The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle: Israeli Lives

If you are looking for straightforward polemic, or boiled-down geopolitical bromides, Igal Sarna has nothing to offer you. But if you are moved by elegant, minimalist tales of real people caught up in devastating currents of history and conflict, this is a great book. I gave it a rave review in the San Francisco Chronicle when it came out. There is a kind of music in the sadness of these stories. It's a mournful, fraught music that at times becomes almost unbearable, but in a way that should be welcomed. Sarna's own experience of the madness of war and of life in Israel anchors these tales. It provides a necessary ballast, which may explain why, curiously, Sarna's account of his own glimpse of life as a soldier during war somehow falls just shy of the luminous power of the stories he tells of others. Sarna is a searcher, a man who finds in empathy for others a kind of release. He writes searingly of the Jewish experience and of the legacy of the Holocaust but does so in miniature. He understands that horror often hides in the small details, the seemingly trivial

Igal Sarna's new book of 'Israeli Lives,' recently published in a superb English translation by Haim Watzman, who also translated Tom Segev's 'One Palestine, Complete,' is a collection of fourteen heart-stopping stories of seemingly very ordinary people who, for different reasons and in different circumstances, found themselves in very extraordinary situations. Sarna is one of a small number of journalists - he writes for the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Achronot - whose stories grab the reader like mystery page-turners. Some of the people he writes about, as in 'Ze'ev' or 'The Sin of the Bedouin Boy,' arrive at tragic endings, while others, as in 'The Palestinian Officer's Palestinian Mom' or 'Heller's Late Doctorate,' bring tears of joy to the reader. But, whatever the outcome, all are about real people - names have not been changed - described with great sympathy and understanding and with a flair for good storytelling. I look forward to reading more from the pen of this engaging author.

This collection of non-fiction stories is an important contribution to understand the complex history of Israel and Palestine. It shows the conflict on the level of individuals and individual suffering. Igal Sarna has a genuine sense do discover, to investigate and to narrate the drama of individual life determined by the building process of two nations. Despite the hard and hopeless reality he finds words of a poetic quality. The book of one of the leading Israeli journalists, former tank commander and founder of the peace movement, is a "must" for everybody who wants to understand the dilemma of Middle East.Emil Zopfi, writer, Switzerland