The next morning before sunrise, as I stepped outside to retrieve my daily copy of Haaretz, I glanced as I often do at the Ottoman-era ruins across the street. The abandoned, dome-roofed khan once housed travelers and their camels. I looked down at the paper in my hands, and an article caught my eye. “The bastard,” I muttered to myself. One of our messianic parliamentarians, capitalizing on the recent violence in Jerusalem, was demanding that we “re-establish Jewish sovereignty” over the Temple Mount.
I couldn’t get Meir’s Fanta man out of my head. I was trained to detect and neutralize threats. In 1967 the Fanta man was not a threat and so would have been, if not invisible to me, instantly forgotten. The fact that not only had Meir noticed the incident but also that it changed the course of his life, confirmed the wisdom of my decision to speak with a novelist at the outset of my memoir quest.
I remained a homebody over the days that followed, ignoring calls from journalists, battling weeds, and watching over our grandkids and their friends on a hot Saturday afternoon as they raced with beach towels around our swimming pool like superheroes in capes. All the while, the image I’d created in my mind’s eye of the Fanta man continued to work on my psyche. Sitting on the poolside deck, sipping a cold beer while the kids splashed and laughed, I remembered a conversation I hadn’t thought about in more than fifty years. In 1963, I joined the sea commandos, the most secretive unit in the IDF. Right before I left our kibbutz to report for duty, my uncle Jonah’s wife, Hava, who lived in the concrete hut next door, said she had to tell me something. With uncanny clarity I recalled staring at Hava, with her neat bun and checkered apron, as she related the story of a German soldier who saved her life during the Holocaust. I responded to her overture by shrugging; I couldn’t have cared less about her life in Europe.
The list of people I wanted to interview for this book couldn’t have included Hava because she died in 2006, but I hadn’t thought to seek out any Holocaust survivors at all, a telling omission. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about how, as a kid, I had shrugged off Hava’s personal account as I left the kibbutz to join the commandos, where I would train to kill or be killed. That afternoon, needing to know more about Hava and her life in Europe, I tracked down the telephone number of her son from her first marriage, Dani Keidar, an architect in a moshav on the north side of the Galilee, and he agreed to meet me a few days later at his office.
The drive to Tiberias would take me from Kerem Maharal through Emek Israel, our agricultural heartland, and down to the Sea of Galilee. It was another sweltering day, made even hotter by the precipitous drop in elevation; Tiberias is several hundred feet lower than Death Valley. The descent offered a panoramic view of the landscape of my youth. A few hotels were scattered below, but life is slow and change even slower in this part of Israel, very different from the tech-boom coast.
It’s in this corner of Israel where one can visit Kinneret Cemetery, the final resting place of kibbutz Zionism’s noble dead. Filled with carved limestone graves facing all directions and not, as prescribed by Judaism, solely toward Jerusalem, it’s a Jewish cemetery devoid of religion. The plain gravestones lack traditional symbols of Judaism; poetry, philosophy, and socialism replaced thousands of years of futile longing.
This strict secularism is suitable for most of the cemetery’s famous denizens, dreamers such as Moses Hess, author of The Holy History of Mankind and a collaborator of Karl Marx. Marx, some say, lifted from Hess the iconic line “religion is the opium of the masses.” Hess’s call for a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine inspired Herzl to write The Jewish State and Old New Land, where the future democratic state of the Jews would grant Jews, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else equal rights. Hess’s neighbor in the Kinneret Cemetery is Nachman Syrkin, the visionary of a “Zionist Judaism” that “uproots religious Judaism” through an “ideology that can be elevated to the status of a religion.”5
Our national poet Rachel Bluwstein is buried there, too. An iron chain tethers a book of her poetry to her grave’s massive limestone slab, its pages torn and discolored from the hands of a thousand pilgrims. As a child I had memorized her lines:
I have not sung to you, my land
Nor have I glorified your name
Through deeds of heroism,
With the spoils of war:
Only a tree — have my hands planted
Along the quiet shores of the Jordan.
