Novel
The Man from There
האיש משם
Yitzhak Ben-Ner · 1967
Synopsis
At the end of 1947, a one-armed Jewish soldier, a survivor of the Shoah, steps off a train from Cairo in a small desert town near Egypt's northern border: war breaks out, the train no longer runs, and he cannot rejoin his unit of the British army. A local family, the Nawad, takes him in, and a young Egyptian doctor, Michel Saraj, engaged to Dahina, the eldest daughter of the house, befriends him out of compassion. Drawn to his hosts' daughters, he fears for his life; as news of the Arab defeats arrives, the friendship sours.
Context
Ben-Ner had published the year before a children's book drawn from a serial in Davar le-yeladim; this one, published by Am Oved in July 1967, is his first book for adults. The critic Yosef Oren praises in it a slowness made of silences, glances and brief conversations, which conveys the hero's strangeness, and a refusal of adventure in the Hollywood manner; he faults the last third for an unconvincing acceleration. Am Oved reissued it in 2015 in its series of classics, in 155 pages, presenting it as the most gripping of his books.
Who it is for
A short novel, with no French edition. It helps to know that in 1948 the Egyptian army entered the war against the new State.
Prizes and reception
Reissued nearly fifty years later in a series of classics; critics praise it as a controlled narrative, but uneven in its final part.