Between Home and the Field, Between Man and Space

The book concentrates on Preliminaries and Zalhavim, two novels published in 1992 and 1993 by S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel's best known authors. It concentrates on Yizhar's poetics of space and place and through it shows how it reveals the Israeli complex relationship between place and space. Questions of belonging and alienation, the relationship between the self and the other, the nexus between man and his place and the cracks that reside in that place, all these are present in Yizhar's novels and are a mirror and a model for Israeli society, and his poetics of space are a powerful hermeneutic tool.