Cleanser to Cleansed

Gabriel Piterberg

  • Buy‘Midnight Convoy’ and Other Stories by S. Yizhar, translated by Misha Louvish et al
    Toby, 283 pp, £9.99, May 2007, ISBN 978 1 59264 183 3
  • Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck
    Ibis, 131 pp, $16.95, April 2008, ISBN 978 965 90125 9 6
  • BuyPreliminaries by S. Yizhar, translated by Nicholas de Lange
    Toby, 305 pp, £14.95, May 2007, ISBN 978 1 59264 190 1

Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the pen-name of S. Yizhar, was the best of the Israeli prose writers for whom Hebrew is a first language, as distinct from those who emigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe. Though he was never a celebrity, either in Israel or internationally, his death in 2006 occasioned a handful of translations of his work into English.

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[*] Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) was founded in 1925 in Jerusalem by Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Ernst Simon. It rejected the Zionist movement’s efforts to establish an ethnic Jewish state at the expense of Palestine’s Arabs, espousing instead the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation. In the eyes of Brit Shalom’s founders, coexistence was not merely a moral imperative, but the only arrangement that would ensure a lasting peace. The Jewish people, Buber argued, ought to declare ‘its desire to live in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people and to develop the common homeland into a republic in which both peoples will have the possibility of free development’.