Dani’s office is in a concrete building designed in the 1960s brutalist style. If the air-conditioning hadn’t been going full-blast, we could have opened the windows and listened to the gentle splash of waves from the Sea of Galilee. Sitting across his desk from him, I told Dani, a man with the physique of a rugby player, about the memory that came back to me by the pool. When I called to set up the meeting, I’d said I hoped he could share something more about Hava’s wartime experiences. He indicated a thick folder on the desk and explained that he had produced a written account of his mother’s life in Europe. “Here’s all I have,” he said as he slid the folder toward me.
I opened the file to discover it contained images as well as his writing, and I pulled out a stack of photos. “I took those during a trip to Hungary and Romania in 2010,” Dani explained. The pile included several of the family home and shoe factory in Budapest. He pointed to a picture of an older man in uniform. “That’s Hava’s father, who owned the shoe factory. She was thirteen when he was drafted into the Hungarian army. He died fighting for the Axis powers during their siege of Stalingrad.” In Hungary, after Jews had become unwanted, they continued fighting and dying for their country.
“There was no time to mourn his death,” Dani continued. A year later, in March 1943, the Nazis invaded Hungary and, almost immediately, Adolf Eichmann began organizing the transport of Jews to death camps. In April 1943, Hava wound up with her mother, her sister Lilli, and her brother Asher in a Jewish ghetto. A few months after that, in January 1944, Nazis with their Hungarian collaborators forced Hava, her mother, sister, brother, and cousin Judith onto a cattle car bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Josef Mengele, waiting for them with his clipboard, dispatched her and her cousin Judith to a work camp, while everyone else in the family was murdered in the gas chambers. I studied photos Dani had taken at Auschwitz in 2014.
After three months or so in the women’s camp at Lager C, Hava and Judith were sent to Bergen-Belsen to work at an aircraft factory near Leipzig. They were there at the same time as Anne Frank. In January 1945, with the Red Army advancing on the German borders, the SS forced Hava and the other female prisoners, including Judith, on a sixteen-day death march to Theresienstadt. Dressed in bare rags, the half-starved women dragged themselves through the snow; prisoners who fell behind were shot. At one point Hava stumbled. Judith quickly helped her up, but Hava lost her shoes in the fall and wouldn’t have lasted long with frozen feet. A regular army German soldier saved her from being shot by the SS. Instead of putting a bullet in her head as instructed by his commander, he told her to keep walking. He gave her a pair of shoes he’d pulled off a dead woman and draped his own wool coat over her emaciated shoulders.
They made it to Theresienstadt, where the Soviets liberated the camp. Hava and Judith, now free, were alone in the world. The only thing left for Hava in Budapest was her family’s shoe factory, and what was a traumatized teenager going to do with that? It was in Budapest that she joined the effort that was run by Uncle Jonah to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine. She and Judith would eventually end up in Kibbutz Ma’agan.
Judging by the rolls of blueprints on his desk, Dani was a busy man, and I didn’t want to hold up his workday. I thanked him for his time and left the office with an armful of photocopies of stories about Hava’s life. From his office, I set off a short distance to the cemetery where my parents are buried next to Jonah, Hava, and Judith. The five of them began their lives in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and were now buried side-by-side beneath a row of identical headstones.
After placing a small stone on Hava’s grave, I headed across the street to the kibbutz. The gates to the rusty chain-link fence, erected fifty years ago to keep out infiltrators from across the cease-fire lines, were wide open. As I entered, I heard a few roosters cackling. Not much has changed for the better on the kibbutz since I was a boy. I looked but failed to see many flourishes of contemporary Israeli life. No high-end German cars. No climbing walls for the kids.
To this day Ma’agan is my spiritual home, my symbol of the boyhood freedom to ramble, swim, and dream of a better world. Despite the constant shelling from Syrian guns, it was a place of optimism, best expressed by Hava, a woman who displayed no outward signs of trauma, no bitterness or fatalism because of her war experiences. She sought and found the best in everyone, including the German soldier who instead of shooting her in the head gave her shoes. She ran a school and taught generations of children in the Jordan Valley to believe in themselves, in the future, in peace.
After Abba died, I rarely returned to Ma’agan, and I don’t know the people living in my parents’ old unadorned concrete shack. As I blinked the sweat from my eyes, I marveled at how we had lived without air-conditioning. In socialist style my parents made do with plain pinewood furniture, only a few books because the kibbutz’s expansive library had replaced the cult of the private bourgeois library of the Diaspora, and no décor — no oil paintings of European landscapes, no sofa in front of a TV, no kitchen like mine and Biba’s with an espresso machine and dishwasher.
