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S. Yizhar
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Yizhar Smilansky (27 September 1916 – 21 August 2006), better known by his pen name S. Yizhar (pronounced Samech Yizhar), was an Israeli writer and a great innovator in modern Hebrew literature. His pen name S. Yizhar was given to him by the poet and editor Yitzhak Lamdan, when in 1938 he published Yizhar's first story Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa in his literary journal Galleons. From then on, Yizhar signed his works with his pen name.
ar was born to a family of writers.
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Encyclopedia
Yizhar Smilansky (27 September 1916 – 21 August 2006), better known by his pen name S. Yizhar (pronounced Samech Yizhar), was an Israeli writer and a great innovator in modern Hebrew literature. His pen name S. Yizhar was given to him by the poet and editor Yitzhak Lamdan, when in 1938 he published Yizhar's first story Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa in his literary journal Galleons. From then on, Yizhar signed his works with his pen name.
Biography
Yizhar was born to a family of writers. His great uncle was Israeli writer Moshe Smilansky. His father, Zev Zass Smilensky, was also a writer.
After earning a degree in education, Yizhar taught in Yavniel, Ben Shemen, Hulda, and Rehovot. He served as a professor of education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement. In 1986-7 he was Visiting Writer at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and he continued to lecture regularly in Teacher Education at Levinsky College in Tel Aviv well into the late 1990s. In addition to his literary writing, he wrote opinion pieces for the newspapers.
Yizhar was a member of Knesset for Mapai. For a time he switched to the Rafi faction. In his Knesset activities, he primarily spoke out for the country's nature preservation laws.
Literary career
Yizhar's early work was influenced by Uri Nissan Gnessin. His knowledge of Israeli geology, geomorphology, climate, and flora is evident in his landscape descriptions and his emphasis on the relationship between person and place.
Yizhar's use of language is unique. With his long sentences and combination of literary Hebrew and street jargon, he draws the reader into his heroes' stream of consciousness.
From the end of the 1930s to the 1950s, Yizhar published short novellas, among them Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa, On the Edge of the Negev, The Wood on the Hill, A Night Without Shootings, Journey to the Evening's Shores, Midnight Convoy, as well as several collections of short stories.
In 1949, he published the novella Khirbet Khizeh, in which he described the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their village by the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It became a best-seller and in 1964 was included in the Israeli high school curriculum. In 1978, a controversy arose after a dramatization of "Khirbet Khizeh" was aired on Israeli television. In 1988, when Benny Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, S. Yizhar "announced himself as the man who had laid bare the original sin of the State of Israel".
In the late 1950s, his massive work Days of Ziklag appeared, comprising two volumes and more than a thousand pages. This work completely changed the outlook for Hebrew prose on the one hand, and "war literature" on the other. The work earned him the Israel Prize at only 43, one of the youngest ages among recipients of the prize.
Although he remained in the public eye as an outstanding polemicist, he broke his decades-long literary silence only in 1992 with the publication of his novel, Mikdamot. This was quickly followed by five additional new volumes of prose, both novels and collections of short stories, the last of which, Discovering Elijah, was published in 1999 and later adapted for the stage. The play won first prize at the prestigious Acco Drama Festival in 2001.
Yizhar also wrote stories for children in which he contended with the defining themes of his youth, as in Oran and Ange concerning Israeli cultivation citrus fruits; Uncle Moshe's Chariot, a memoir of the character of his famous uncle Moshe Smilansky; and others.
External links
- at the Jewish National and University Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- at the
- Elisha Porat, "", essay on the sources of S. Yizhar's work, on the site "Literatura" (in Hebrew)
- Joseph Galron-Goldschläger, editor. "", in Modern Hebrew Literature: a Bio-Bibliographical Lexicon (in Hebrew).
- "" bibliography at the Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature
- "" Haaretz obit by Yitzhak Laor, 25 Aug 2006
- Guardian obituary by Lawrence Joffe, 24 August 2006
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- Rachel Donadio on Khirbet Khizeh, The New York Times Sunday Book Review,, 29 June 2008
- Khirbet Khizeh, English translation
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