Israeli author Yishai Sarid writes about what he terms Israel’s psychology and the Israeli mind. Liam Hoare speaks to Sarid to discuss his books, writing in general, and Israeli society after October 7.
‘Very bad timing’, Yishai Sarid jokes. The author’s most recent novel, The Physician from Korazim, was published in Hebrew at the beginning of March 2026 – around the time Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran targeting military installations and senior Iranian officials. Iran responded with missile strikes that have, at the time of interview, resulted in the deaths of twelve civilians in Israel.
Sarid and I are talking via Zoom in mid-March, a little over two weeks into the Iran war. ‘The streets in Tel Aviv are almost empty. Even though the government has announced that things are going back to normal, that’s not the reality’, he describes. This includes cultural life, and Sarid has not yet been able to promote The Physician from Korazim. ‘I don’t think many people are going to bookstores or have the patience to read books right now’, Sarid observes, though he isn’t worried: ‘A book is not like cheese or meat. It can wait a little bit’.
Spoken with experience. Sarid’s first book was published in 2000, though he really broke through with Limassol in 2009. His most successful work in translation has arguably been 2017’s The Memory Monster. The book is a powerful novella, written in the form of a Holocaust researcher’s report to the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem, about how history can consume and destroy a human being. The New York Times named it one of the 100 notable books of 2020 (when the English translation was published). In Fathom, I described it as ‘one of the great Israeli novels to have been published in translation in recent years’.
Sarid continues to observe the ways in which Holocaust memory plays a distorted role in Israel’s political debate. He cites an example of Likud activists who, back in 2022, claimed that certain anti-government protestors were descendants of Nazis. Sarid argues that such conspiracy theories relate to views on the Israel right that anti-government protestors ‘are helping the new Nazis – Hamas and other enemies of Israel – to achieve their goals’.
The Holocaust has become, over the course of Israel’s existence, Sarid thinks, evermore central to Israeli identity. He recalls taking part in the first delegation of Israeli high school students to visit the sites of death in Poland – a ‘pilgrimage’, as Sarid calls it, that is now de rigueur for young Israelis. ‘Instead of learning the only lesson that is taught nowadays [about the Holocaust] that we should be very strong in order that it will not happen to us again, which is a very good and wise lesson for Jews after the Holocaust,’ Sarid considers, ‘we could also learn other lessons from it, which are more humanistic and do not concentrate only on Jews or Israelis’.
The Memory Monster was followed in English by Victorious, which probed the consequences of militarisation for the Israeli psyche. His most recent book in English has been The Third Temple, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel (published in Hebrew in 2015) about a precarious religious kingdom built on the ruins of the former State of Israel told from the point of view of the Jewish monarch’s son. Sarid’s most recent works in Hebrew including Vulnerabilities (2023) and The Panelist (2024) await translation into English.
Sarid references The Third Temple as we continue to talk about Iran – a book which takes place after a nuclear strike by Iran (‘or the Amalekites, as the narrator calls them in the book’, Sarid notes) has laid waste to Israel. Sarid was an intelligence officer during his military service in the 1980s and is under no illusions about the nature of the Iranian threat. ‘I was terrified by the possibility that [Iran] would get a nuclear weapon’, he recalls, a view he says is shared by ‘the vast majority of Israelis, including left wing Israelis’.
Still, Sarid is sceptical about the way Israel is conducting the Iran war. ‘Instead of focusing on eliminating the nuclear threat, Netanyahu and the U.S. are going on this crazy adventure of destroying Tehran and destroying Iran, which will not achieve anything and is kind of replicating what we did in Gaza – destruction for the sake of destruction, which is not useful’. He adds: ‘You’re not going to liberate the Iranian people by bombing them’.
Then there’s the question of what this continuous state of war is doing to Israel itself. ‘The Iranian nuclear threat is very serious, but I think the threat posed by the atrocities that are being committed in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, every day and every night now, are more harmful and dangerous to Israel’s future, because it’s destroying us from the inside. I’m a Zionist, I’m a patriot, but what the settlers and the government who supports them are going is terrible, immoral’.
Historical memory. Militarisation. Religious fanaticism. In his novels, Sarid does not shy away from the issues central to Israeli politics and society. ‘I write about Israel’s psychology, about the Israeli mind,’ he thinks of his work. Novel writing is also, for Sarid, ‘a way for me to express my thoughts, both positive and negative, the sick thoughts I have, the unpleasant thoughts – to put them on other characters, and put some kind of shield around me’.
