A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace

By Noa Baum

An Israeli woman writes about growing up amid war and ancestral trauma and later building a friendship with a Palestinian woman in America.

Israeli storyteller Noa Baum grew up in Jerusalem in the shadow of the ancestral traumas of the holocaust and ongoing wars. Stories of the past and fear of annihilation in the wars of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s shaped her perceptions and identity. In America, she met a Palestinian woman who had grown up under Israeli Occupation, and as they shared memories of war years in Jerusalem, an unlikely friendship blossomed.

A Land Twice Promised delves into the heart of one of the world’s most enduring and complex conflicts. Baum’s deeply personal memoir recounts her journey from girlhood in post-Holocaust Israel to her adult encounter with “the other.” With honesty, compassion, and humor, she captures the drama of a nation at war and her discovery of humanity in the enemy.  

Winner of the 2017 Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award, among others, this compelling memoir demonstrates the transformative power of art and challenges each reader to take the first step toward peace.

Praise for A Land Twice Promised

“A penetrating, introspective memoir that mines the depths of the chasm between the Israeli and Palestinian experiences, the torment of family loss and conflict, and the therapy of storytelling as a cleansing art. You will not think in the same way at the end of this captivating book as you did at the beginning.” —David K. Shipler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944822095

Noa Baum

Noa Baum is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning storyteller and author. Born and raised in Jerusalem, she presents internationally to diverse audiences, from the World Bank and universities to schools, festivals, and congregations.  

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Praise for A Land Twice Promised:

An Israeli Woman’s Quest for Peace

"A Land Twice Promised is more than a coming-of-age story; it is a coming-to-consciousness story by an Israeli woman who clearly loves her country. But because Noa Baum is a storyteller through and through, her love of country comes to be far more nuanced as she uncovers and starts to retell the story of her Palestinian friend. This beautifully written book helps us understand that truth is never black and white. Baum guides us though the shades of grey with love and wisdom."

—Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, Senior Fellow, Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and author of Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World

I couldn’t put it down! This engaging book offers readers a riveting look into the backstory, pivotal experiences, and creative process of a storytelling artist whose work sparks important political questions and encourages listeners’ empathy for multiple points of view.

—Heather Forest, PhD, author and storyteller

"A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman’s Quest for Peace is an extraordinary book. I hope it becomes a classic. It’s beautifully written, funny, sad, and, mostly, it’s powerful. If we could be as imaginative, compassionate, and open as Noa Baum, we would break down walls and find peace."

—Jay O’Callahan, writer, storyteller, and NEA Recipient, commissioned by NASA

"A Land Twice Promised is a real story of transformation—of seeing the humanity in the other and of realizing that we are destined to share this land; otherwise, we will just share more graves. For those who know little of Israel and its history, you will get a glimpse through the eyes of someone real of just how complex life here is, of living through peace agreements which led to more bloodshed, of wars where no one won. But also of relationships that can be mended. I was left with a sense of hope."

—Robi Damelin, Spokesperson for International Relations, The Parents Circle-Families Forum

A memoir about coming of age emotionally and politically, told as only a master storyteller could. Absolutely riveting!

—Ira P. Weiss, PhD, Jewish Islamic Dialogue Society

What makes a soulfully creative and compelling storyteller? I was struck by Noa Baum’s exceptionally well-told journey. With her indomitable passion and spirit, she grows into womanhood in Israel, encompassing with exquisite compassion all the many forceful voices of her life.

—Hedy Schleifer, Director of Tikkun Learning Center

Noa is a storyteller, and her stories are not fictional fables but true living personal tales of a land twice promised. I was deeply moved to understand the tragic memories of the Jewish people and their longings for a safe homeland. But I also understand by personal experience the deep unjust sufferings of the Palestinian people and their humiliations, frustrations, and hopelessness to the present day. Perhaps through such conversations and storytelling, there can be hope and peace. Highly recommended.

—Patricia Rantisi, author of Miriam’s Legacy and My Name Is Musa

Noa Baum is a masterful storyteller, and she has an important story to tell. Her message is an inspiration and a pathway to all who yearn for peace.

