The Third Temple
The Third Temple
By Yishai Sarid
Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan
Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize in 2016
Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063892
Publication date: November 26, 2024
Other buying options:
About the Book
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.
Praise for THE THIRD TEMPLE
“A masterful indictment of fundamentalist and messianic ideologies, and a probing meditation on Jewish power and powerlessness over time, the book is written with a great deal of integrity and soul—and is perhaps the most essential Israeli novel in recent memory.”
— Ranen Omer-Sherman, Jewish Book Council
“Yishai Sarid is half-priest, half-prophet: he sustains the culture even while decrying it, in books of tragic beauty that might outlive his country.”
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
“A powerful, visionary work that will leave you breathless. Yishai Sarid has written an unsettling—one could say prophetic—reflection on faith, zeal, and the consequences of ideological extremism. This is a book that feels prescient and urgent: a gripping, insightful novel that serves as both a reflection of our times and a warning for the future of religion and politics in one of the world’s most contested regions.”
— Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
“If in 2015 [on its original publication in Israel], Yishai Sarid’s book read like apocalyptic science fiction, a warning meriting consideration, reading it today, I found myself wondering if it might not be too late to avert the apocalypse it envisions.”
— David B. Green, Haaretz
“[The Third Temple] doesn’t find bloodlust a productive response to a sensitive conflict, nor does it think a Jewish State can weather today’s world while isolated from other nations. It suggests, instead, at every turn, that there is no going back to a past that was, in all likelihood, better in retrospect. Ultimately God, whether He dwells among his people or not, can’t save us from ourselves.”
—PJ Grisar, Forward
“The Third Temple is an unusual novel in that it is impressive and unlikable at the same time. But that’s its power: it makes readers face what might happen if Israel was no longer a democracy, but rather a kingdom based on biblical laws enforced by one man. . . . Book clubs that focus on difficult, serious fiction should find much to discuss.”
—Rabbi Rachel Esserman, The Reporter
“Yishai Sarid is arguably the most inventive Israeli novelist of his generation.”
— Le Monde
“The most apocalyptic, futuristic, historical, and perhaps also most realistic novel published in Israel in recent years. . . . Sarid holds the reader in thrall.”
— Haaretz
“The project is audacious, and the masterful orchestration of the story and its poetic tone are at the height of this audacity. And so are the questions it raises . . . Beautiful and chilling.”
— Patricia Reznikov, Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire
“An extreme novel that reads like a warning.”
— Biblioteca
“Sarid has emerged as a polished storyteller whose writing is lucid, almost transparent, and poetic even though he consciously avoids any poetic pretense . . . The Third Temple is well written, precise and sharp, and its dialogue with . . . Hebrew literature as well as speculative literature is deep and fertile.”
— The Bernstein Prize Committee
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
© Yasmin Sarid
Yishai Sarid was born in Tel Aviv in 1965 to Dorit and Yossi Sarid, a prominent Israeli left-wing MP and cabinet member. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces for six years as an intelligence officer, Sarid studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later earned a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is an active lawyer and arbitrator, practicing mainly civil and administrative law. To date, Sarid has published eight novels that have been translated into a dozen languages and awarded numerous accolades, including the Bernstein Prize, the Brenner Prize, and the Levi Eshkol Literary Award for Hebrew literature, and in France, the Grand prix de littérature policière. Sarid lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Rachel Sion Sarid, an intensive care pediatrician, and their three children.
About the Translator
© Shai Davidai
Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv. She was a regular contributor to Ploughshares from 2016 to 2023. Her writing has been featured in Literary Hub, Haaretz, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Two Lines, and Apogee, among other publications. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her translation of The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and her translations of Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur and the anthology West Jerusalem Noir were 2023 World Literature Today Notable Translations. She has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Book Details
Hardcover: $26
ISBN: 9781632063892
eBook ISBN: 9781632063908
Publication date: November 26, 2024
5" x 7.125" • 320 pages
Fiction: World Literature / Israel / Jewish / Dystopian / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Rights: World English, UK, Audio
Books by Yishai Sarid
By Yishai Sarid
Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan
Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize in 2016
Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063892
Publication date: November 26, 2024