Yishai Sarid

The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims' lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers--their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka's The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo's White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

The Memory Monster

Siegerin

השלישי

From the author of The Memory Monster, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, comes a gripping examination of the complexities of military service as experienced by Abigail, a psychologist who becomes implicated in the moral, political, and ethical dilemmas soldiers encounter both on and off the battlefield. The fierce protagonist of Yishai Sarid's Victorious is Abigail, a military psychologist and single mother who has spent her career in the Israeli Army. She has become an expert in talking with young soldiers about the trauma of war, instructing them how to prepare for combat and to kill with resilience and efficacy. She is wholly devoted to her mission and to her country. As Abigail becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the army's Chief of Staff and those of her patients, the lines between her personal beliefs and her objectivity as a mental health professional begin to blur. Abigail's deeply moral father, a clinical psychologist himself, is openly critical of her choice to use psychology to aid Israel's imperative to kill. Yet she believes she has a duty to help the army defeat its enemy. When her son Shauli enlists in the paratrooper's unit as part of his mandatory military service, he experiences a mental breakdown during combat, and Abigail must confront the horrific consequences of war. As he did in his acclaimed novel The Memory Monster, Yishai Sarid unmasks the contradictions at the heart of patriotism, national identity, and the conflicts that have riven the Middle East for decades. Victorious is a riveting, thoughtful examination of modern warfare that brings readers into the minds of soldiers and those who train them, ultimately leading us to ask, what price is a country willing to pay for victory?

Yishai Sarid

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