God and the Nation after the Yom Kippur War: A Reading of S. Yizhar's Giluy Eliyahu

Giluy Eliyahu (1999) (Discovering Elijah) is S. Yizhar's (Yizhar Smilansky) final novel. It was written after this prolific writer, who wrote extensively on the 1948 war and is considered the voice of the Israeli humanist soldier, resumed writing fiction in 1993 following three decades of literary silence. The novel lays out the journey of three Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War (1973). The three joined the military reserve force in the Sinai Desert to entertain the troops by giving lectures. Yet, as the narrator of the novel declares, they are "three lecturers needed by no one," dragged from one point to the other with combat soldiers and their equipment and weapons, waiting idly to be picked up by some military truck. Sometimes, when there is nowhere else to go, they even participate in battle.¹

The three soldiers neither volunteered to fight in the war nor were recruited for the task. Yet, they entered the battlefield for a reason: the narrator and his comrades-in-arms went deep into Sinai in order to look for Eliyahu, a paratrooper from whom the narrator has not heard a word since the beginning of the war.² Before the war, Eliyahu worked in rose farming. Interestingly, until the very end, the novel does not provide other details about Eliyahu: throughout, he has neither physical characteristics nor a personality and no information is given regarding the nature of his relationship with the narrator, nor why the latter is beleaguered by worries as to his fate. All that is known is that Eliyahu must be revealed—"revealed" and not "found"—thereby imbuing the search with a deeper theological significance.³

The goal and theme of revealing Eliyahu suffuses the entire text, persisting through battles and death, during shelling and quiet conversations. Simultaneously, in addition to the revelation of Elijah, characters experience theological revelations, occurring in the midst of the war. In the present article, I read the multiple revelations that the novel presents, explaining them as a response to the collective trauma of the Yom Kippur War.

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The novel is partially based on Yizhar's own experience of the Yom Kippur War, when he volunteered for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and served as a lecturer, along with poet Haim Guri and media personality Uzi Peled. The three joined military division 252, all the while searching for Yizhar's son-inlaw, Eliezer who, like the fictional Eliyahu, lost touch with his family in the first days of the war. Many of the descriptions in Giluy Eliyahu are detailed and faithful reports of aspects of the war, including locations in the Sinai peninsula, military bases, traffic routes, and several characters, including Kalman Magen, the IDF division commander who is mentioned by name, and Ariel Sharon, who is easily identified by his description. Segments of Giluy Eliyahu are based on a special edition of the military newspaper Bamahane (In the Camp), published on May 9, 1975, and dedicated to testimonies from the Yom Kippur War.

The novel's reception was far from smooth. One the one hand, as with all of Yizhar's late writings, Giluy Eliyahu was warmly received by many who pointed to the ways in which the author, after his long silence, resumed his position as a master of prose, and particularly of war fiction.⁴ On the other hand, like Yizhar's earlier war fiction—and particularly his short stories "The Prisoner" and "Khirbet Khizeh," published in 1948 and 1949 respectively—Giluy Eliyahu caused heated debate among historians and literary critics alike. Early criticism focused on one harrowing scene from the novel, depicting Israeli soldiers violently tearing gold teeth out of the mouths of dead Egyptian soldiers. Since the novel was based on Yizhar's own war experience, readers and historians sought historical accuracy. For example, historian Tom Segev, wishing to prove that the scene never occurred, turned to dentists, who pointed out that it is physically impossible to pull teeth in the way described in Giluy Eliyahu.⁵ In addition, Segev noted that Yizhar's colleagues...