The narrative begins in the morning and simply describes the Israeli soldiers doing a job, surprising the village, rounding up the villagers, putting them on the trucks. The soldiers make jokes, talk about family, break for lunch -- it's all routine, and the routine insulates them from thinking too hard about what they are doing. The first person narrator finds himself, nonetheless, thinking about what he is doing, in long, somewhat Thomas Bernhard-like sentences that wind between observation and reflection, bumping into realizations that the narrator backs away from, then is led back to even more forcibly. Here he gazes over the villagers' fields:
Some plots were left fallow, and others were sown, by design, everything was carefully thought out, they had looked at the clouds and observed the wind, and they might also have foreseen drought, flooding, mildew, and even field mice; they had also calculated the implications of rising and falling prices, so that if you were beset by a loss in one sector you'd be saved by a gain in another, and if you lost on grain, the onions might come to the rescue, apart, of course, from the one calculation they had failed to make, and that was the one that was stalking around, here and now, descending into their spacious fields in order to dispossess them.
The translation by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck is that dry, that sober, throughout, and the narrative has the same understated plainness. The narrator murmurs, but does not make any great gestures. The similarity of the rounding-up of the Palestinians to the rounding-up of Europe's Jews only a few years previously is visible, but not melodramatically underlined.
The novella has been well-known, though controversial, in Israel for a long time, but had to wait until 2008 for it English translation. Hmm. Well, we can be glad it's here, for many reasons.
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