The Man Who Fell into a Puddle: Israeli Lives

"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.

Igal Sarna was born in 1952 and served as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He writes for the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot and was one of the founders of the Peace Now movement. He received the IBM Tolerance Prize for a series of cover stories on Iranian political prisoners in Israel, and in 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright grant and spent a semester at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. He has published, in Hebrew, a biography of the poet Yona Wallach, a novel, Tzayad Ha-Zikaron (Hunter of Memory) and most recently, Muzungu: The Story of the Airplane that Crashed on the Moon-Mountains. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two children.