Amir Harash and Yosef Haim Brenner. Shekhol ve-Khishalon ve-Zombim (Breakdown and Bereavement Zombies). Am Oved, 2025.

What would happen if you took one of the founding novels of modern Hebrew literature and added zombies?

That is what Amir Harash does in Shekhol ve-Khishalon ve-Zombim (Breakdown and Bereavement Zombies, Am Oved, 2025), a rewrite of Yosef Haim Brenner’s famous Shekhol ve-Khishalon. 

The novel stars Brenner himself as a character and narrator, living in a Yishuv much like the one Hefetz lived in, only filled with the walking dead. While the idea sounds like a joke, the book has been taken seriously, winning one of Israel’s most important literary award in 2025, the Sapir Prize.

A horror mashup is not a brand new idea. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies started the genre by putting flesh-eating monsters into Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance. The humor comes from the incongruity between Austen’s world of manners and the bloody violence of zombie combat.

Harash does the same thing to Brenner.

Many Israeli reviewers have interpreted Harash’s zombies as a story of Zionist revival gone wrong. The zombies could be a metaphor for........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)