Victorious

Description

From the author of The Memory Monster, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, comes a gripping examination of the complexities of military service as experienced by Abigail, a psychologist who becomes implicated in the dilemmas soldiers encounter both on and off the battlefield. The tenacious narrator of Yishai Sarid's Victorious is Abigail, a military psychologist and single mother who has spent her career in the Israeli Army. A leading expert in the psychology of combat, Abigail helps soldiers negotiate the trauma of war while instructing commanders on best practices for killing with resilience and efficacy. As her son Shauli approaches the age for military service, Abigail becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the army's Chief of Staff and those of her patients, and the lines between her personal beliefs and her profession begin to blur. Meanwhile, Abigail's deeply moral father, a clinical psychologist himself, openly condemns her choice to aid Israel's military machine. Yet for Abigail, it's a patriotic duty. Only when gentle-hearted Shauli enlists in the elite and dangerous paratroopers unit are Abigail's own mental defenses finally breached. As he did in his acclaimed novel The Memory Monster, Yishai Sarid unmasks the contradictions at the heart of patriotism, national identity, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Victorious is a riveting, provocative inquiry into modern warfare that forces us to ask: what price are we willing to pay for victory?

Yishai Sarid was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1965. He is the son of senior politician and journalist Yossi Sarid. Between 1974-1977, he lived with his family in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanon border. Sarid was recruited to Israeli Army in 1983 and served for five years. During his service, he finished the IDF's officers school and served as an intelligence officer. He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1994-1997, he worked for the Government as an Assistant District Attorney in Tel-Aviv, prosecuting criminal cases. Sarid has a Public Administration Master's Degree (MPA) from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1999). Nowadays he is an active lawyer and arbitrator, practicing mainly civil and administrative law. His law office is located in Tel-Aviv. Alongside his legal career, Sarid writes literature, and so far he has published six novels. His novels have been translated into ten languages and have won literary prizes. Sarid is married to Dr. Racheli Sion-Sarid, a critical care pediatrician, and they have three children. Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin's Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Yardenne's writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.

Praise for The Memory Monster: "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 "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 "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." -Publishers Weekly "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)