—Gerda Weissmann Klein, author of All but My Life and Holocaust survivor

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Copyright © 2016 by Noa Baum

All rights reserved.

Published by Familius LLC, www.familius.com

Familius books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases, whether for sales

promotions or for family or corporate use. For more information, contact Familius Sales at

559-876-2170 or email [e-mail].

Reproduction of this book in any manner, in whole or in part, without written

permission of the publisher is prohibited.

Special thanks to Bill Harley for use of his song lyrics; to David P. Stern for use of his translation of Nathan Alterman’s The Silver Platter; to Rachel Tzvia Back for use of her translation of Tuvia Ruebner’s This Is Not What We Wanted, from In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (2014), and of Lea Goldberg’s A Nameless Journey, from Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (2005); to Naomi Shihab Nye for use of her poem Jerusalem; to Fady Joudah for use of his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Counterpoint: For Edward Said; to Marcela Sulak for use of her translation of Orit Gidali’s Closing In; to Barbara Harshav for use of her translation of Yehuda Amichai’s God Takes Pity on Kindergarten Children; and to Adam Czerniawski for use of his translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s Big Numbers.

Some names, places, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the people mentioned in this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2015955937

Print ISBN 9781942934493

Ebook ISBN 9781944822095

Hardcover ISBN 9781944822101

Printed in the United States of America

Edited by Brooke Jorden and Sarah Echard

Cover design by David Miles

Book design by Brooke Jorden and Lindsay Sandberg

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

To our children, Maya, Ittai, Tammer, Nader, and Ramsey: may peace and justice be your guiding light.

. . . And the effort, when the night gives too many stars and not enough luminaries of truth, not to insist on the answer.

—Orit Gidali, from Closing In, English translation by

Marcela Sulak

Author’s Note

I have never met anyone who was not in favor of peace.

I grew up in Israel and have never met anyone, Israeli or Palestinian, of any shade of the political spectrum who was not in favor of peace. All human beings long for peace; every faith tradition prays for peace; every government proclaims a desire for peace. But we have no peace, neither between Israelis and Palestinians nor, for that matter, in so much of the world. So why don’t we have peace already?

This book does not presume to have any answer to this question. I do not attempt to give a full or even partial account of the history of the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wiser and more learned scholars than I have captured and continue to capture our mercurial history.

This book is my attempt to shed light on how people experience and remember history. Not all people—just me and one Palestinian woman I met in America and our families. It is the story of our friendship and of my becoming a storyteller and using the art of storytelling as a peace-building tool.

In an attempt to explore the elusiveness of peace, I have gathered clues from memory’s secret hideouts to create stories. I try to give shape to the subtle and mysterious shifts in perception on my journey, from the secure black-and-white narratives of my childhood to the uneasy place of complexity, where multiple narratives, ambiguity, and contradictions reside.

I also try to reconstruct my creative process as a storytelling artist to reveal the transformative power of my art form. The art of storytelling is an ancient and re-emerging performance art form that is not just for children. It borrows from principles of traditional storytelling as well as uses tools from theater to evoke a story in the audience’s imagination. The art of storytelling has seen resurgence in the past few decades in the United States and throughout the world.

My hope is that this exploration will encourage you to deepen and expand your listening to the other. I hope it will inspire you to look at your own quest for peace and seek out more stories and encounters with those you see as most different from you or even as enemies.

Contents

Author’s Note

Beginnings

What I Know about THEM

Names on the Wall

Army Days

I’m Not into Politics

My Brother’s Keeper

Detours

Uncharted Territory

The Meeting

Starting to Talk

A Decision Unfolds

Putting the Pieces Together

Life Gets in the Way

A Work in Progress

Stories from the Road

My Mother’s Candle

On Despair and Hope

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Land Twice Promised

Chapter 1

Beginnings

What intrigues me in my life is: How did I come to be what I am? How did this person develop, this I whom I rediscover each morning and to whom I must accommodate myself to the end?

—François Jacobs

It is told that a rabbi once ordered a new pair of pants for the holidays from the village tailor. Days and weeks went by, but the pants did not arrive. The rabbi began to worry he would not have the pants in time for the holidays. Finally, on the very last day, the tailor arrived with the pants.

