From one of Israel's leading investigative journalists, piercingly honest portraits of Israeli men and women who, in the face of brutal and desperate forces, try-often without success-to hold onto their past, their identity, their sanity, and their hope. The son of a Holocaust survivor descends into paranoia, "swept away like a demon-ravaged refugee ship"; a Bedouin boy kills his father with a stone; a Russian immigrant crashes his car-his sole, proud possession-and vanishes into the desert; a veteran is left with agonizing memories of his fallen comrades in the Yom Kippur War; a senior army officer who grew up believing himself to be an orphan discovers his mother living among Arabs in Jordan. These are just a few of the people whose stories make up this stunning book. Brilliantly, Igal Sarna lets their unexpected and harrowing tales speak for themselves, carefully weaving individual voices into a narrative of shattering power. Like no other book before it, The Man Who Fell into a Puddle reveals the profound human suffering at the heart of the process of creating the Israeli nation.

The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle: Israeli Lives

Sarna, Igal

Biographies & Memoirs

Pantheon

"Throughout my life as a journalist," writes Igal Sarna in his preface, "I have written about Israeli traumas and have seen how new lives are built on the ruins. How a new land sprouts out from a charred ground zero." In this striking collection of essays, Sarna taps his powers as an acclaimed investigative journalist to uncover the fascinating, wrenching experiences of Israeli men and women clinging to their stories, their history, their hope. Meditations on memory and personal mythology, these superb essays startle as they move, all the while offering a unique perspective on contemporary Israel.

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Vintage

A traveller from another continent crosses the Minho River from Spain for the first time and arrives in northern Portugal. Enchanted by the Alto Minho region, he determines to make a home for himself there. Aged sixty-five, with a long career as a journalist in war-torn Israel and having recently lost a bitter legal battle with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he finds sanctuary on the edge of Europe, where a river meets the Atlantic. Igal Sarna buys a dilapidated village house and with a local architect and craftsmen begins renovations. Months of tribulations are interspersed with the joy of transforming a near ruin, with its overgrown land and cowshed, into a comfortable home. He makes friends along the way and is readily accepted as an exile by a kind and generous cast of neighbours and fellow foreigners. Spurred on by journalistic instinct, meanwhile, he begins to explore the history of both house and region, untangling the intrigues behind his new home and his adopted community. In a country still marked by Salazar's dictatorship, poverty and migration, tragic stories persist. Sarna searches for answers in the haunted rooms of abandoned houses and palaces, uncovering local family secrets and the dark legacy left by outsiders: the abandoned ashram of criminal Baba Shanti, and the deserted home of a troubled Danish artist whose disappearance remains a mystery. The Stranger's Homecoming is a love story to Portugal, but also a poignant tale of exile. It tells of a man creating a new home in a foreign land; who feels that, even late in life, he can still start again and return to the old continent his parents fled over eighty-five years before.

The Stranger's Homecoming: A House in the Alto Minho, Portugal

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Signal Books Ltd

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.

Broken Promises

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

ATLANTIC BOOKS *

A House to Call Home: A Traveler Finds a Haven in North Portugal’s Lost Paradise

Community & Culture

Independently published

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Books by Sarna, Igal