This morally complex novel tells the story of a conflicted Israeli secret service agent and his questionable aresenal of interrogation techinques. A connoisseur of persuasive methods–legal and otherwise–he never fails to make his subjects talk, but his tactics often fall beyond international law. His tampering with protocol culminates when two prisoners die in his custody, causing his superiors to suggest a temporary reassignment. Begrudgingly, he accepts his new mission: go undercover, posing as an aspiring novelist, and befriend Daphna, an Israeli writer. His primary target is the son of a Palestinan poet and wanted terrorist leader named Yotam, the son of Hani–Daphna's best friend. As the writer's friendship begins to awaken feelings he thought long dead, his own well-entrenched sense of right and wrong is clouded. But the habits of a lifetime in the military propel him to continue his deceptions and lay his trap for Yotam. Playing upon a dying man's sentiments, he convinces the elderly poet to arrange a meeting with his son in Limassol, a Cypriot town where the Israelis lie in wait to eliminate their target. As intrigue and tension mount, the agent will be forced to choose between his professional obligations and his newfound loyalties–compromising the mission and his identity.

Limassol

Literature & Fiction

Sarid, Yishaï

World Literature

Europa Editions

The Memory Monster

Product Description 
“A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present” (The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster is a harrowing parable of a young historian who becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. 
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2020 SELECTION 
Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. 
The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers―their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. 
With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? 
 Review 
“A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present. . . . Other writers have described well the reverberations of trauma (like David Grossman in See Under: Love) but few have taken this further step, to wonder out loud about the ways the Holocaust may have warped the collective conscience of a nation, making every moment existential, a constant panic not to become victims again.” 
―Gal Beckerman, \n“The short but powerful novel raises the question of how far we let the horrors of the past infiltrate our present-day lives. . . . The Memory Monster is not an easy book to read but its message is important to hear.” 
―Ellis Shuman, The Times of Israel\n“Numerous powerful passages evoke [the narrator’s] increasingly vivid interior experiences of what happened at the camps…. The book feels like real life in its humble details, but even more so in its implied conclusion that no ultimate actions, no final solutions, are ever truly available to us. . . . It makes a valuable contribution to the present generation of Holocaust literature. It adds to the hope that the memory of the monster may linger unto the nth generation.” 
―Jon Sobel, \n“Sarid’s incisive critique of Holocaust memorialization, the corruption within it, and the perverse forms of nationalism it can engender is courageous. . . . It unabashedly critiques the link between Holocaust remembrance culture and the tendency of certain strains of Jewish and particularly Israeli culture to overrate the centrality of aggressive survivorship to Jewish identity, and how this culture in turn nurtures the militarization, settler colonialism, and Islamophobia that combine to create the perfect storm of violent right-wing nationalism. . . . Nuanced and subtle at every level.” 
―Miranda Cooper, \n“The Memory Monster is one of the great Israeli novels to have been published in translation in recent years. Sarid’s book is wonderfully subversive, darkly humorous; riveting, challenging, and thought-provoking. The voice―captured well in English by Yardenne Greenspan―is finely balanced, teetering on the edge as the memory m

Literary

Restless Books

"A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present" (The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice), Yishai Sarid's The Memory Monster is a harrowing parable of a young historian who becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims' lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers--their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka's The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo's White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

From the author of The Memory Monster, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, comes a gripping examination of the complexities of military service as experienced by Abigail, a psychologist who becomes implicated in the dilemmas soldiers encounter both on and off the battlefield. 
The tenacious narrator of Yishai Sarid’s Victorious is Abigail, a military psychologist and single mother who has spent her career in the Israeli Army. A leading expert in the psychology of combat, Abigail helps soldiers negotiate the trauma of war while instructing commanders on best practices for killing with resilience and efficacy.\nAs her son Shauli approaches the age for military service, Abigail becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the army’s Chief of Staff and those of her patients, and the lines between her personal beliefs and her profession begin to blur. Meanwhile, Abigail’s deeply moral father, a clinical psychologist himself, openly condemns her choice to aid Israel's military machine. Yet for Abigail, it’s a patriotic duty. Only when gentle-hearted Shauli enlists in the elite and dangerous paratroopers unit are Abigail’s own mental defenses finally breached.\nAs he did in his acclaimed novel The Memory Monster, Yishai Sarid unmasks the contradictions at the heart of patriotism, national identity, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Victorious is a riveting, provocative inquiry into modern warfare that forces us to ask: what price are we willing to pay for victory?

Victorious

'A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present' The New York Times\n'Excels in its readiness to court controversy without surrendering nuance, and in place of moralising it offers questioning that's as necessary as it is unsettling.' Observer\nWritten as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, the unnamed narrator of The Memory Monster recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination, guiding tours through the death camps. The job becomes a mission, and then a dangerous obsession.\nWith great perspicuity and the bitterest black humour, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honour the suffering of our forebears without becoming consumed by it?

Contemporary

Serpent's Tail

Le Poète de Gaza

Genre Fiction

Actes-sud

Le Troisième Temple

Monster

Kein + Aber

Limassol: Roman

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