Khirbet Khizeh A Novel [Paperback]

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 novellaKhirbet Khizehwas 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debates it has prompted would themselves makeKhirbet Khizehworth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art.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 Khizehis an extraordinary and heartbreaking book that is destined to be a classic of world literature.

This narrow focus gives the book its extraordinary emotional force . . . Two things giveKhirbet Khizehlasting significance. The first is the intimate, personal scale on which it's composed . . . The other source of the power ofKhirbet Khizeh: its connection to the present . . . [InKhirbet 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

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