The rabbi thanked him but asked in great wonder, Can you please explain this to me—how is it possible that it took God only six days to create such a vast and complicated world like ours and it took you more than six weeks to make one pair of pants?!

The tailor looked at the rabbi and smiled. Rabbi, how can you even compare? Take a look at the mess that God made! And then take a look at this fine pair of pants!

I’m not here to fix the mess that God made, but in an effort not to insist on an answer, here is my story.

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I was almost seventeen years old. We were in Paris for my father’s sabbatical, and I had saved all my babysitting money and lobbied hard to go to London for two weeks with a friend without adults. In my journal from August 1975, I wrote:

It’s been ages since I wrote. And so much has happened! We were at the wax museum and the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace and at the Tower and all the banal places of your average tourist. One of the most wonderful experiences was on Sunday: we met a group of Israeli teenagers who are here as part of an international program of young science scholars. Together with them, we went to Hyde Park to listen to the Democracy.

There was all sorts of nonsense and one interesting speaker who talked about anarchism. His speech was nice and interesting and even logical, but completely not practical.

Then a large crowd gathered around a stage of an idiotic Palestinian that spoke with no intelligence and no shape or form and just babbled nonsense! There were more Israelis there than Arabs, and they started yelling at him and answering him furiously. It was raging and lively; suddenly, there were thousands of Israelis and Jews. At a certain point, they saw that there was no point in arguing with him at all, in particular since the Israeli English is pretty lame. So we started to sing. And the song turned into a huge roar of dozens of enthusiastic Israelis, and the roar became an exciting Horah dance. Everything was spinning in rhythm and enthusiasm while the defeated speaker stood astonished on the stage, making last attempts to talk, but his voice was drowned in the sea of roars: "Am Yisrael Chai! The Israel Nation lives!"¹ And all that remained was a handful of silly Palestinians with their leader and the flags and the excited, boisterous, dancing crowd . . . It was truly an experience. I was so excited and moved. Suddenly, one felt that one was a people. That you DO belong and everyone IS together, ultimately united.

I don’t remember much of what that Palestinian man said. It’s not as if I was actually listening to him. There were things like The Zionist oppressors and Free Palestine! I remember his passion and anger, his flag held up high. The mere association of Zionism with oppression and occupation meant only one thing: that my home, my Israel, all that I know and love, should not exist.

What I do remember is the fear that swelled up immediately as indignation and righteous anger and erupted with that elated sense of belonging—singing and dancing with the roaring crowd. I remember the indescribable ecstasy: that feeling you get when the marching band plays or the national anthem is sung or you see your flag fluttering in the breeze. The goose bumps crawling all over when your team wins or your country earns a gold medal at the Olympics. The overwhelming, gushing, welling up of emotions too big for words that only the brass and drums can express when you’re seventeen and more than anything want to belong. It was so good to feel that pride. My people. My nation. MINE. We were ONE.

That encounter in Hyde Park validated everything I knew about who I was, everything that I knew and breathed and heard all through my childhood growing up in Jerusalem.

From the moment I can remember, I knew these words:

They hate us! They don’t want us here. They hate us.

But why?

No one ever had a satisfying answer. It was the question that haunted me all through my young life.

My ima (mother in Hebrew) shrugs. "Who knows? Since when does anyone need a reason for hating Jews? The Arabs hate us just like the whole world hates us. It’s the reality. Their mufti incited them. He went with Hitler; yimach shmo. May his name be erased." She was referring to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the most prominent leader of the Arabs of the land of Israel in the 1920s and ’30s. Under the British mandatory rule during World War II, he sided with Germany against the Allies.²

When my maternal grandmother, Mina, hears the word Arab, she spits three times to ward off the Evil Eye and says, "Tfoo . . . yimach shmam, may their name be erased. They took my Yaakov, yimach shmam." Yaakov was her son. He’s gone, killed in the War of Independence of 1948 when he was twenty-two years old. He fell. He is our hero.

My mother says, You can never trust them. An Arab will stick a knife in your back. What can you do? That’s who they are. I have seen it, believe me, more than once or twice . . . that’s what they do.

We were never taught to hate them. It’s only that they hate us, and what can we do? We have no choice but to defend ourselves.

