Midnight Convoy & Other Stories     by S Yizhar, Translated by M Louvish Original title: Sheyyara shel hazot Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by IHT:Jerusalem Not available for ordering

Yizhar is a key figure in the ’first wave’ of Israeli fiction writers, born in Israel and first published there. A writer, member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), farmer and teacher, his stories are fed by involvement with the land of Israel in both the agricultural and political senses, and he shows an ongoing fascination with the Israeli landscape. His stories are memorable above all for their distinctive, modernist style which departs from the more realist leanings of his contemporaries such as Moshe Shamir (see the anthology Israeli Stories and The Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories, reviewed here).

This collection of two short stories and the prize-winning novella Midnight convoy, is invaluable for showing Yizhar’s development, from the slightly awkward staging of ideological debate in Ephraim goes back to alfalfa (1938) to the jubilantly anarchic tale of a violin-playing prophet in Habakuk (1960).

While the 1938 story is principally concerned with individual aspirations in their conflict with collective goals, this theme is shot through with startling reflections on the ambiguous quality of routine; that it gives tranquillity and reassurance while at the same time bringing despair at the unbending aspects of repetition: ’nothing has been forgotten, and the same wounds are still bleeding’. There are also striking descriptions of nature tamed by human forces yet still resistant, on the verge of breaking loose again, the complex lines of irrigation channels ’on whose swelling ripples danced dismembered, turbid suns’.

Midnight Convoy (1950) expands on the themes of the group and the individual, human and natural worlds. While only in the last twenty pages does anything actually happen in the strict sense of the word, the tale manages to be gripping, capturing the strange sense of solidarity between individual soldiers — people for whom one would risk one’s life — and yet also the distance and unfamiliarity; the sense of elation at being a member of the group in the silence and darkness at the same time as experiencing a violent unravelling of the self, where ’unhealed scars open in an instant’ and ’that same disquietude quivered in the air’.

Both tales depict with unusual sensitivity those rarely described perceptions and states of being which make up the most intimate fabric of daily lives: the transformation of the sense of space, distance and threat as we get to know a route or a place, the diverse qualities of silence, waking at night to an anxiety without cause, growing close to someone at a distance without knowing how the threads were woven...

The other story here, Habakuk (1960), is energetic and playful, full of asides to the reader and digressions swept aside they stray too far (’indeed it is time his story were told after all this delay’). The story mixes biblical and prophetic styles with the gleeful vision of a group of children who daily swoop down on an old man they have named Habakuk. They go to him in his basement and hear him play the violin and read the stars. But the story, which employs the most virtuoso narrative techniques of the whole collection, also has a current of melancholy running through it. This is partly conveyed through the shades of anxiety emerging in the playful questions about how to tell the story — where to begin, how to proceed, how to tell — and partly through the theme of the child now grown up who recalls his past. He is still haunted by a presence which he drifted away from but which at the same time he has not left. Habakuk is a moving and lyrical story, full of wonderment and eagerness, but which is also ’listening to... things unsaid, things that were and might have been were it not that.’

’Then silence was heard, spreading out and flowing over the warm fields to the farthest limits of the cultivated land, rising and falling in accordance with the contours, reaching out to pour itself like a soundless wind over the desolation of rolling expanses, until it became so broad and unfathomable that, without knowing when, and without any obvious connection with anything in particular, you suddenly began to feel like a lamb left behind, tiny and far off and lonely, or like a tamarisk tree in the wilderness.’ p116