Gabriel Piterberg writes:

These books translate work from all three periods. ‘Midnight Convoy’ and Other Stories adds four stories to a volume that appeared in book form in 1969 along with an essay by the critic Dan Miron. The stories originally included ‘Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa’, ‘Habakuk’, which was written in 1963, a wonderful short story and, as Miron observes, an aesthetic turning point in Yizhar’s writing; and the 1959 novella ‘Midnight Convoy’. The new translation adds an early war story, ‘The Prisoner’; ‘The Runaway’ of 1963; and two stories from the 1990s, ‘Whoso Breaketh a Hedge a Snake Shall Bite Him’ (Yael Lotan’s translation is especially attentive to Yizhar’s manner) and ‘Harlamov’. Miron questions the usual description of Yizhar as the quintessential writer of the ’48 generation who laid the foundations of Israeli literature. In fact he did not come up through the Labour youth movements; he did not serve in the Palmach; he was older than the ’48 generation; his cultural and political sensibilities were different; so, crucially, was his experience as a settler. To adopt the language of settler colonialism, Yizhar was formed not in the kibbutz, the pure colonies of settlement that excluded the indigenous population, but in the moshava.

(LRB 26 February 2009)

Toby | paperback 283 pp. |ISBN: 9781592641833