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I grew up in a state that came into existence only ten years before I was born. I exist because the British mandate ruling that place (called Palestine before 1948) allocated a certain amount of certificates for European Jews to enter. My paternal grandfather, Kamil Kohn, was a devoted Zionist who saw the writing on the wall and managed to get certificates for his wife and his two boys—my father, Rueven, who was seventeen at the time, and his younger brother, Mati—to leave Prague in 1939. They left March 7, exactly eight days before Hitler entered Prague.

Before the War, the families of my Grandfather Kamil and my Grandmother Zdeni had lived in Czechoslovakia for more than three hundred years. They lived in a small town on the outskirts of Prague where my Savta (grandmother in Hebrew) Zdeni was the only pediatrician for miles around and helped bring into the world most of the babies there. The people begged her not to leave. The people promised that they would protect her and her family and that no one would give them over to the Germans if they came. But she followed her husband and left. When they arrived in Israel, she received a letter from her maid telling her that the names of the entire Kohn family were at the top of the list of names of Jews requested by the Germans and pinned up on the wall at the church. My grandfather couldn’t get his mother and two sisters out. They were on the list and perished. Saba (grandpa in Hebrew) Kamil died in Israel when I was two years old.

In 1936, my maternal grandfather, Mordechai Rosenberg, bribed his way out of Hitler’s Germany, leaving all his properties and businesses behind. My mother, Tzipporet, was seven years old when she came on a ship to Haifa. But my grandfather could do nothing for his wife’s large family: my Grandmother Mina’s parents, her two brothers and two sisters and their spouses and children, her many aunts and uncles and almost forty cousins—all stayed behind. My parents and grandparents escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, but everyone else in their extended families perished. Saba Mordechai died in Israel when I was four years old, but I never met him.

I am, because of those who managed to escape and those who rose up from the ashes, the fallen heroes whose blood was soaked into the land, and the sacrifices of so many who have brought the miracle of Israel into being.

When I was little, I used to lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling, the What ifs racing through my mind: What if Saba Kamil hadn’t managed to get those certificates? What if Saba Mordechai hadn’t been so rich in Germany before the War? My being is such a huge almost never. It makes my heart clench in fear, and I can feel it in my stomach. I put myself through this private torture ritual time and time again. I just can’t stop. I would not be here if they had stayed.

I know this. I breathe it. It is part of being Israeli.

Every year, we have Holocaust Memorial Day. In elementary school in the early ’60s, it is the special day when we all go to school in blue and white—the colors of our flag. I wear a white shirt and blue skirt. We gather on the cement slab that is the school playground, gymnastics square, soccer field, and basketball court all in one. I stand with my class next to all the other classes—first through eighth grades. We are all lined up in perfect straight rows, in a misdar, a special ceremonial assembly, facing the makeshift stage with the side of the building as a backdrop. The torch is lit. We watch the flames, tongues of orange and red chasing each other into the shimmering blue haze of the hot day. It is May in Jerusalem.

Kalman, the vice principal, calls out with his voice booming like a cannon, "Hamisdar y’aavor l’dom! The assembly will stand at attention!" We stand straight and tall and very serious. Then the siren emerges, a primal moan from some unseen belly of the world, escalating to a loud, high-pitched wail that lasts a lifetime of 120 complete seconds. The entire country comes to a standstill. Out in the streets, the cars stop; everyone walking in the street stops. At the stores, people stop everything they’re doing, even stop talking midsentence. An entire nation united, we stand at attention in silent remembrance of the six million who perished. We do this every single year as One.

When I was very young, in first and second grade, I was mortified during most of that assembly. What if I get an itch? What if I move and the teacher scolds me?

In third and fourth grade, I worried, too. It was so serious, and we were supposed to be sad for all the children and mothers and fathers and grandparents who died. Of course, I was sad, too, though I couldn’t really imagine it, but it was so hard not to move and keep a straight face for soooo long! And some of the boys snorted and giggled, and everyone knew that laughter was catchy. What if I break down and giggle or smile? Oh, the sheer, immense horror of that thought was enough to keep me breathlessly still and solemn faced.