The wind kicked up as it does every afternoon in the summer. I peeled off my shirt and walked through a patch of dead grass to the shore for a dip. On my way to the beach I peered through the dust-laced windows of the woebegone House of Culture, now inhabited only by spiders and a family of feral cats. I smiled wistfully as I recalled the after-dinner gatherings when I was young, the plays and films and concerts, theater performances and folk dances, and all the debates, women and men filled to the brim with the belief that we were carrying the banner for humanity forward — idealists debating alternative brands of liberation: for women, for the working class, for the oppressed of the world.
Just before stripping off my trousers and plunging naked into the water, I paused in front of a monument to Peretz Goldstein, the Palmach commando who parachuted with Jonah into Yugoslavia in 1944. Though we didn’t have God to worship, we had our heroes, and Abba, a kibbutz leader, had been determined to erect a shrine to what had been the most daring attempt by Jews in Palestine to save lives during the Holocaust.
If we knew nothing about the Holocaust, as kids we could recount every detail of Uncle Jonah’s daredevilry. A man of action like Father, Jonah was a bon vivant enthralled by the thrill of danger and the adrenaline rush of adventure. He spent the last phase of World War II with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up by the British to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe. The poet Hannah Senesh, recruited by Jonah, also joined him and Goldstein.
They parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia, where they were joined by the partisans. On the evening before crossing the border into Hungary, Hannah read aloud a poem she had just composed. Goldstein was caught and sent to the death camps. Hannah, too, was caught, tortured, and executed by the Nazis in prison. Goldstein’s and Hannah’s arrest, torture, and murder turned the poem into one of the most famous songs during our War of Independence in 1948: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.”6
I dove into the lake, tepid and oily with blooms of algae. As I swam to deeper, cooler waters, memories of my school days flooded back. The Syrian guns staring down at us children from the Golan ensured that we identified with the heroic characters in the Bible or Josephus — every morning our teachers read a passage to us over breakfast.7 As for the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism, we had as little interest in its stories as we did in European shoe factory owners or flour mill bosses, or for that matter Moses Mendelssohn or Martin Buber, stick figures representing weakness, not strength. We identified with ancient militants and rebels such as the guerrilla fighters who stood up to the Romans. We admired power, preferring Samson the hero over Judah ha-Nasi, the man behind the Mishnah. Teachers kept us in our seats by regaling us with stories of Jewish military heroes, progenitors of the Palmach and the elite IDF commandos, and how we defeated enemies with our swords.
We, not God, were the central protagonists in our revolutionary saga of liberation. In our Passover Seder, the Hebrews led themselves out of captivity in ancient Egypt.8 We were the haluzim who, shedding our own chains, entered the Land of Israel and kicked ass. And the wars of liberation continued, with every olive tree or sand dune we captured from the enemy.
My best friend on the kibbutz was Israel Guttman, whom we all called Srulik, a common nickname for Israel. As kids of seven or eight, the two of us, born three days apart, shared more than age and a common dormitory. Srulik was just like me; we loved nothing more than wrestling in the water, or playing war — one of us got to be the good guy, the noble Israeli, and the other the villainous Arab sneaking down from his position in the Golan.
Srulik’s parents, sadly, moved him to the town of Kiryat Tiv’on in the early 1950s because of ideological squabbles on the kibbutz; our loquacious and quarrelsome socialist parents couldn’t agree on the proper formula for universal brotherhood.9 The Guttmans, nevertheless, visited our kibbutz every summer, and like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on the Mississippi, Srulik and I would resume roaming the empty wilderness just steps from the kibbutz. Each day we’d comb the shore and find new treasures: an Ottoman coin, an old beer bottle from an English soldier, the sun-bleached skull of a jackrabbit, a rusting bullet from the War of Independence.
As a boy, barefoot and splashing in the waters of the Galilee, I already dreamed of joining Flotilla 13, whose base was near Haifa at Atlit, the last outpost in the Holy Land to have been evacuated by the crusaders in 1291. I was possessed by stories of the most secretive unit in the entire Israel Defense Forces and was determined to join the group. My sidekick Srulik, less enamored of the sea, resolved to join an equally elite army combat unit.
