Publication Dates, and Pre-Passover Reflection

Striving to emerge into the light.

Israeli flag—the official symbol of Israel. (Israeli Travel Secrets)

I’ve gotten the good news that the e-book of my memoir, Israel Odyssey: Coming of Age and Finding Peace in the Middle East, will be coming out on June 25, and the print book on September 10. That latter date is particularly well-timed: it will have been almost exactly 40 years since I made aliyah (moved to Israel) on September 6, 1984.

My (inevitably subjective) impression from the first part of my memoir, which surveys my life in the US before making aliyah, is that it reads somewhat like a mystery novel. How did I end up making aliyah when my background wouldn’t have “predicted” it? My parents, Austrian Jewish refugees whose families escaped Austria months after the German Nazi takeover (Anschluss) in March 1938, were, albeit deeply tied to the Jewish people, very secular Jews. And since “very secular” meant distance from religion, from traditional Jewish culture, and particularly since we lived in an almost totally non-Jewish area of upstate New York, the predominant cultural ambience I grew up in was American—though with certain Jewish, and even Israeli, infusions. But no one in my life ever encouraged me to make aliyah or even mentioned the subject.

I don’t want to give the story away here, so I’ll just say that during my twenties, my mind became Israeli-occupied territory. It reached an apex when the 1982 Lebanon War broke out. Israeli forces were attacking PLO terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, there were inevitable civilian casualties, and Israel was—of course—getting pilloried worldwide, by people whose countries had never been relentlessly bombarded by a terrorist organization across a border. I felt, finally, that I was either “with” Israel or “with” “the world”; however stark or even simplistic that may sound, I still think there’s truth to it, and I’m here and would never live anywhere else.

It’s not, of course, just a matter of a stark moral choice; there are great joys to be had in this beautiful, very richly varied country. That aspect of color and variety was enhanced, admittedly, after I divorced—12 years post-aliyah—and then floated around in the dating world for another 11 years before finding, as I call it in the memoir, a “deepwater port.” Stable, at last, in our deepwater port, I’d felt, for years—to stretch the metaphor—that I’d sailed through some rough seas and finally come out in a very good place. And so, I thought, had the young, high-achieving country I’d moved to, forging ahead as a demographic and economic success story, remarkably productive, and even—so it seemed—gradually overcoming the security problems that had plagued it since its birth in 1948.

That was how it looked, that is, until October 7, 2003.

And now we’ve reached the first post–October 7 Passover; how do we feel? How are we supposed to feel? No one really knows; people say “Chag Sameach, k’khol ha’efshar”—Happy Holiday, as much as possible. The hostages are still in their tunnels or small, airless rooms, undergoing things too terrible to think about; genocidists in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran are attacking us—enemies with a lust to perpetrate 10,000 October 7ths.

So let me note one not insignificant consolation I see: the past six and a half months have shown that we’re militarily and technologically far superior to our enemies. No, that’s not very poetic, or even philosophical. But it jibes with the idea of emerging from slavery to freedom, the idea of Zionism: planting our feet solidly on our own land, learning to cope rationally and effectively with even the harshest realities; fighting abysmal darkness with the light of intellect and life-affirming resilience.