Extraordinary ... Khirbet Khizeh is a tribute to the power of critical thought to register the injustices of history ... Khirbet Khizeh is the story which, with the least ambivalence, offers to official Zionist history its strongest, unanswerable, counterpoint. The translation is long overdue. In lyrical, haunting prose - evocatively rendered into English by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck ... Read more- the narrator describes what was done to the Palestinians in 1948
Jacqueline Rose
Guardian
It's subject is so painful, its execution so charged, so wildly beautiful, its moral ambivalence so incendiary and eloquent that one has to put it down every few pages ... the mighty rush of its prose, with its creative syntax, its long, fibrous sentences, its combination of impassioned, unbridled lyricism and colloquial speech, is exhilarating ... How often can you say of a harrowing, unquiet book that it makes you wrestle with your soul
Neel Mukherjee
The Times
S. Yizar's classic Khirbet Khizeh is available in a fine miniature new edition ... its original publication in 1949 was a landmark, both historically and linguistically
Jewish Chronicle
The luminous account of the clearing of an Arab village during the'48 war
and of a protest that never quite leaves the throat of its narrator as the houses are demolished and the villagers driven from their land. It is a tribute to an open society that this novella was for many years required reading for Israeli schoolchildren. Khirbet Khizet remains painfully relevant, and the moral questioning lives on.
Ian McEwan
Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech
Yizhar's extraordinary tale narrates the need, and the price, of remembering
Jacqueline Rose
Years after the tragic events it describes, Khirbet Khizeh retains its disturbing relevance ... Conveying in vivid microcosm the moral ambiguities attending Israel's establishment in 1948, [it] resonates as both historical experience and art
TLS
The entire novella, canonical in Hebrew literature, has the effect of pointing up how brutally unjust visitations of war inevitably are upon civilian populations, and how brutally coarsened soldiers must become to carry out the "operational orders" that steer, in the sanitized language of the generals and politicians who decide such things from a distance, the broad and heartless missions of armies
Mark Kamine
The Believer
There's no false note, no generic anti-war rhetoric in Khirbet, and as long as we continue to kill one another, in the Middle East or elsewhere, Khirbet will retain its poetic relevance
Words Without Borders
Astonishing
The Economist
Sixty years on S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh retains its extraordinary power ... No outline can do justice to a narrative that touches the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For anyone familiar with the 1948 war but reading Khirbet Khizeh for the first time, the story is both startling and uncanny in its predictive clarity
Ian Black
Jewish Quarterly
Written by an Israeli soldier on a sortie to forcibly expel the Palestinian villagers of Khirbet Khizeh during the 1948 war, this mesmerising and prophetic testimony is just as potent today against the backdrop of continuing conflict ...The account unfolds with a magnificent, biblical simplicity, and none of its terrible beauty is lost in this shimmering translation by Nicholas De Lange and Yaacob Dweck
Arifa Akbar
Independent
[This] poetic, anguished and uncompromising portrayal of the eviction of an Arab village was based on experience ... the lyricism of the writing has been beautifully captured by Nicolas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck
Toby Lichtig
Times Literary Supplement
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