The oldest kids, the eighth graders, are up on the makeshift stage. They are part of the ceremony, reciting poems in clear, dramatic voices:

Al da’at einai sherau et H’shchol . . .

By the eyes that witnessed bereavement . . .

Nadarti haneder lizkor et hakol,

I contracted the vow to remember all,

Lizkor vedavar lo lishkoach.

To remember—and nothing forget.³

The words are engraved in my soul, echoing, reverberating year after year:

We will never forget.

We will always remember.

Never again will we be led like lambs to the slaughter.

We have risen from the ashes.

"Am Yisrael Chai!"

The nation of Israel lives! We are here!

When TVs arrived in the ’70s, the images of the Holocaust were no longer the abstract imaginations of our minds. They now materialized in front of our eyes: mountains of shoes, spirals of ominous barbed wire stretching into eternity, and piles of corpses and bones—huge, tall piles that no imagination can create. Children with skeleton faces and gigantic, hollow, dark eyes. Skin and bones! declares the grave voice of the narrator on the screen.

Unspeakable horrors in black and white for twenty-four long hours nonstop every year, my ima propped up in her bed, eyes glued to the screen, sighing, clutching her bathrobe to her chest, and wiping away tears. "Oish . . . ach! Oiy . . . oishvey, nora, nora. Terrible, terrible . . ."

My mother sometimes tells stories of her early childhood in Germany. The large house with the sixty rooms and the servants they had; the automobile and the house in the country where they gathered blackberries in the summer; the nursery full of toys, particularly the large toy pram that she had for her special porcelain doll that she took for rides all through those endless rooms—all of it was left behind. She came with a suitcase, no dolls, no toys, to the harsh light and the sands of Tel Aviv. They lived in a one-room shack, all four kids and her parents, and were often hungry.

No one knew what had happened to her mother’s, my Grandmother Mina’s, family. They were all left behind. I don’t know if my grandmother ever knew. She never talks about it. She only sighs, "Ach, they’re all gone. The Nazis took them; yimach shmam. May their name be erased."

Sometimes they come for me, too. At night, I dream of Nazis with their black boots stomping on our stone path, climbing the stairs, banging on the door of our apartment. They’re coming to take us away. All through my childhood, I get these night invasions of the black boots because I know they can come and take you! Regular people just like us sitting around the dinner table, ima and aba, mother and father, children like me, and grandmothers and old people with long beards.

The Nazis can come at night and take you away. I know this. I breathe it. It is a deep, existential knowledge that such things can happen.

It has happened, and it can happen again because they hate us.

The Nazis hated us, and the Arabs hate us still.

Ach, look at them . . . can you believe this? My mother’s eyes are bright with fervor at the injustice of it. "After all that our people went through, all that slaughter and pain and suffering . . . What are we? What?! Ud mutzal m’esh, an ember saved out of the flames.⁴ And what are we asking after all? What?! Not much—just this little godforsaken corner of the world, a small refuge to call our own. But no, no! Even here, they won’t let us live in peace. Seven countries they have! Seven countries they can go to. SEVEN! But we have nowhere else to go. We have no other home, just this little piece of land, and all they want is to throw us into the sea."

The Arabs hate us and want to throw us into the sea. But we are the survivors. We have Our Boys, who protect us and guard us. Our special army made of all the excellent boys who turn eighteen. We are strong now—not like it was for my grandparents. Our small nation will persevere against all odds, just like it has from the start.

In 1948, the small few overcame all the odds and defeated the seven countries that attacked us. My mother tells many stories about 1948—the war that brought us our independence, a Jewish state in a Jewish homeland. My mother tells many stories about her brother who was killed in that war. He is THE hero, a mythical figure larger than life. He is the hero who died and gave me the state on a silver platter so that I can live in security and have a country to call my own.

We will never let them come and take us away again. I know this. I breathe it. It is part of being Israeli.

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On Saturday mornings, my brother and I snuggle against our ima in our parents’ bed. I’m eight, my brother five, and my sister a toddler; she sometimes joins in, too. It is our favorite ritual.

Tell about the pictures, we plead, eyes shining with anticipation as Ima brings out the pile of photo albums. First, we go through our baby pictures and she tells about how we were born and recites all the cute and brilliant and very silly things we said and did, and we roll on the bed shrieking with glee.