Born in 1965, Sarid – who studied law and public administration and worked as a prosecutor and lawyer when he began his literary career – is the son of Yossi Sarid, the conscience of the Israeli left who led Meretz from 1996 to 2003 and served turns as education and environment minister. The label ‘the son of’ was something Sarid fils carried around with him at the beginning of his writing life. Today, he doesn’t feel the same burden any more.
‘If I had a father complex, it’s over,’ he reflects. ‘I miss my father very much: both personally and at the national level for his unique voice, the way he expressed himself, and his courage. There are no such courageous politicians in Israel anymore’.
In July 2024, Meretz merged with Labor to form a new political party, The Democrats, led by former IDF deputy chief of general staff Yair Golan – an electoral attempt to save what remains of the Israeli left. Sarid supports the merger, and says of Golan: ‘I know him personally. He’s a very good person. I think in a normal political situation, he would be considered some kind of a centrist, but in Israel at the moment, because everything’s shifted to the right, he’s considered to be almost a radical leftist, which he’s not. He’s an ex-general with very classic views about security, but he [also] positive and reflects the classic vision of the Labour movement.’
‘I’m not my father,’ Sarid continues. ‘My father was a fighter. He was really brave. If he were alive today, he would oppose this war [in Iran] with all his might. He would’ve shouted like hell about what we were doing in Gaza and the needless killing there. He was a combination of a patriot and a real humanist and a left-wing leader. I’m not built like him. I’m not strong like him,’ Sarid says modestly, before adding: ‘I’m writing books’.
Sarid is politically active himself, engaging in public speaking and attending demonstrations, but is also circumspect about the level of influence writers have in today’s Israel. As he sees it, ‘the time of the big literary gurus like Amos Oz and, A.B. Yehoshua, is over. Whether because people are less willing to accept authority, because Israel has changed a great deal, because people don’t read books like they used to, and because the status of the writer as a moral leader or compass does not exist anymore’.
His latest novel, The Physician from Korazim, is set in the time of Jesus and deals with a doctor who goes out day and night to take care of the villagers near the Sea of Galilee and tries to save them from disease, suffering, and death. Sarid sees it as rather different to his previous works including 2024’s The Panellist, about a veteran journalist who, with his best years behind him, returns to prominence as a talking head on the Channel 14-esque patriotic television station. Whereas that book was written from a place of ‘anger’ and was ‘directed at what’s happening now’, Sarid describes The Physician from Korazim as a more ‘compassionate’ and ‘positive’ work.
The Physician from Korazim was written after October 7, 2023, and The Panellist was about two-thirds done on the day Hamas carried out its pogroms in Israel’s south. The Physician from Korazim is a kind of post-October 7 in the sense, Sarid explains, that writing it arose out of ‘my frustration of being unable to change the situation and portray a person who’s much better than myself – who tries his best in his small environment and with his limited abilities to do some good’. Writing has been a refuge for Sarid in recent years; ‘writing is what keeps me alive – emotionally, psychologically. Otherwise, it would be very, very hard for me’.
October 7 was ‘a terrible trauma and experience for Israelis’ that left ‘people feeling totally helpless’, Sarid recounts of that time. Its aftermath has had a negative impact on Israeli artists, including its writers, whose world has shrunk as publishers think twice about publishing translations of Hebrew novels. ‘I’ve spoken with agents who’ve told me selling new books by Israeli authors is much harder, especially to the U.K. They’re not getting explicit answers to say we’re not going to publish Israeli authors, but rather: It’s not the right time, let’s see, maybe in the future’.
Sarid himself is fortunate to have established relationships with his publishers, including his English one, Restless Books in Amherst, Massachusetts, who brought out The Memory Monster, Victorious, and The Third Temple. He continues to receive a particularly positive reception in Germany, where Vulnerabilities and The Panelist have already been translated and published. However, ‘for a young writer who has just started their career, it would be very hard right now’, Sarid acknowledges.
Israeli writers today find themselves under pressure from multiple forces, and not only hostile foreign audiences. ‘I used to get invited to tours by or in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs until a few years ago. It doesn’t happen anymore – at least not under this government’. Since October 7, Sarid has had at least one Israeli ambassador abroad scold him for presenting what they saw as anti-Israeli views at a public event, though Sarid says he takes pains to articulate himself carefully while on foreign soil.
Between these various forces, Sarid sees an Israel that has become more culturally isolated: Israeli artists aren’t being invited abroad as they used to, while foreign performers are passing over Israel, ‘which used to be always open to the world and artists’, Sarid says. It’s one of the fears that motivated him to write The Third Temple, ‘which describes this process in which Israel become more and more closed to the world, and a world which will become more distanced from Israel. It’s already happening. It’s very unfortunate. We see it in front of our eyes.’
