Novel
הוא הלך בשדות
Not translated into English
Moshe Shamir · 1947
Synopsis
Uri, nineteen, the first child born at kibbutz Gat Haamakim, comes home from the Kadouri agricultural school. He finds his family in pieces: his father, Willy, back from a rescue mission in Tehran, is joining the British army and leaves the next day; his mother is living with a newcomer to the kibbutz. Uri falls in love with Mika, a young refugee from Poland whom his father brought back from Tehran and who struggles to find her place among the local-born children. He wants to join the Palmach; she opposes it, and discovers that she is expecting a child.
Context
The title comes from a line by Nathan Alterman, in The Third Mother, a poem from Kokhavim ba-hutz. Shamir, who had just left the kibbutz, attributed a deliberate delay in publication to the movement that owned the publishing house. The Cameri brought the novel to the stage as early as 1948, with Hanna Maron as Mika, and Yosef Millo filmed it in 1967, with Assi Dayan as Uri; these adaptations alter the plot and reinforced the myth of the sabra.
Who it is for
A novel of more than three hundred pages, with no French edition. It helps to know what a kibbutz was in the 1940s.
Prizes and reception
Ussishkin Prize in 1948 and an unprecedented bestseller, it is on the Israeli baccalaureate syllabus for both literature and theatre.