Then I lift the large green album with the curly gold letters

PICTURE ALBUM

on the front. This is her album filled with class pictures and pictures from before she met our father. Tell this one.

My mother props up the album against her knees; we peek in at the black pages with little heart-shaped corners holding gray and sepia photos. There are only a few pictures of the boy with the dreamy eyes wearing the Eastern European casket hat like the children in the Holocaust Memorial Day pictures. There are even fewer of the young man he became, with a smooth, serious face and the hat of a religious man.

My mother points a manicured finger:

Look at him. He was something special, my brother. Nobody had such a brother . . . ach! He loved me so! And I loved him more than anyone in the world. We were so poor after my father lost everything coming here. We lived in one room among the sands of Tel Aviv for years. Hungry. Look at my eyes. I was so hungry, but I never complained, and we never talked about it. We stayed respectable, and no one knew our shame.

In my mind, my mother is like the Little Match Girl from that Hans Christian Andersen story I loved so much. I imagine my mother as a young girl in rags. Like the little match girl, she too had so little growing up, yet her heart was pure and good. She was hungry and suffered, but she was always smiling and so full of life so no one would know.

She sighs and caresses the faded photos. Look at him . . . so gentle. He always looked after me. And such a joker he was! When we were hungry, he would make us laugh with jokes and songs so we would forget our hunger. If I was sad, he would say, ‘Tzipele, don’t be so sad. Look how rich we are! We are all studying!’ That was the most important thing. He went to the university in Jerusalem to study law and history against our father’s wishes.

Saba Mordechai? Why? Was he mean? I ask, hoping to hear something about my grandfather. I never saw him; there is only one blurry picture of him, and no one ever talks about him.

Mean? Oiy, he was crazy. She waves her hand to dismiss the topic. "But it was because we came from a religious family. My brother, Yaakov, studied at the yeshiva, the house of religious studies. That was the Torah and the Talmud, the Jewish law. Learning other things was considered trafe, non-kosher, not allowed. But he did it anyway, and then, secretly, without telling anyone, not even me, he also continued his religious studies at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, and he became a rabbi when he was nineteen years old! Can you imagine? Such a genius he was! Maor L’goyim, a light onto the nations."

I silently vow deep in my heart to be better at doing homework so I can be such an admired scholar and shining light like my uncle Yaakov.

But don’t think he was one of those nerds, a bookish fellow. Oh, no! Her melodic laughter cascades like rose petals on our heads. My brother was a hero. Fought in LEHI for the freedom of Israel.⁵

My ima’s eyes shine with pride. "He was a real hero, fighting the British so they would leave and we could have our own Jewish state. So what the Nazis did to our mother’s family will never happen again. He said, ‘Tzipele, we will never again be led like lambs to the slaughter. We will have our own Jewish state. You will see!’ I helped him, too. Sometimes I smuggled fliers in my sewing basket on the bus. And once, when I was fourteen, they sent me to deliver grenades inside a baby carriage. Oiy, my heart pounded so hard. The British soldier looked at me. Such cold blue eyes; yimach shmo. May his name be erased. I was terrified he would stop me and lift the blanket to check and then he would see that it was not a real baby, just a doll, and then discover the grenades. Oiy, I was so scared . . . but I was lucky."

She smiles wistfully and is silent for a moment. Then she sighs. "Nu, ma la’asot? What can we do? Halach. He went. The best always do. Gone. When you’re older, I’ll tell you about it. Ach nu. Enough."

She sighs again. We huddle closer to comfort her.

I love my ima. I believe my ima is so brave and the most talented and beautiful woman in the whole world. She is always dressed like a fashion queen, and I love her ladylike hands with the ever-present pale pink nail polish, and I love listening to the same stories she repeats time and again. She always tells it the same, in her upbeat, urgent manner. Her theatrical voice—animated and adulating—presses upon us the dramas of her childhood and the people she knows that have died. Even the very few funny stories are punctuated with sighs.

Oh, how I loved those sad, heroic stories filled with such pathos and suffering.

