S. Yizhar

Template:Infobox member of the Knesset Yizhar Smilansky (Hebrew: יזהר סמילנסקי, 27 September 1916 – 21 August 2006), better known by his pen name S. Yizhar (Hebrew: ס. יזהר), was an Israeli writer and a great innovator in modern Hebrew literature.

His pen name 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 in Rehovot 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 elected to the first Knesset in 1949, remaining a Knesset member until losing his seat in the 1955 elections. He returned to the Knesset in October 1956 as a replacement for Aharon Becker. In 1965 he defected to David Ben-Gurion's new Rafi party, but resigned from the Knesset on 20 February 1967 and was replaced by Aryeh Bahir.

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 by director Ram Loevy 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 had a powerful impact on changing the outlook for Hebrew prose on the one hand, and "war literature" on the other. Although Yizhar 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. His last work, Gilui Eliahu (Discovering Elijah), set in the period of the Yom Kippur War, was published in 1999 and later adapted for the stage. The play won first prize at the prestigious Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre 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 the Israeli cultivation of citrus fruits; Uncle Moshe's Chariot, a memoir of the character of his famous uncle Moshe Smilansky; and others.

Awards

• In 1959, Yizhar was awarded the Israel Prize, for literature.
• In 1959, he was awarded the Brenner Prize for literature.
• In 1960, he was awarded the Lamdan Prize for children's literature.
• In 1991, he was awarded the Bialik Prize for literature.
• In 2002, he received the EMET Prize.
• He is also the recipient of the Ben-Gurion Prize..

In 2005, he was voted the 164th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.

External links

• Works of S. Yizhar at the Jewish National and University Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• S. Yizhar on the Knesset website
• Elisha Porat, "From the Edge of the North to the Edge of the Negev", essay on the sources of S. Yizhar's work, on the site "Literatura" (in Hebrew)
• Joseph Galron-Goldschläger, editor. "S. Yizhar", in Modern Hebrew Literature: a Bio-Bibliographical Lexicon (in Hebrew).
• "S. Yizhar" bibliography at the Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature
• "'It is a filthy war, this'" Haaretz obit by Yitzhak Laor, 25 Aug 2006
• Yizhar Smilansky Guardian obituary by Lawrence Joffe, 24 August 2006
• English excerpt from Yizhar's autobiographical novel "Preliminaries"
• Rachel Donadio on Khirbet Khizeh, The New York Times Sunday Book Review,"Cultural Crossroads of the Levant", 29 June 2008
• Khirbet Khizeh, English translation [1]

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of Bialik Prize recipients