Victorious
Victorious
By Yishai Sarid
Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan
Finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
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.
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063120
Publication date: Sep 20, 2022
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About the Book
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.
As 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 Abigail sees her work as a calling and her patriotic duty. Only when gentle-hearted Shauli enlists in the elite and dangerous paratrooper unit are Abigail’s own mental defenses finally breached.
As 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?
Praise for Victorious
“In electrifying prose that captures the tensions and moral ambivalences of his society, Victorious proves an exceptionally worthy thematic successor of and companion to Sarid’s post-Holocaust novel, The Memory Monster—a disquieting work about the uses of Holocaust remembrance and pedagogy. Victorious is at once a haunting character study of a compromised woman whose healthy libido, black humor, and acerbic observations help her to cope (up to a point), and an unsparing portrait of Israel’s troubled soul.”
—Ranen Omer-Sherman, The Jewish Book Council
“Yishai Sarid's new novel about an Israeli military psychologist raises important questions about honor, loyalty, and truth. Victorious highlights some of the issues troubling contemporary Israeli society.... [and] upends what one might expect from a ‘war novel.’”
—Vivien Cohen-Leisorek, The Tel Aviv Review of Books
“A new novel by popular Israeli author Yishai Sarid explores the role of psychology in the Israel Defense Forces, how the military turns young men and women into hardened soldiers, and how they emerge from such an experience…In subtle yet sharp dialogue, Sarid brings nuance to even the horrors of dead children, writing scenes bound to garner reactions that reveal more about the reader than the author.”
—Amy Spiro, The Times of Israel
“Sarid’s frank portrayal of the emotional scars borne by successive generations of Israelis is sure to provoke strong feelings.”
“As in his previous works, Sarid exposes a troubling element of Israeli culture in an oblique and clever manner. Sarid’s portrayal shows how even the humanity built into these systems intentionally (through the presence of mental health officers, for instance) and implicitly (through a mother-son relationship) cannot redeem the fundamentally inhumane institution of war. By focusing on an element of military culture that is supposedly intended to mitigate harm and showing how it fails to alleviate—and often even worsens—that harm, Sarid’s novel reveals the hollowness of the oft-touted claim that Israel has the “most moral army in the world … A quietly scathing indictment of military culture.”
“In Victorious, [Sarid] trains the same trenchant eye on the psychology of warfare, through the bloody and fraught lens of the Israel Defense Forces…. Sarid, a former IDF intelligence officer, has given us a cool-headed glimpse behind the scenes of military life…. Yardenne Greenspan’s straightforward translation preserves the tidy style that helps give this novel its subtle power.”
—Jon Sobel, Blogcritics
“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.”
—Steve Pfarrer, The Daily Hampshire Gazette
Praise for The Memory Monster
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020
2020 National Jewish Book Awards Finalist
“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, The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“A brilliant, challenging, and uncompromising novel…. It lays bare the hard truth, often obscured by a too-hopeful vision of humanity, that Holocaust education has not led to a softer, kinder world, and ‘Never Again’ merely means ‘never again for us.’”
—Mitchell Abidor, Jewish Currents
“Award-winning Yishai Sarid’s slender, elegantly translated novel grapples with some mighty questions, among them the myriad ways in which the Holocaust might be seen to have shaped Israel’s culture, and the complex existential politics of memorialization and Holocaust education…. Where the book excels is in its readiness to court controversy without surrendering nuance, and in place of moralizing it offers questioning that’s as necessary as it is unsettling.”
—Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
“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 monster sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into Sarid’s protagonist. The Memory Monster is a novel that demands to be read and deserves our attention.”
—Liam Hoare, Fathom
“[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.”
“Sarid’s incisive critique of Holocaust memorialization, the corruption within it, and the perverse forms of nationalism it can engender is courageous…. Anything but moralistic, it leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions about the complex politics of Holocaust memorialization and its many layers of irony. 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, LA Review of Books
“The Memory Monster is shattering, brilliant, disturbing, and very important. Sarid’s background as a lawyer makes the narrator’s arguments—and his falling apart—all the more disturbing when his logic fails. How can the horrors of the Holocaust be taught, remembered? A powerful novel.”
—Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions
“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, Blogcritics
“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
“Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.”
—Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)
About the Author
Yishai Sarid was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1965. He is the son of senior politician and journalist Yossi Sarid. Between 1974–1977, he lived with his family in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanon border. Sarid was recruited to Israeli Army in 1983 and served for five years. During his service, he finished the IDF’s officers school and served as an intelligence officer. He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1994–1997, he worked for the Government as an Assistant District Attorney in Tel-Aviv, prosecuting criminal cases. Sarid has a Public Administration Master's Degree (MPA) from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1999). Nowadays he is an active lawyer and arbitrator, practicing mainly civil and administrative law. His law office is located in Tel-Aviv. Alongside his legal career, Sarid writes literature, and so far he has published six novels. His novels have been translated into ten languages and have won literary prizes. Sarid is married to Dr. Racheli Sion-Sarid, a critical care pediatrician, and they have three children.
About the Translator
© Shai Davidai
Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, and Amazon Crossing, and are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Yardenne’s writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.
Book Details
Hardcover: $24
ISBN: 9781632063120
eBook ISBN: 9781632063137
Publication date: Sep 20, 2022
5" x 7.125" • 288 pages
Fiction: Israeli / Military / Psychological / Jewish / Literary Fiction
Rights: World English, Audio
Books by Yishai Sarid
By Yishai Sarid
Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan
Finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
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.
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063120
Publication date: Sep 20, 2022