Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, and: Preliminaries (review)

In 1991 in Rehovot, bulldozers cleared a piece of land on which the Yizhar Smilansky family house had stood for 64 years. In this period, Rehovot had changed from a sleepy farming colony shaded by orchards and vineyards, nestling amid Arab villages and open countryside up to the horizon, into a bustling town that is part of the large Tel Aviv conurbation. The 85-year-old Yizhar had to leave his home. He moved to a nearby moshav where his son built a boutique winery, a rather recent fad in Israel. Miraculously, this traumatic move released a flurry of creativity in the aged writer, a sort of late blooming. Yizhar had not published literary works since 1964, all of 27 years. In the last five years of his life he returned to the landscape of Israeli literature, producing a number of works. The first of these, Mikdamot—Preliminaries—has now been translated into English.

Yizhar Smilansky, known by his pen name of S. Yizhar (1916–2006), is considered the most important native Hebrew writer. His own and later literary generations widely admired him, deferring to his moral authority as much for his talents as his principles. From the publication of his first story in 1938, “Ephraim Hozer la-Aspesset” (Ephraim Returns to Alfalfa—see Midnight Convoy and Other Stories), he exerted a dominant presence in Israel’s literary, intellectual discourse. Serving as a Member of the Knesset from 1949 until 1966, he was a faithful adherent of Ben Gurion. When he retired from the Knesset, he devoted his energies to education. In line with a lingering Zionist tradition that saw intellectuals as the guardians of public morality, he made frequent public appearances, lectured extensively, and expressed his views in newspaper articles. He was a sharp critic of various unbecoming phenomena in Israeli society. His particular bailiwick concerned Arab-Israeli relations and the territories conquered in the Six Day War. The dualism that characterized his life—writer and politician, moralist and pragmatist, educator and preacher—was not evident in his literary work. His literature remained anchored in absolute morality, refusing to compromise with reality.

Despite his powerful writing and key status in Israeli society, Yizhar is virtually unknown to English readers, only a few of his stories having been translated to date. Hopefully, the two volumes just published by Toby Press will help rectify this shortcoming. The fact that so little of his work has been translated into different languages is curious. To be sure, his Hebrew is staggeringly rich and varied, in fact, he writes poetic prose. Nevertheless, Agnon too wrote a unique Hebrew and in a style that is not easy to either read or translate. Yet, not only was he read and translated, but the translations brought him to the attention of the judges of the Nobel Prize. Yizhar, on the other hand, stayed within the framework of Hebrew culture, never erupting into the consciousness of world literature. According to Dan Miron, a senior scholar of Hebrew literature, who wrote the introduction to the two volumes considered here, Yizhar was influenced by the stream of consciousness style employed by the Hebrew writer A. N. Gnessin, but he seems to have borrowed at least as much from William Faulkner. Like Faulkner, Yizhar remained a “local” author in the sense that his work dealt with one type of physical landscape—Israel’s southern lowlands up to Tel Aviv; with one type of character—young men and women born and bred in the land of Israel; and with one social environment— the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine prior to statehood. His love of the virgin country, its open spaces and unspoilt scenery, was near pagan. He flowed with the leisurely pace of change prior to Israel’s establishment, before millions of immigrants stormed the physical and...