Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104040 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This stellar, seamlessly translated report records the devastation that two decades of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has wreaked on Palestinians and Israelis alike. On assignment for an Israeli newsweekly, the 34-year-old Israeli novelist spent seven weeks in the area, and his is one of the most stirring, refreshing voices of moral conscience to emerge from the depths of this political imbroglio. Supporters of right-of-center Israeli policy will surely take umbrage with these timely interviews, but others will marvel at Grossman's deftly intimate penetration of multilayered issues and personalities. Thus, to his own expressed bafflement, the author discovers that an elderly and wise, tale-spinning Palestinian refugee reminds him of his grandmother and her stories about Poland, from which she was expelled. A description of refugees returning to their Israeli village evokes imagery from the biblical book of Ezekiel; the Arabic apocalyptic tale of the hot and terrible yellow wind, which seeks out those who have performed cruel, unjust deeds, and its accompanying yellow dust, becomes a symbol of the suffocating cloud of occupation that hangs above Israel. Laid bare and damned is the intransigence of both Palestinians who refuse to improve their lot or negotiate for peace and lawbreaking Jewish settlers of Gush Emunim. Evenhandedly, Grossman depicts the criminal treatment by Israelis of Palestinian hunger-strikers, the murder of innocent Jews by Arab terrorists, Israeli and Arab profiteers, an Israeli army, at once brutal and considerate, that puts an Arab town under curfew but stations soldiers to prevent plundering, and the prejudices that exist between Israeli and West Bank Arabs. Grossman's rich and eloquent call to action is aimed at his fellow Israelis who slumber atop a time bomb, unwilling to acknowledge that their moral and political destinies are intertwined with those of the Palestinians. "The situation is a mint casting human coins with opposite legends imprinted on their two sides. But the contradicting legends do not change the fact that between themfreedom fighter or terrorist; ours or theirscan be found the dark, hidden raw material: a murderer." First serial to the New Yorker; BOMC, QPBC and Reader's Subscription Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“A brilliant, searing examination of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank...beautiful, passionate and profoundly disturbing.” —Chicago Tribune“The most honest, soul-searching book yet written by an Israeli—or, for that matter, by a Palestinian—on an agony that neither of them alone can bring to an end.” —Los Angeles Times“Even the most cautious readers—and even the most hostile—are bound to learn something about the conflict that they never knew before, something that illuminates the news and the reality that produces it, something that explains what is and may yet be, something deep and achingly, damningly, true.” —The New York Times Book Review“Invaluable. It should be available alongside the road maps at Ben Gurion Airport, for it is a map of the psychological distances that now separate not only occupier and occupied, but willing from unwilling conquerors.” —The Wall Street Journal

Walter Reich, The New York Times Book Review
[All] are bound to learn something about the conflict that they never knew before, something that illuminates the news and the reality that produces it, something that explains what is and may yet be, something deep and achingly, damningly, true.

Customer Reviews

So little has changed
Grossman's message in The Yellow Wind is simple, and has been declaimed in other situations, at other times: occupation of one people by another degrades the moral and political life of both occupied and occupier. In The Yellow Wind Grossman allows both Arabs and Jews to speak their own opinions about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in their own words, although there is a significant authorial intrusion at various times. Grossman's analysis is penetrating, deep and involved. His command of the political situation of the first 20 years of Israeli occupation of the Territories is multifaceted, his perspective humane and intense, and as his forward and afterward show, the essential themes of the book are still relevant, twenty years after its publication. In the end, it is the common people, both Jews and Arabs, who lose from 100 years of conflict. The cycle of violence and fear without end becomes a kind of tragic nexus for Israelis and Palestinians which no one is capable of resolving, which only worsens with time, every attempt at a solution only highlighting the complexity of the conflict. Everyone in the region, Grossman explains, is touched by this conflict. David Grossman's son was killed in the 2006 Lebanon war. Knowing this, and then reading this book, adds to the pathos and veracity of his claims.

I'd Hoped for More Clarity
"The Yellow Wind" is outdated - already. Also, I was expecting a more objective presentation about the lives of the current generation of Palestinians, as it seemed this would be. I was interested in the book because an Israeli wrote it, reviews said he was patriotic yet sympathetic and that the stories were the human side of Palestinian life -- at least that was my impression and what I'd hoped to read.

Grossman spent time living with Palestinians. I think he feels he did put aside his own preconceptions to learn about Palestian life from Palestinians. At first I, too, felt he succeeded. The first few chapters--each chapter is a sort of short narrative of its own--were well-crafted and combined history with in-the-moment accounts.

As I continued to read on, I couldn't help but feel Grossman's own view and anger come through. His anger wasn't, to me, generalized frustration, but patriotic and with a "pro-" and "anti-" feel to it. He writes of Palestinians that they've been taught for generations, that it's so ingrained as to be nearly inescapable, to feel and express hatred. So, too, I felt, Grossman couldn't see past his own bias. He could for certain individuals, but the deeper I read the more bias I sensed. This isn't inherently negative. What is negative about this portrait is that he proclaims non-partisanship, and seems to believe he is a neutral voice, but ultimately he isn't.

"The Yellow Wind" isn't bad, not horrible, and it's readable. It's worthwhile. But distinguishing lines between fact, fiction, humanity and nationalism became a bit too difficult -- such that I questioned, for example, his factual presentation of history or even observations at times. Given this less-than-required objectivity in order to render the book what it is, and that it is somewhat dated, I'd say it's not necessary reading. I realize I disagree with the other reviews. Perhaps due to the current time in history, it takes on a different feel, and I'm certainly open to feeling differently about Grossman's work in the future. But I felt it could have offered so much more, given how it came about--Grossman, an Israeli, living with Palestinians for awhile--but perhaps that, too, is inherent to the deep-rooted emotions between Israelis and Palestinians.

A very talented writer and very poor moralist
I remember the sensation this work made when it was first published. The Israeli left , the post- modern anti- Zionist elite waved this work as a flag against Israeli ordinary citizens, soldiers and political leaders.
Grossman is a highly skilled writer. His effort to look into ' West- Bank reality' in a supposedly even- handed way is however a thinly disguised anti- Jewish and pro- Palestinian rant. It is simplistic and it time and again is guilty of taking Arab propaganda ( even when delivered by individuals in interviews) at their word. At some point it almost becomes laughable. This is when Grossman dutifully uncritically records an old ( and therefore to Grossman necessarily wise) Arab who predicts( really threatens) the Jews with destruction if they do not leave the Holy Land to the Arabs.
So skeptical, so critical so seemingly sophisticated in its relation to Jews, and so simply gullible in relation to Arabs this work marks yet another watershed in the lemming - like march of the Israeli left to the sea.