The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle: Israeli Lives

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.

Igal Sarna writes for the newspaper daily Yediot Aharonot. After serving as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he helped found the Peace Now movement. He received the IBM Tolerance Prize for a series of cover stories he wrote on Iranian political prisoners in Israel, and in 1998 he spent a semester as a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Sarna has published, in Hebrew, a biography of the poet Yona Wallach and a novel, Hunter
of Memory. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two children.