I didn’t see Srulik again for a couple of years because in 1959, the year I turned fourteen, Abba took Imma and me to Argentina on a mission, ostensibly for the kibbutz movement, though I suspected there was more to it. Two years later, just as I finally spoke enough Spanish to make a few friends in the neighborhood, the adventure ended abruptly when, one night, Abba woke me and said we had to pack our bags. From his notebooks I would eventually learn that he was involved in the cloak-and-dagger kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. Once Eichmann was safely bundled up in the back of a plane bound for Israel, where he would face trial and eventually be hanged for his Nazi war crimes, the Argentine government considered us personae non gratae. On that terrifying night we escaped by boat across the river to Uruguay.
Imma used the trip back to Israel to introduce me to some of her European culture: She insisted on making a side trip to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David. She even bought me a miniature version of the statue so I would never forget what beauty can look like.
Back in Israel my friendship with Srulik continued; he studied in Haifa at a military boarding school and spent his weekends at the kibbutz. In our last year in school, the two of us strapped on backpacks and walked from Ma’agan all the way to the Carmel Mountains, a grueling, arduous adventure meant to prepare us for the military.
The minute I turned eighteen, I signed up for Flotilla 13. Because I was an only child, joining any of the operational units, in particular Flotilla 13, required both parents’ agreement. Abba, expecting no less from his son, had no objections. Had he not risked his own life smuggling refugees and fighting Iraqis during the siege at Kibbutz Gesher in the War of Independence? After all, establishing a kibbutz within range of trigger-happy Syrians was hardly a matter for the meek.
The problem was with Imma. She accepted, with grim fatalism, that I had to serve our country; where she drew the line was with the sea commandos. Had she not sacrificed enough already? She left the green Carpathian Mountains for a mosquito-infested swamp, gave up her jewelry to buy a tractor for our kibbutz, and worst of all accepted, against her very nature, that in our socialist system I slept in the children’s dorm as if I belonged to the collective and not to her. Now, in 1963, she refused to permit that her only son would risk his life on daredevil missions not because he had to, but because he wanted to. “How can you even ask me to sign this?” she said, pushing the page back in my direction. Imma cared far more about family, children, theater, and music than she ever did about socialism. She sacrificed almost everything because she fell in love with an ideologue. She wasn’t going to sacrifice her only son.
We stood in the concrete bungalow, sweat pouring from her furrowed brow in the pitiless heat. I took no pleasure in hurting her, but I’d been raised on glorious tales of the Maccabees and the Palmach, and seeking permission from my mother felt degrading. It was my life, and if I wanted to dive under a ship to attach a limpet mine, or penetrate enemy territory to photograph a communications tower, that was my affair, not hers.
After failing to bring her around, I resorted to an ultimatum I knew would work. “Imma,” began the cruelest line ever to cross my lips, “if I’m on a mission, yes there’s a chance I’ll be killed. But if I can’t join Flotilla 13 because of you, there is 100 percent certainty you will not see me again.” With tears welling up in her eyes, she signed the form.
My final hurdle was the kibbutz itself. The members, too, demanded a right to approve my plan, and at the assembly in the House of Culture they voted no. Maybe Imma lobbied against me behind the scenes, I can’t say. The kibbutz refused to give me permission to join what they deemed an example of the individualism they considered anathema: The New Man wasn’t supposed to be a daredevil out for thrills. I should join a regular military unit like everyone else.
They gave me a chance to speak, and I presented more or less the same ultimatum I had given Imma. I looked at my parents and their comrades, people I admired because they had turned an inferno of desolation and malarial mosquitoes into a paradise. “I do not want to leave the kibbutz,” I told them, “but your decision betrays everything the kibbutz has taught me about defending our hard-fought land from our enemies. What about the Syrians?” I said pointing in the general direction of their positions on the Golan. “Don’t you risk your life every time you drive a tractor over the border? Why is your battle to expand our territory different from what I am determined to do, which is to defend it?” The only way they could raise their bananas was for others to protect them and, with luck, even conquer fresh land for settlement.
Jonah, sensing I really would walk away from the kibbutz and never return if they stuck to their guns, convinced people to reverse their ban. I was free.