David Shulman
Jerusalem, November 2007
ALSO BY S. YIZHAR
Days of Ziklag
Preliminaries
At Sea
Asides
Beautiful Malcolmia
Discovering Elijah
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S. Yizhar was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, born in Rehovot in 1916. A longtime member of the Knesset, he is most famous as the author of Khirbet Khizeh and of the untranslated magnum opus Days of Ziklag. He died in 2006.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Nicholas de Lange, a professor emeritus of Hebrew and Jewish studies at Cambridge University, has translated many Hebrew novels, including Preliminaries by S. Yizhar.
Yaacob Dweck translated Haim Sabato’s The Dawning of the Day. He is an assistant professor of history and Judaic studies at Princeton University.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AFTERWORD AUTHOR
David Shulman teaches Sanskrit and other Indian languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published numerous books and is the author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine. Shulman was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Hebrew copyright © 1949 by Noemi Smilansky and Zmora Bitan Publishers
English translation copyright © 2008 by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck
Afterword copyright © 2008 by David Shulman and Ibis Editions
All rights reserved
English translation originally published in 2008 by Ibis Editions, Israel
English translation published in 2011 by Granta Books, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published by arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 2014
This volume reproduces the translation edited and published by Ibis Editions in 2008.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949321
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53556-8
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71385-0
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Ibis Editions and the translators would like to thank Nitsa Ben-Ari, Isaac Zailer, and Gideon Nevo for their generous help. Special thanks as well to the Maor Foundation, Jerusalem and St. Louis.