Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
Understanding the Uprising
By Avishai Margalit
The Yellow Wind
by David Grossman, Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pp., $17.95
For its special issue published on Israeli Independence Day in May 1987, Koteret Rashit, a sophisticated Israeli magazine of the liberal left, commissioned a report on daily life in the occupied territories from a talented young Israeli writer, David Grossman. Grossman was the only Israeli novelist who had previously crossed the so-called Green Line in his fiction, particularly in short stories that are set in the West Bank. An Israeli-born Ashkenazi who speaks fluent Arabic—a rare breed in Israel—Grossman took a taxi to the West Bank every day for forty days. He did not go to Gaza. This fact is not accidental. Before the recent uprising the Gaza strip did not exist in the minds of most Israelis, even in the mind of a writer who took it upon himself to explore the repressed zones of the Israeli national consciousness.
Review, 5461 words
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