From the war in Iraq to the rumblings in Iran to the heightening tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, there are few bright spots in the Middle East these days. But one boutique Jerusalem press has cleared a space for conversation in a contentious region. Started in 1998 by a husband-and-wife team, Ibis Editions has published English translations of works in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, German and Judeo-Spanish — all relating to the Levant.
S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) wrote “Khirbet Khizeh.”
The Levant is technically the Eastern Mediterranean region, parts of the Middle East and Turkey. But for Ibis’s American founders — Peter Cole, a MacArthur award-winning poet and translator, and Adina Hoffman, a biographer and critic — it’s less a geographical region than a realm of the imagination: “an exchange across languages and national political borders” and “a meeting of all the different cultures that have existed here over time,” as Cole put it in a recent telephone conversation from Jerusalem. “That openness to all the other cultures around one, the possibilities of cross-fertilization and hybridization, is pretty much the name of the game.”
This spring, Ibis published one of its most controversial books yet, the first English translation of “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella by S. Yizhar, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, a noted Israeli writer and longtime Knesset member. Originally published in 1949, one year after the founding of Israel, the book tells of the violent evacuation of a Palestinian village by a Jewish unit in the 1948 war of independence. Yizhar, who died in 2006, was born in 1916 and served as an intelligence officer in the 1948 war. Although the novella was a best-seller in Israel when it first appeared and has been on the Israeli high school curriculum since 1964, “Khirbet Khizeh” has never been well known outside Israel. The new Ibis edition was translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck.
Set in and around a quiet Palestinian village, the fictional Khirbet Khizeh of the title, the novella is written in a slow, meditative style that weaves together biblical allusions with contemporary slang. At first, the soldiers wait for a command. “No one knows how to wait like soldiers,” Yizhar writes. “There is the ruthlessly long waiting, the nervous anxious waiting, ... the tedious waiting, that consumes and burns everything.” When the order comes, the unit begins shelling. The villagers flee. The book ends with the cri de coeur of the young soldier narrator. “This was what exile looked like,” he thinks out loud, watching the Palestinians leaving. “I had never been in the diaspora. I had never known what it was like, but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction ... exile. ... What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?”
The book resonated from the start. “For us it’s classic,” the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua said in a recent telephone interview. The novella is “a little bit naïve, simple,” he added, but it became a part of the Israeli canon because “the subject was important.” Early after its publication, “Khirbet Khizeh” created “an echo” more than a storm, he said. “There was no scandal” back then “because the society felt itself so just that it could absorb a critic.”
Not so with Yizhar’s second novel, “Days of Ziklag.” Also about the 1948 war, it stirred up controversies in Israel when it first appeared in 1958. Writing in Commentary in 1962, the literary scholar Robert Alter called the book “a strikingly revealing moral document” which laid bare “all the pained questionings and radical self-doubts of sensitive Israeli youth: about the significance of statehood, about their Jewishness and their cultural future, about the existence of any certain values by which they can live.” Younger intellectuals admired the novel, Alter noted, but the older generation criticized it as “cynical” or “nihilistic.”
After “Days of Ziklag,” Yizhar effectively stopped writing for decades and instead pursued his political career. He was a founder of the Hapoel Hatzair party, which later became part of Ben-Gurion’s centrist party. “Yizhar was very much a man of the Israeli middle,” Hoffman said. Unlike many Israeli writers, he was born in Palestine, to a family of Russian pioneers. He was “very much an Israeli writer, even before there were Israelis,” Cole said. “His mother tongue was Hebrew. ... He’s very grounded in the place.”
Although Hoffman argues it would be wrong to think of “Khirbet Khizeh” as “a protest novel,” the book has found a favorable readership among critics of Israel. Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist, oversaw the first Arabic translation of it in the late ’70s, when he was an editor at Palestine Affairs magazine. “Yizhar’s novel for me was very important,” Khoury said in a recent telephone interview. “For some Arab critics it’s very important, it’s an admission of the Israelis that they have committed horrors in 1948. ... But I don’t think this is the most important part.” In his reading, the novella is “a play of mirrors” in which Yizhar uses the Palestinians as a reflection of the new Israelis.
In 1978, “Khirbet Khizeh” caused a huge furor when an Israeli director made a television series based on the book. By then, Israel had been through the 1967 war and had voted in its first right-wing government, led by Menachem Begin. The series was almost canceled. When it was finally broadcast, it met a wave of criticism. “Even if the Fatah Information Bureau were headed by a genius, he couldn’t have come up with a better one than this,” the Israeli journalist Yosef Lapid wrote in the Israeli daily Maariv in 1978. “And even if a fifth column were operating in our television studios, they couldn’t have performed a better service to aid the enemies of our state.”
Yehoshua said he had defended the film in a discussion on live television in 1978, but said he had reservations about the book. Other Israeli writers have treated “the Palestinian problem” with far more sophistication, he said. From 1948 onward, Israel hasn’t been “taking innocent citizens” and trying “to do harm to them,” he said. “It’s a war between two peoples about the land.” The Palestinians “don’t want us for their own reasons, and we have to be there because we don’t have another place. This is the tragedy.” Even if the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are “evil,” Yehoshua added, “we cannot say that the other side doesn’t want to push us to the sea.”
To Yehoshua, the mood in Israel these days is “a kind of profound despair.” For their part, Cole and Hoffman are trying to keep the conversation alive. Ibis’s list also includes “Baghdad Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew,” a memoir of growing up in Jewish Iraq in the ’30s and ’40s by Sasson Somekh, a noted Israeli scholar of Arabic literature, which was a best-seller in Israel when it first appeared in 2003; “The Fullness of Time,” a bilingual German-English edition of poems by the cabala scholar Gershom Scholem, translated by Richard Sieburth; “A Levant Journal,” a travel diary from the ’40s and ’50s by the Greek Nobel laureate George Seferis; a Hebrew-English edition of the collected poems of Avraham Ben Yitzhak, who was born in Poland and emigrated to Palestine in 1938; and “In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura,” the memoir of a French scholar, Marcel Cohen, which was originally written in the mid-1980s in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Ottoman Jews.
Browsing through Ibis’s small list is like wandering into a literary cafe filled with a vital spirit of intellectual engagement. The books are “feeding each other, not always in perfect harmony,” Hoffman said. Like Yizhar’s novella, some venture into tricky political terrain, including “Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale,” a 1991 novel by Emile Habiby, a leading Arabic novelist, Israeli Arab and founding member of the Israeli Communist Party, translated by Peter Theroux, and “Sadder Than Water,” new and selected poems by the noted Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, who was born in 1939 and was one of the first Druse to refuse to serve in the Israeli Army.
All have intrinsic literary merit transcending recrimination and sloganeering. “Sometimes people ask us if what we’re doing isn’t slightly utopian,” Hoffman said. Cole added: “There’s nothing utopian about it from our standpoint. If they’re good books, they last and they get around in their way — and they last a lot longer than some of the political arguments here.”
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