Victorious
By Yishai Sarid, translated by Yardenne Greenspan;
Restless Books
Israeli author Yishai Sarid gained considerable attention a few years ago with his novel “The Memory Monster,” which took a hard look at the culture of Holocaust remembrance in Israel. The New York Times called it “a brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present.”
Sarid’s new novel, “Victorious,” translated by Yardenne Greenspan (who also translated “The Memory Monster”), tackles another controversial subject: how the Israeli military hardens the men and women in its ranks to make them efficient killers, and the toll that takes on people’s psyches.
Like “The Memory Monster,” the new novel is published by Restless Books, the Amherst-New York press founded by the writer Ilan Stavans, who teaches at Amherst College.
“Victorious” is narrated by Abigail, a military psychologist in the Israeli army who has spent her career serving seemingly disparate roles: helping soldiers deal with the trauma of war while also showing commanders how they can turn those same troops into efficient, resilient killers.
As the novel opens, Abigail, a single mother, is facing a new reckoning. Her gentle son, Shauli, is now eligible for the military draft and has decided to join an elite paratrooper unit, where the training will be intense and the danger from combat high. The boy’s father is a leading commander in the Israeli army; Abigail has long insisted he never reveal his connection to Shauli.
Abigail believes in her work — the ultimate goal of having well-adjusted soldiers is “to defeat the enemy,” she says — even though her aging father, also a psychologist, has long been critical of her. “You’ve translated capitalism into military terms,” he says. “You don’t treat people. You are a servant of power.”
Her father also notices that Abigail has developed warts and lesions on her fingers — a sure sign, he says, that her life is out of balance and that’s she’s troubled by the contradictions of her work.
Abigail doesn’t deny those contradictions. In one scene, she oversees a mock but brutally realistic interrogation of a young female helicopter pilot as part of her training, and the session ends with the woman urinating on herself. Abigail comforts her afterward; she’s determined that female recruits be as tough as the male ones, but she also says of her job, “You break them down and then try to fix them … Like some psychopathic toy collector.”
As the army readies for an unspecified “major operation,” Abigail’s loneliness, her concerns about her son, and some creeping doubts about her work begin to blur the line between her personal life and her professional one. Ordered to assess the state of mind of a sniper unit that has killed unidentified civilians, presumably Palestinians, she begins an affair with the unit’s young commander — who also holds her finger on the trigger of his rifle as he shoots a man.
Sarid himself served in the Israeli army for several years, including as an intelligence officer, and he draws on that and a crisp, unadorned writing style to examine the difficult questions of patriotism, national identity, and ongoing fighting in the Middle East.
“Israel recruits young people, almost children, 18 years old, and some of them have to go to combat units and kill,” the author said in an interview last year. “They grow up like my children … They are not any different from others. You have to train them to kill. This is both fascinating and tragic.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
