• 1948
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1948

1948

by Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris

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Sixty years after fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, Yoram Kaniuk tries to remember what exactly did—and did not—happen in his time as a teenage soldier in the Palmach. The result is a touchingly poignant and hauntingly beautiful memoir that the author himself considers a work of fiction, for what is memory but one’s own story about the past? 

In this case, that past is the war in which Kaniuk fought when he was only seventeen years old. Eschewing self-righteousness in favor of self-criticism, Kaniuk’s book, winner of the 2010 Sapir Prize for Literature, is the tale of a younger man told by his older, wiser self—the self who realizes that wars are senseless, and that he and his friends, young men from good homes forming an offbeat band of brothers, were senseless to see glory in the prospect of dying young. But it is also a painful, shocking, and tragically relevant homage to the importance of bearing witness to the follies of the past, even—or especially—when they are one’s own.by Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Lit
ISBN: 9781590176481
Pages: 190
Publication Date:

Praise

Kaniuk conveys the spirit of the time in a truly unique way.
—Ynet

The best book I’ve read this year... Kaniuk’s voice is bold, clear, loving, pained.
—Haaretz

An experimentalist fond of the southerly wind of the long and longing sentence, he has rightly been compared with Borges and Marquez as much as with James Joyce.
—Joshua Cohen, The Jewish Daily Forward

One of the masters of contemporary fiction [because of] his inordinate technical skill, fecundity of incident and character, and overall intensity.
—Chicago Tribune

If the prophets of the Old Testament had read Joyce, Kafka, Marquez, Conrad and Gershom Scholem, listened to American jazz, seen Broadway musicals and heard Lenny Bruce, they might have sounded something like Kaniuk.
—Nicole Krauss, Time

Of the novelists I have discovered in translation…the three for whom I have the greatest admiration are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peter Handke, and Yoram Kaniuk.
—Susan Sontag

A writer of remarkable gifts...highly original and richly complicated.
—The New York Review of Books

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