Blind

Blind is an autobiography that recounts, step by step, events in the life of its narrator. The writing is literary in style.
The pivotal, if not the most dramatic, event comes when the author tells how he was blinded by shrapnel from an exploding shell during the bombardment of an Israeli army outpost on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, while he was serving as a reservist. The initial chapters portray the ambience of the town he was born in, his boyhood, adolescence, and military service. They bring home just how radically his life changed and his emotional and spiritual struggles he endured as a result of his injury.
The reader of Blind joins Uri for his first Braille lesson, his first steps with a leader dog, and sits beside him in his university classes. He watches him play goalball and waterski on Lake Kinneret, accompanies him on his worldwide travels, watches him find his way in his workplaces, and sees how he finds solutions for administrative issues he encounters in his position as director of Israel’s Central Library for the Blind.
But book’s principal importance is the opportunity it offers to dive deep into the author’s emotions as he grapples with his blindness and navigates his family relationships. Over the years, through his interactions with his environment, he gains insight. Absurd situations in his lived experience present dilemmas that lead him to adopt rational positions that change his view of the world. His emotional impasses cause him to think deeply about how society treats blind people. Explicit precepts in traditional Jewish texts shake his faith in the Jewish religion, causing a crisis that intensifies after his eldest daughter’s husband dies in a helicopter crash during his service as an air force pilot. His ruminations on the existence of God, set against the background of his awe and estimation for his pious and god-fearing father, exacerbates his quandary, which hangs over him constantly like a storm cloud in a dark sky.
The author draws the emotional and spiritual strength he needs to overcome these crises from his work and his intellectual activity, his love for his family and nature, from his lived experience, and from his holistic view of life. Seeing people often wonder what and how a blind person “sees.” Blind enables readers to imagine that for themselves.