My Imaginary Offspring: Reality and Fantasy in Days of Ziklag by S. Yizhar and in If There is a Heaven by Ron Leshem

The union of language and life bought upon us by the modern age of the internet—that truism that the world has become one global village—does not apply to the unique army experience of young people in Israel. At the same time, it is surprising that this elemental experience of the Israelis enjoys only an indirect, not a central, reflection in Israeli literature.

The article compares two stark war novels: Days of Ziklag (1958) by S. Yizhar, considered the epic of Israel's War of Independence, and If There Is a Heaven (2005) by Ron Leshem, deemed the most important novel of the first Lebanon war. Both novels use factual historical material in the literary design of the war experience, and the Aristotelian separation of literature from history is blurred in them. In fact, in the second novel this separation hardly exists. Yizhar's work still evinces clear marks of fiction, such as the name Ziklag, which is a fictive biblical place where the battle took place, and is written by the stream-of-consciousness technique; the "Yizharian" language too is highly literary. By contrast, all these "literary" components are missing from Ron Leshem's war novel of the 2000s. Place, language, events, and characters are drawn from a concrete and known reality. For all that, If There Is a Heaven is a work of fine literature.