1948

Nearly sixty years on, an old writer reaches back to 1948, when as a well-raised Tel Aviv boy of seventeen he joined the Palmach. His comrades were not kibbutz elite but kids from villages and small towns who marched toward Jerusalem singing romantic songs about death, and he fought at the Kastel, Nabi Samwil, Mount Zion and elsewhere. He sees the battles vividly yet cannot find himself in them, and keeps questioning whether memory tells the truth. Retelling episodes he has narrated all his life in their purest form, the book is mournful, funny and absurd, a reckoning with the insanity of that war and with what it cost the teenagers who fought it.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

190 pages in the original

Genres

War, Historical, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Israel, 1947–1948

First published

2010 by Yedioth Ahronoth

Author's age

80 when first published

ISBN

9789654828710 (original)

9781590176481 (New York Review Books, United States)

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