Gabriel Piterberg

Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the pen-name of S. Yizhar, was the best of the Israeli prose writers for whom Hebrew is a first language, as distinct from those who emigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe. Though he was never a celebrity, either in Israel or internationally, his death in 2006 occasioned a handful of translations of his work into English.

Yizhar was born in 1916 in...

On the road to Qiryat Shemona in northern Israel, on Sunday, 13 August, just before the ceasefire is declared, my mobile phone buzzes incessantly: my mother would just like to know if I think that either Jews or Arabs are worth dying for. Woody Allen’s line about being brought up by a castrating Zionist mother comes to mind. My own was an active Communist as a medical student in Buenos...