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    Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
    Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
    Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel

    By S. Yizhar, Nicholas de Lange, David Shulman and Yaacob Dweck

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debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art.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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    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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    Reviews for Khirbet Khizeh

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    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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

    1

    TRUE, IT ALL HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, but it has haunted me ever since. I sought to drown it out with the din of passing time, to diminish its value, to blunt its edge with the rush of daily life, and I even, occasionally, managed a sober shrug, managed to see that the whole thing had not been so bad after all, congratulating myself on my patience, which is, of course, the brother of true wisdom. But sometimes I would shake myself again, astonished at how easy it had been to be seduced, to be knowingly led astray and join the great general mass of liars—that mass compounded of crass ignorance, utilitarian indifference, and shameless self-interest—and exchange a single great truth for the cynical shrug of a hardened sinner. I saw that I could no longer hold back, and although I hadn’t even made up my mind where it would end, it seemed to me that, in any case, instead of staying silent, I should, rather, start telling the story.

    One option is to tell the story in order, beginning with one clear day, one clear winter’s day, and describing in detail the departure and the journey, when the dirt paths were moistened by the earlier rain, and the cactus hedges surrounding the citrus groves were burned by the sun and moist, their feet, as of old, licked by flocks of dense damp dark-green nettles, as the noonday gradually advanced, a pleasant unhurried noonday, which moved on as usual and turned into a darkening twilight chill, when it was all over, finished, done.

    Another and possibly better option, however, would be to begin differently, and to mention straightaway what had been the purpose of that entire day from the start, operational order number such and such, on such and such day of the month, in the margin of which, in the final section that was simply entitled miscellaneous, it said, in a short line and a half, that although the mission must be executed decisively and precisely, whatever happened, no violent outbursts or disorderly conduct—it said—would be permitted, which only indicated straightaway that there was something amiss, that anything was possible (and even planned and foreseen), and that one couldn’t evaluate this straightforward final clause before returning to the opening and also scanning the noteworthy clause entitled information, which immediately warned of the mounting danger of infiltrators, terrorist cells, and (in a wonderful turn of phrase) operatives dispatched on hostile missions, but also the subsequent and even more noteworthy clause, which explicitly stated, "assemble the inhabitants of the area extending from point X (see attached map) to point Y (see same map)—load them onto transports, and convey them across our lines; blow up the stone houses, and burn the huts; detain the youths and the suspects, and clear the area of ‘hostile forces,’ and so on and so forth—so that it was now obvious how many good and honest hopes were being invested in those who were being sent out to implement all this burn-blow-up-imprison-load-convey," who would burn blow up imprison load and convey with such courtesy and with a restraint born of true culture, and this would be a sign of a wind of change, of decent upbringing, and, perhaps, even of the Jewish soul, the great Jewish soul.

    And so it happened as we set out that clear splendid winter morning, cheerfully making our way, showered, well fed, and smartly turned out; and so, in the light breeze, we got out at a certain point close to a village that wasn’t yet visible, and our company was dispatched to the flank, while some of the others were to cover the rear and the rest were to enter the village. And as usual there was nothing better than being in the flanking company. Which was moving off through unknown territory, setting out into the washed, cleansed existence of the fields, the pure pellucid air, among plantations partly plowed (from before the rage), and partly covered with weeds and grass (from the days of rage)—and it was so pleasant to slosh around on the muddy paths slippery with puddles and fresh mire, until your youth, albeit no longer so very youthful, burst forth with renewed vigor. Even carrying the mission-case, which cut into your hand, might be transformed now and resemble nothing more than something or other that belonged to a group of people walking, let’s say, to work or even, for example, a flock of chirping sparrowlike urchins. There we were sloshing, talking and chattering, joking and singing, not noisily, but cheerfully, and it was clear: there was to be no battle for us today, and if anyone happened to feel apprehensive—this had nothing to do with us, God help him, today we were going on an outing.

    We reached a hill, where we crouched under a cactus hedge, and we were ready to eat something, when the man, one Moishe, the company commander, gathered us together, and briefed us about the situation, the lay of the land, and the objective. From which it transpired that the few houses on the lower slope of another hill were some Khirbet Khizeh or other, and all the surrounding crops and fields belonged to that village, whose abundant water, good soil, and celebrated husbandry had gained a reputation almost equal to that of its inhabitants, who were, they said, a band of ruffians, who gave succor to the enemy, and were ready for any mischief should the opportunity only arise; or, for example, should they happen to encounter any Jews you could be sure they would wipe them out, at once—such was their nature, and such were their ways. And when we fixed our sights upon those few houses on the flanks of that unobtrusive hill, from which we were separated by the plantations, the well-tended gardens, and a scattering of wells, we saw that this whole Khirbet Khizeh presented no problem, truly did not justify any further explanation. On the other hand, there were some trees, sycamores apparently, here and there, so venerable and tranquil that they seemed to be no longer part of the vegetation but of the inanimate realm. And then someone came back with some oranges, and we ate oranges.

    Then we set off down the slimy gray furrows, which they hadn’t had time to sow; we pushed open a big wooden gate set in a mud wall, and walked up a narrow path, between hedges of prickly pears spread with dung and chilly dampness, where deadnettles, fumarias, and flowerless fleshy plants twined in profusion and sprawled under their own damp drab weight, or hid coyly in the recesses of the cactus hedge, and we climbed up the next hill. From here the village lay spread out before us. We took our positions, set up the machine gun, and were ready to start. And when the one who was bent over his equipment listening and speaking into the wireless receiver in a ceremonial singsong informed us that there was still a wait until zero hour, we each sought and found a dry place to sit or stretch out and wait quietly for things to begin.

    No one knows how to wait like soldiers. There is no time or place that soldiers are not waiting and waiting. Waiting in dug-in positions on the high ground, waiting for an attack, waiting to move on, waiting in a cease-fire; there is the ruthlessly long waiting, the nervous anxious waiting, and there is also the tedious waiting, that consumes and burns everything, without fire or smoke or purpose or anything. You find yourself a place, you lie down in it, and you wait. Where have we not lain

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