1948

Description

At the beginning of 1948, the then seventeen-year-old Yoram Kanyuk, a high school student in Tel Aviv, decides to leave school and take part in Israel's War of Independence. When the fighting is over, the state of Israel has been established and the author's life has changed forever. Sixty years later, he remembers exactly what happened - or didn't happen - then. "I'm not sure what exactly I remember," he confesses, "because memory plays games and there is no single truth." "1948" is the story of a young boy as told by his older and wiser self, a boy thrown into battle full of doubts, his only training a few dips in the frozen sea, a boy from a good family, a "nurse" , as his friends called him, who witnessed events that were beyond him and who lived closely a conflict in which, to this day, nothing has been resolved, except for the blood tax that was paid. 1948 is his memories, his testimony of this war, but he himself considers it a product of fiction; after all, what is memory but a story, the story of each one of us about his past? Through his personal perspective of the events, the author manages to give us one of the most profound and insightful analyzes of the war of 1948. Kanyuk with his harsh narrative tells us about the savagery, the horror, the destruction, and about the absurdity of this, but also of every war. But it also tells us about sacrifice, heroism and friendship. He and his friends by day fought side by side and by night buried their dead, knowing that, perhaps, the next night it would be their turn. "We may have been handsome and brave, but we weren't brainy. Brainy people don't choose war at seventeen or eighteen. We were children," he explains. Capturing the reader with his love and devotion for those children who existed