When the Montreal writer A.M. Klein visited Israel in 1949 he was nonplussed by its nascent literary scene. The “poets of the settlement,” he wrote, “were milder, kinder men,” who wrote verse with “lyric sentiment” influenced by such 19th century models as Heinrich Heine and Alexander Pushkin.
Either Klein missed the major, young voice of Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the pen name S. Yizhar, or he decided that provocative work like Khirbet Khizeh was beyond his ken because it was offered in prose.
Yizhar is one of Israel’s best-known prose writers, whose early work, including the newly reissued novella Khirbet Khizeh, provided a prominent literary mirror in which the state viewed itself.
As Klein traversed the country, developing a report he would take back to the Canadian Jewish Congress, and working on his own literary portrait of Israel, he must have encountered the provocative discussions raised by Yizhar’s portrayal of the events of the country’s War of Independence.
Khirbet Khizeh, along with Yizhar’s other novels, played a central role in the development of modern Hebrew literature, but his work has only recently found its way to an English language audience. In 2008, the first full English translation of Khirbet Khizeh appeared from Jerusalem-based Ibis Editions, a non-profit, activist publisher dedicated to bringing out “Levant-related books of poetry and prose” in translations from Hebrew, Arabic, French and other languages of the region. A British edition of Khirbet Khizeh appeared in 2011. Farrar Straus and Giroux has recently reissued the English translation for a North American audience.
Reviews of Khirbet Khizeh inevitably recount its slender plot line, which focuses on a single day’s activities undertaken by a company of young Israeli army men whose “operational orders” are to clear the last of an Arab village’s population in order to level the area and prepare it for new Israeli settlement.
Yizhar’s narrator is deeply divided over the orders he must follow, and he argues with his comrades, however fitfully, over the rightness of the plan to expel the remaining populace of Khirbet Khirzeh.
His argument regarding why “it’s not right” to do so is met with the challenge, “So what do you suggest?” The narrator’s reply – “I just don’t know” – is demolished by a cynical but practical-minded response: “If you don’t know – then shut up.”
This he more or less does, while offering the reader an aching and inward monologue considering the acts and likely fate of the new country he serves. “And so it happened,” he tells us, “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.”
Yizhar was in his early 30s when Khirbet Khizeh appeared. Born in Rehovot, his family had arrived in Palestine from Kiev at the turn of the 20th century. His literary mentors were James Joyce, William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. But part of his uniqueness arose from the challenges associated with founding a modernist Hebrew voice among Israel’s first generation of native Hebrew speakers.
(Klein found “new life” being given to the “antique speech” in the realm of business advertising; dry cleaning shops were called Kesheth, for the rainbow, a brand of Israeli sausage, Bashan, paid tribute to the land of a giant king in the Bible).
Biblical imagery and allusions remain a key element in Yizhar’s modern Hebrew voice, and translators have struggled to convey this straddling position between the ancient Jewish view of the land and its contemporary character. This paradoxical position informs Yizhar’s narrator’s sense of being not-at-home as events unfold.
As the platoon waits, upon a hilltop, to descend to the terraced lands of Khirbet Khizeh, our guide wishes he could leave what’s about to be done to others: “If someone had to get filthy, let others soil their hands. I couldn’t. Absolutely not.”
Aspects of the book are prophetic. Yizhar conveys, with great emotional impact, an Arab boy being sent away from his home, and the narrator arrives at an awareness that “what was happening in the heart of the boy . . . could only become a viper inside of him.” By way of the author’s appreciation of exile, the narrator wishes he could discover an Arab “Jeremiah mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stifled tones to the old God in Heaven, atop the trucks of exile.”
Responses to the reissue of Yizhar’s novella routinely read it as an expression of one side of the events that took place with the creation of the State of Israel. But Khirbet Khirzeh strives to see the events leading up to and following 1948 from many sides – both Arab and Jewish. It’s potential for education and the creation of dialogue is great. Whether its newfound readers will rise to the occasion is an open question.