Lesson 5:   HAIM SABATO

READING ASSIGNMENT:
Adjusting Sights
The Modern Jewish Canon, pp. 176-188

WHO HAIM SABATO?

Haim Sabato, born in Cairo, descended from a long line of rabbis from Aleppo, Syria, was forced with his family to leave Egypt in 1957, and settled as a child of five in the Jerusalem immigrant neighborhood, Beit Mazmil. He attended a yeshiva of the national religious community and did his army service as a gunner in the tank corps. Among the reservists called up following the Yom Kippur attack of 1973, he fought against the Syrians in one of the most devastating series of battles in Israel’s history. It was this experience that he felt compelled to write about thirty years later in the autobiographical novel, Adjusting Sights.

INTRODUCTION TO STORY

Unlike the other universally acclaimed books we read for this course by some of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, this novel is only the second work of fiction by the head of a yeshiva who devotes most of his time to the study and teaching of Torah. The book won two literary prizes in Israel, but we have no idea whether its author will continue his literary career in tandem with his other responsibilities.

We read this book as an example of contemporary Israeli fiction, noting that Sabato is the first author on our list who derives from the Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic (European) branch of the Jewish people. Sephardic Jewish society did not undergo the same process of secularization and westernization that characterizes the Ashkenazic sector, although once in Israel, the two cultural streams began to merge.

This book is written in the form of an intimate memoir. Since it does not present the historical background of the conflict, readers may want to consult a book like The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich to set this work of fiction in its broader context.

What challenges the author is the knowledge that his closest friend was killed in the war, and that he must, somehow, account for that death before he can go on with the rest of his life. It is not hard to see how this intensely personal book has also been read as an attempt to confront one of the traumatic events in the life of the country. What do the living owe to those who died so that they should go on living? Sabato puts and responds to this universal question in his own affecting way.

QUESTIONS FOR ONLINE DISCUSSION

How do you interpret the title, "adjusting sights?"

Some readers have felt that Sabato missed an opportunity to have his religious narrator undergo a crisis of doubt. Do you agree that such a crisis is "missing?"

What is the relation between the individual and society in this novel? Is there a tension between the two? Is society represented by friendship, by neighborhood, by the religious community, or by the country at large?

Three officers come to the front to record the soldiers' experiences. What role do these depositions play in this book?

This book is filled with quotations and references to Jewish sources. How does this affect our reading and thinking about the events being described?