NOVEL

Am Oved, 2015 - Hebrew

Altneuland Press, November 2026 - German

Additional Languages:  Editions du Seuil, 2018 and Points, 2020 (French); Editorial Acantilado, 2019 (Spanish); Quaderns Crema 2019 (Catalan); ; Giutina Editore, 2022 (Italian)

Winner of the Sapir Prize for Best First Novel; nominated for the Prix Femina (Foreign Fiction); a global literary sensation, translated into French, English, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian.

A poignant journey into the heart of transgenerational trauma. In his award-winning debut novel, Itamar Orlev confronts the violent legacy of the past and asks: Can we ever truly escape the people who shaped us?

More than twenty years after fleeing his father’s brutality, Tadeusz returns to Poland. Having left the country as a boy to seek refuge in Israel, he is now drawn back to the shattered past he had tried to repress. In a retirement home for war heroes in Warsaw, he visits his father Stefan, the “Bandit”: a former Polish partisan, a heavy drinker in decline. For Tadeusz, Stefan is both the tyrant who destroyed his childhood, and at the same time the only person whose approval can make him feel whole again. Together, they embark on a journey through the Polish countryside and return to the village where Stefan was born. As they travel, Stefan's story unfolds: his years as a partisan during World War II, the violence he endured, and the revenge he took.

Darkly humorous, unflinching, and deeply moving. “Bandit” masterfully explores the moral gray areas between victim and perpetrator, hero and tyrant and the shadows passed down from one generation to the next, delineating the perpetually complex relationship between fathers and sons.