The Memory Monster

By Yishai Sarid

Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan

Starred Kirkus Review

Winner of the Bernstein Prize in 2016

Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?

In a near-future Jerusalem, harrowing omens plague the city: a desecrated altar, an unbearable stench, a rampant famine. Shaken but devout, Jonathan, the royal family’s third son, continues to hold services and offer animal sacrifices at the prophesied Third Temple, built to consecrate the founding of the new Kingdom of Judah. His father, Israel’s self-appointed king, has abolished the Supreme Court. The Torah is the law of the land, and only people of the Jewish faith are allowed in. When war breaks out and an angel of God begins to torment Jonathan, warning him of his father’s sacrilege, the foundations of the young priest’s faith—and then his world—begin to give way.

Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Third Temple plunges readers into a tempest of fanaticism, betrayal, and destruction. Where does the power of man end and the power of God begin? With chilling resonance, this vivid novel from one of Israel’s leading authors sounds an unforgettable warning amidst rising extremism.

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.

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?

By Yishai Sarid

Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan

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” (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.

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? 

Edited by Ilan Stavans

World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translation of 2020

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.

As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. In Mauritius, a journalist contends with denialism and mourns the last days of summer, lost to the lockdown. In Paris, a writer struggles to protect his young son from fear. In Chile, protesters who prevailed against tear gas and rubber bullets are now halted by a virus. In Queens, after thirteen-hour shifts in the ER, a doctor dons running shoes and makes the long jog home. 

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante’s Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection—from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Rivka Galchen, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more—detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. Together they comprise a profound global portrait of the defining moment of our time, and send a clarion call for solidarity across borders.