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Every year, six days after the Holocaust Memorial Day, we have another day of remembrance. On the day before Independence Day, before we celebrate the miracle of the Jewish State, before the festivities begin, we gather for Yom Hazikaron—The Day of Remembrance. Memorial Day. We stand still once again, a whole nation, united for one long minute as the siren rises and falls. We remember our fallen soldiers and all the Jews who died in acts of violence on this land. We stand in solidarity with every family that has lost a loved one.

At school, we gather for another ceremonial assembly in our special white shirts. When I was in eighth grade, it was my turn to recite from the stage in front of the assembly. I recited one of my favorite poems, our second national anthem (copied in careful, round letters into my journal), by one of Israel’s most prominent poets, journalists, and playwrights—and my personal favorite—Nathan Alterman.

In Hebrew, the words pulse and cascade in perfect measures. I read loud and clear, cradled by the rhythm, with pathos, with feeling, just like my mother:

The Silver Platter

by Nathan Alterman (translated from the Hebrew by David P. Stern)

And the land will grow still

Crimson skies dimming, misting

Slowly paling again

Over smoking frontiers

As the nation stands up

Torn at heart but existing

To receive its first wonder

In two thousand years

As the moment draws near

It will rise, darkness facing

Stand straight in the moonlight

In terror and joy

When across from it step out

Towards it slowly pacing

In plain sight of all

A young girl and a boy

Dressed in battle gear, dirty

Shoes heavy with grime

On the path they will climb up

While their lips remain sealed

To change garb, to wipe brow

They have not yet found time

Still bone weary from days

And from nights in the field

Full of endless fatigue

And all drained of emotion

Yet the dew of their youth

Is still seen on their head

Thus like statues they stand

Stiff and still with no motion

And no sign that will show

If they live or are dead

Then a nation in tears

And amazed at this matter

Will ask: Who are you?

And the two will then say

With soft voice: We—

Are the silver platter

On which the Jews’ state

Was presented today

Then they fall back in darkness

As the dazed nation looks

And the rest can be found

In the history books.⁶

In my mind, Yaakov is the boy marching slowly toward the nation in that poem. He is the one who gave his blood so we can live. In my mind, there is nothing nobler than being like Yaakov, ready to do anything, sacrifice anything, for your beloved nation. It is who we are, who Our Boys are. They are special.

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When I was ten, my father, a Hebrew University professor of psychology and special education, took a sabbatical at Stanford University, and we lived for two years in Palo Alto, California. At first, I didn’t know a word of English, but I learned in a few months. By my second year in America, I was fluent in English, and we also moved to a different neighborhood; my two siblings and I all went to Addison Elementary. I was in sixth grade, my little brother was in fourth, and my baby sister started kindergarten.

Mary and Cindy and Anne Delaney always walked home together, and I walked with them till the corner of Waverly and Lincoln where our ways parted and I continued the few blocks home by myself. I was the new girl, always a step behind, on the outskirts of the group, trying to catch up. Oh, I so desperately wanted them to like me; I so wanted to have friends and be one of them.

I believe it started that day when Mary suddenly took interest in me and asked if in my country people live in tents on the sand, and then Cindy said, Is it true you have camels instead of cars? I thought these were by far the stupidest questions ever asked, but I loved that everyone actually stopped walking and all the girls had their eyes on me. Hey, I’d give anything to be cool, and if that meant answering a few strange American questions, why not?

I explained that I lived in an apartment building, three stories high, with two entrances and a total of twelve families, and that I’d never been on a camel. The excitement and curiosity drained from their faces. Oh. That’s nice, Cindy muttered perfunctorily and started walking again, about to change the subject.

Quickly, in an effort to remain the interesting center of attention, I said, I was in a war in third grade. They all stopped, but I couldn’t think of anything heroic that happened to me at that war, so I said, Yeah, and my big brother is in the army. Instantly, I was the center of cool again, all eyes on me, filled with curious adoration and envy.

Thus began my almost yearlong story in daily installments about my big brother, Yigal, the soldier hero. I had always hated being the oldest of three and always wished I had a big brother, so creating him was natural—the perfect weaving of all my longings and fantasies and the Yaakov myths I was raised on.

He was handsome and tall, of course, and brave. Silent and