Broken Promises

by Sarna Igal

A Holocaust survivor's tortured son, a Bedouin boy who kills his father with a stone, a Russian immigrant who crashes his car and vanishes into the desert, a veteran of the Yom Kippur war left with agonizing memories of his fallen comrades...In these piercingly honest portraits, Sarna describes how Israeli men and women struggle to hold on to their identity, their sanity and their hope in the face of brutal and desperate conditions. Sarna's modern-day parables of flesh and blood and soil expose just what it is like to live in the underbelly of the Zionist dream and the profound human toll exacted in the process of creating a nation.

Genres: Short Stories, Israel

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Israeli journalist, Igal Sarna, offers a series of sketches about Israelis of various ages and backgrounds. In addition, one chapter describes the experiences of Armored Battalion 46 during the Yom Kippur War. (Sarna had completed his service in the battalion the previous August.) That chapter is harrowing and heartbreaking in a particular way because it is so personal, but most of the other stories contain different sorts of tragedies. "The Kurd's Seven Beds," fortunately, lightens the mood for a moment!
Sarna is an excellent writer; his tenderness and sympathy for his subjects is appreciably evident. However, nothing is sugar-coated. Translator Haim Watzman did a splendid job. Readers will feel they are given an insider's perspective on Israeli society.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of stories about real people, damaged by or otherwise living in conflict with their pasts, whether marked by battle, holocaust, abandonment, or other forms of trauma and loss. It is written by a journalist, and this, I think, is the book's greatest weakness: its essays are written less as stories than as carefully recorded descriptions of chronological events in an individual life. And yet, as the stories unfold, there is passion, poetry and poignancy that sometimes surfaces above the journalist's formula. "Two Heroes" was the turning point for me, that stage in the reading when I thought "yes! I'll keep reading this... ." Another story "The Dead Company", written from a personal experience of a young soldier in training before and in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, was the most eloquent and moving piece in the book. The title story, "The Man Who Fell into a Puddle" gave an insightful look at the lifelong effect and ingrown sadness of an adult raised without love. Similar in tone and tragedy is the story of a lost baby, left behind during the flight from Poland in the Holocaust in the story titled "Whoever Knew Shut Up or Died". Having finished reading the last story, I feel the book deserves another, closer reading. I highly recommend.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and varied collection of short essays. Sarna deftly examines the contemporary Israeli psyche through a variety of disparate and somewhat tragic characters and their vivid experiences.



[Also published under title: 'The Man Who Fell Into A Puddle: Israeli Lives'.]

[Hal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author is part of the long tradition of journalists who write bold nonfiction books, which read as wonderfully as novels. (Although, in this case, a short story collection might be a more valid comparison.) I have been enjoying the book's unique insights into Israeli culture ! !