, Nowhere is this lack of euphoria, this veracity and political suitability-debates and Grossman. Much less known outside unexpected dourness of historical vision, that reflected the complicated evolution Israel, but certainly one of the most signif- clearer than in a novella that Yzhar wrote of Israeli public memory of 1948. icant figures in the Hebrew literary canon, in1949, a year after the war in which he Both the novella's literary merits and is Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the participated as an intelligence officer. I(hir- the lingering effects of its call for self- transposed pen name S. Yizhar, and died bet Khizeh was published along with a reckoning have prompted the small fe- in Israel two years ago. Stylistically, Yi- much briefer short story, "Ha-Shavuil' rusalem publishing house Ibis Editions to zhar was a quiet revolutionary, expanding or "The Prisoneri'which tells of an army add Khirbet l(hizeh to its fine list of titles, the register ofliterary Hebrew through unit's capture and mistreatment of an in- mainly books translated from Hebrew a modern style that attended to the ca- nocent Arab shepherd; butitwas Khirbet and Arabic. Although a few of Yizhar's dences and the phrasings of the Bible. I(hizeh that became a cause c6ldbre in Is- other writings (but not yet his huge mas- r)7ith a sharp eye for physical description, rael. Thousands ofcopies were sold, and terpiece) have been translated, I(hirbet Yizhar artfully lavished words upon the reviews and discussions of the novella Khizeh appears in English here for the landscape of his land. He slowly unfolded swirled in the Israeli press for months, first time, and it is long overdue. The its forbidding beauty in Faulknerian even years. \iflhat stood at the center of rendering from the Hebrew by Nicholas sentences that morphed into stream-of- this remarkable work-and what pro- de Lange and Yaacob Dweck is graceful consciousness paragraphs, whose hyp- voked so much controversy in its day- and fluid, with but a few minor infelici- notic rhythm was periodically jolted by was Yizhar's portrayal of an Israeli army ties. Their important translation will en- sharp ruptures in the plot. And themat- unit called upon to stake out, occupy, and able Yizhar to gain the readership outside ically he was a stealthy provocateur, al- then expel the residents of a fictional Pal- of Israel that his work so richly deserves. ternately planting bravado and self-doubt, estinian Arab town called I(hirbet I(hizeh, insouciance and moral indignation, in which had been vanquished in the war. ET KHTZEH opens with the his protagonists-ambivalent characters Yizhar's typically languid pacing, whereby lection of the narrator that who both upheld and undermined the the unit is beset by boredom and puer- happened a long time ago, Zionist narrative ofnoble struggle for the ile squabbles as it aimlessly wanders the but it has haunted me ever since....How ancient fewish homeland. countryside awaiting orders, is undone by easy it had beenj' he marvels, "to be se- This iconoclastic side notwithstand- the brutality and indifference of the Is- duced, to be knowingly led astray and ing, Yizhar came to be known by many raeli soldiers as they expel the Arab resi- join the great general mass of liarsl' It contemporaries and critics as the quint- dents from the village. is not evident at this point-in fact, it is essential writer of his generation-the Yizhar's story challenged, to put it not evident until the end-what the exact so-called Palmach Generation (named mildly, the sense of virtue that accom- source of the narrator's psychic discom- after the Haganah strike force that played panied the carefully cultivated Zionist fort is. But a significant clue is given soon a leading role in the fewish fight for Pal- image of a new fewish man, the legend- enough, when the narrator avers that one estine in 1948). A good part ofthis repu- ary sabra. No longer content to be a pas- way he could begin to unravel his story tation is owed to the summa summarum sive victim of history like his Diaspora is by mentioning the 'bperational order" of Yizhar's literary career, a sprawl- fewish cousins, this new few was vir- that guided his unit on "a clear splendid ing 1,100-page novel about the war of ile, armed, and prepared to fight for his winter morningi'The unit was operating 1948 called Yeme Ziklag, or The Days land-but always, it was said, according just after military hostilities between the to an exacting ethical code, the vaunted Jewish and Arab sides in the war of 7948 David N. Ivlyers is a professor of lewish his- principle of "purity of arms" that was a had concluded. This was a period ofon- tory at UCLA. His new book, BzrwteN /zw doctrine of the new Israeli army. Strik- going instability, when Israeli forces were tNo An,q.s: Tne, Losr Votce op Srtrottt ing an extraordinary balance between in- attempting to pacify hostile Arab villages R.qwroowtcz, will be published in thefall timacy and detachment, I(hirbet Khizeh and towns as well as to stem the tide of by Brandeis University Press. rattled this myth of the noble sabra and "infiltrationj' when thousands of Pales- 44 Ocrosna zz, zooS True New Rr,puntrc tinian Arabs sought to steal back across tle but "the ruthless long waitingJ' It is haunting is how easily they conjure up the border from neighboring Arab coun- in this realm of suspension and dread images of forced population removal tries, mostly to return to their homes and that the narrator of l(hirbet l(hizeh re- from the recent and not-so-recent past- reconnect with relatives, but in a small veals his inner conflicts-at once willing images that are deeply imprinted in few- number of cases to engage in terrorist to go along with the small chatter, sadis- ish memory, as well as in our contempo- activity. In this fragile environment, the tic pranks, and anti-Arab racism ofhis rary consclousness. narrator reports that an initial order was comrades and at the same time attempt- In contemplating the actions of his given to his unit to "assemble the inhab- ing to preserve a modicum of conscience unit, the narrator happens onto the most itants ofthe area extending from point and decency. tragic irony of the conflict between Jews X (see attached map) to point Y (see For much of the story, he goes along and Arabs over Palestine: the fact that same map)-load them onto transports, and gets along-as, for example, when the histories of the two peoples were and convey them across our lines; blow the unit is shaken out of its torpor upon eerily parallel in many ways, perhaps no up the stone houses, and burn the huts; receipt of the order to move into I(hirbet more so than at the very moment when detain the youths and the suspects, and I(hizeh. The soldiers unleash volley after the )ews decisively left behind exile and clear the area of 'hostile forcesl " With a volley of machine-gun fire intended to the Palestinians decisively entered it. trace of the withering irony that will char- flush out any living being left in the vil- This sudden realization shakes the nar- acterize his stance of omniscient but par- lage. Four Arab men manage to flee in rator to the core: alyzing passivity throughout, the narrator the opposite direction, inducing a weird takes aim at the claims of Zionist chiv- titillation among the )ewish soldiers. I had never been in the Diaspora-I said alry: the order would no doubt be car- "'We were getting excited," the narrator to myself-I had never known what it ried out, he remarks, with'tourtesy and reports.