"Beaufort: A Novel," by Ron Leshem, translated from the Hebrew

"Beaufort: A Novel," by Ron Leshem, translated from the Hebrew

Though Israel boasts a rich and vibrant literary culture and has been almost continuously at war since its founding, none of its writers -- many of them veterans -- heretofore have produced a defining novel of men in combat. Ron Leshem's evocative, heartbreaking and haunting first novel, "Beaufort," makes history of that anomaly. Moreover, his novel not only is unflinchingly realistic about war in general but also captures in an unprecedented way the character of the new, so-called asymmetrical conflicts between materially advantaged military forces (like those of Israel and the United States) and antagonists more lightly armed with everything but an implacably murderous ideology.

At 31, Leshem " a one-time journalist turned television executive " is, like most Israeli men, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. His tour of duty, however, was spent as a self-described "pencil pusher" who never heard a shot fired in anger.

What we have in "Beaufort" is less an Israeli "Naked and the Dead" than its "Red Badge of Courage." Because Leshem, like Stephen Crane, never saw combat, this is not a work of autobiography or observations but one of empathy and reconstruction " and all the stronger for that because the author has deployed both qualities without judgment.

"Beaufort" is that rare novel of deep moral concern in which sympathetically drawn and beautifully realized characters are allowed to speak for themselves.

Leshem sets his story seven years ago, as the IDF prepared to end its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Beaufort is an actual place -" a Crusader fortress set atop a craggy promontory that commands the surrounding countryside and leaves its modern occupants exposed to mortar and rocket attacks. Hezbollah initially had used the site to shell settlements in northern Israel, and Beaufort's heroic capture by elements of the elite Golani Brigade was a storied victory in Israel's first major incursion over the Litani River. Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon visited the fortress. A plaque was installed that eulogized the fallen thus: "Where do you find men like the one who was as a weeping willow, and like an ancient fortress, at the end of his road?"

Leshem's characters are the sons of a new, war-weary and ambivalent Israel " men no less courageous or resolved on their self-defense but unsure of their leaders and their direction. His narrator is a young Sephardi lieutenant, Liraz Liberti, who commands a 13-man squad occupying a Beaufort made hellishly dangerous by the resurgent Hezbollah, who monitor everything occurring in the old fort and shell it at will.

The story unfolds as Liberti's diary, an account by turns despairing, courageous, rawly sexual, bewildered and philosophical " at times wearily contemptuous of his comrades, at times movingly affectionate. It is, in other words, a convincing portrait of a small combat unit under great stress. It's also a compelling window on contemporary young Israel. Part of what engages the reader is the opportunity to learn the soldiers' slang and feel their struggle to subdue emotional experiences no young man should have to bear, like the loss of comrades. Liberti and his men play a grim game with their dead, spinning out what amount to elaborately detailed elegies by reciting everything the dead man now will never be able to do:

"Yonatan can't take his little brother to a movie anymore. Yonatan can't watch Hapoel bring home the soccer trophy anymore. He can't see Tom with the ugliest slut in Nahariya anymore. ... He'll never know how great it is when your mother's proud of you for getting accepted to college. Even a community college. He won't be at his grandfather's funeral, he won't know if his sister gets married." He won't go with his girlfriend "to Roladin Bakery in the middle of the night, when it's raining, because all of a sudden she wants a doughnut, and anyway you're a jerk, you never knew how to say no to her."

They speak a private language, with nouns borrowed and reassigned not only from common speech but also from secular Israeli piety. A soldier who holds forth pompously on the future is a "Herzl" and a busybody "a Zionist." Their patriotism is practical and naturally expressed, as when Liberti thinks about describing Beaufort to his girlfriend:

"Once, Lila asked me what exactly Beaufort is and I thought how difficult it is to explain in words. You have to be there to understand, and even that's not enough. Because Beaufort is a lot of things. ... You play backgammon for cheese toasts, whoever loses makes them for everyone -- killer cheese toasts with pesto. ... Beaufort is living without a single second of privacy, long weeks with the squad, one bed pushed up against the next, the ability to pick out the smell from every guy's boots in your sleep. ... Beaufort is lying to your mother on the phone so she won't worry. You always say, 'Everything's great, I just finished showering and I'm off to bed,' when in fact you haven't showered for twenty-one days, the water in the tanks has been used up, and in another minute you're going up for guard duty. And not just any guard duty but the scariest position there is. ... And then there's the worst situation of all: in the middle of a conversation with your mother the mortar shells start blowing up around you. She hears an explosion and then the line goes dead. She's over there shaking, certain her kid's been killed, waiting on the balcony for a visit from the army bereavement team."

Leshem's novel captures all that pathos, along with the claustrophobia of an isolated outpost " isolated even in these technologically advanced times " the casual heroism, the pervasiveness of fear. Liberti and his comrades call giving into it being "eaten." As they approach withdrawal and the planned demolition of Beaufort, these emotions build to a shattering climax. ("It's really a book about withdrawal, not combat," Leshem told Israeli writer Diana Bletter in an interview.)

"Beaufort" took Israel by storm in 2005. Published under the title "If Heaven Exists," it spent 18 months on the country's bestseller lists , nine at No. 1, and sold 130,000 copies. With Leshem's collaboration, it was subsequently adapted into an award-winning film directed by Joseph Cedar, which will open next month. Mothers of Israeli soldiers killed in the most recent Lebanon war have had passages from Leshem's novel read at their sons' funerals.

One of the wrenching things about this particular era is how asymmetrical warfare has undercut notions of "the just war" dating to the Middle Ages " moral concepts holding that even acts of self-defense are licit only if they are proportionate to the threat. How to make that calculation in the face of militantly theocratic, armed insurgencies is a central challenge of the age.

Reviewed by Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times