New Show: Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar

[Burning Books]

The latest Burning Books episode, Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar has just been released.

This original series is produced by Litopia and hosted by Eric Beck Rubin. From recent débuts to classics, fiction to non-fiction, memoirs, philosophy, science, history and journalism... Burning Books separates the smoking from the singeworthy, looking at the pleasures (and pains) of reading, the craft of writing, the ideas that are at the heart of great novels as well as novels that try to be great… but don’t quite make it.

You can subscribe to the show through iTunes or any other podcast app, which will ensure you never miss an episode. More info about the show, and a full list of all back episodes, here.

Feel free to add your thoughts below.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Excellent. A novella about the Nakba, with the focus on one day in one village and one Israeli soldier's responses to what he witnessed. To criticise Israel's actions in Gaza and Jerusalem is not to be made synonymous with anti-semitism, for that is to make a claim that a state can claim the right on principle, to be considered exempt from criticism. There are rabbis who are clearly very disturbed at a current drive to silence critics of Israeli policy by means of a conflation of Zionist policy with Judaism. I was ready to feel angry, and I did, but not at the author of this book Khirbet Khizeh, and definitely not with Eric's delicate and empathic presentation. It's possibly even rather daring and brave of him in this current climate, but I hope not and I trust he escapes any trolling.

I especially appreciated his closing remarks about writers deriving power from Nature, in writing about nature. To name a thing is to create it, and that, he remarks, wasn't that God's job once upon a time?