The Israel I Carry

Chapter 1 - The End of Innocence

My mother walked with me down the flagstone walkway that my father had built from the house to the metal gate at the end of our yard. She stopped there, as if that line marked the boundary of the childhood world she had created for me.

It was early on November 7, 1976—a crisp morning in Kfar Saba, where I was born and raised. It was a Sunday—Yom Rishon, literally “first day” in Hebrew. That was the day I was drafted into the Army.

I turned back once and saw her standing still, her hands on her face.

What was going through her mind as she watched her child go off to join the Army? Could she have had any inkling of what I was about to go through? I doubt it. Did she recall seeing her own mother walk away into the night at Auschwitz, never to be seen again? I will never know.

I didn’t understand that gesture then, and for many years I didn’t think much about it or about what it was like for her. I didn’t understand what she had already lived through, or what she might have been imagining.

I knew she was a Holocaust survivor—that she had last seen her mother walking toward what she later learned were the gas chambers, shortly after she and her two sisters arrived at Auschwitz in a crowded boxcar. But I did not truly try to imagine what she had experienced until much later.

I walked down the street where I had spent most of my childhood. We played all kinds of games there—soccer with small goals, stanga, and games we invented around the concrete support columns under one of the buildings. We were outside all the time. There were no screens, no programs, and no guiding or supervising adults, only us and whatever we could make up.

It’s hard to explain now what that felt like. We had a lot of freedom and independence—maybe more than you would expect. But I was leaving all that freedom behind and stepping into the role for which I had been prepared since childhood.

I passed the apartment building where I once jumped from the third floor, chased by the old Arab guard who had finally had enough of our taunting. I passed Bluma’s kiosk, where I committed my first and last theft—stealing a krembo while she wasn’t looking. I remember the thrill, and then the guilt that came almost immediately, even before I took a bite. Even then, I knew the difference between what I could do and what I should do.

At the bus stop, everything felt familiar. The world made sense. There were unwritten rules, and if you followed them—if you were strong enough, determined enough—you could find your place. You could get to the top. In my childhood world, the path to the top often began in an elite unit or a high-command position.

I took the 586 Egged bus to Tel Aviv, then the 70 Dan bus to the induction base, the Bakum. Tall eucalyptus trees lined the road, giving off a fresh scent after the rain as their leaves rustled in the wind. It felt like crossing into something important, something expected.

I was not afraid. Or if I was, it didn’t matter.

I had prepared for this day for years, getting up every morning two hours before school to do special endurance training for the Army. There was no doubt about where I wanted to go—where I had to go: a Sayeret, an elite reconnaissance unit. That was the path I had set for myself, the way I measured who I was becoming.

I was ready. Excited, even. Almost thrilled.

I walked through the gate, showed my ID and draft letter, and just like that, I was inside.I was in the Army.

I was calm, certain, so sure of myself.

If I could go back to that moment, to talk to that boy walking through the gate, I sometimes wonder what I would say to him.

Would I try to explain what that world was really preparing him for?

Would I tell him that life would not stay as clear as it seemed then, that the lines between right and wrong, strong and weak, would not hold the way he believed?

Would I tell him that life would never be the same once his memories included the cold wetness of human brain tissue on his face, or the expression of a person taking his last breath?

Would he have understood what that meant?

I doubt it.

Some things you don’t learn through your head; you learn them through your legs.

And I was only beginning to walk.

Chapter 2 - The Years of Childhood

To understand why I was so ready, even eager, to join the Army, you have to understand the world I grew up in.

The whole environment during my childhood seemed to be telling my generation that we had to prepare, to be tough, and to be ready for the next deadly threat that was sure to come. The message of my childhood world, in many different ways and from different directions, was this: you are special. You will grow to be strong and tough. And next time they come for us, and they will, you will save us. You will not let them take us like sheep to the slaughter again.

“Never again” was not a slogan. It was the purpose assigned to us.

My parents, like most of my peers’ parents, were Holocaust survivors. They all spoke Hebrew with an accent, and they carried a kind of anxiety that we could sense everywhere, even if we didn’t fully understand it. My mother, like all of my friends’ mothers, was always worried. She wanted us to wear warm clothes so we wouldn’t “catch a cold,” to be back home in time for supper, to eat more, not to hurt ourselves wherever we were going, and to wash our hands as soon as we came back into the house. In short, the outside environment was dangerous, full of threats that could hurt us anytime, anywhere.

Did my parents have a similar childhood, with parents who were immigrants? I know my mother did not. She grew up with her grandmother, who owned the house and had been born there. But my father’s family had moved from another country to the town where he grew up. It was not far away, but at the time it was another country. I learned that only recently, while searching for anything I could find about his family—a family he never talked about. That search is what prompted me to write this.

To us, the “cool” Sabras, born in Israel, they seemed lame. Always worrying for nothing, trying to force us to wear warm clothes when it was a bit cool, and getting all upset when we refused. Looking back on my childhood, I can’t recall a single adult who spoke Hebrew without an accent. They were all refugees who had come to Israel running for their lives. Many had nowhere else to go.

There is a well-known line by Shaul Tchernichovsky: “Ha’adam eino ela tavnit nof moladeto,” often translated as “Man is but the imprint of his native landscape,” or more literally, “A person is nothing but the pattern of the landscape of his birthplace.” Our character, soul, and future are shaped by the sights, sounds, and scenery of our childhood and youth. A complementary expression of this idea is “The Child is father of the Man.” Our early self essentially shapes or determines our future self, much like a father guides a child. Freud, too, built much of his theory around the idea that early childhood experiences continue to shape adult life.

As I now look back over the span of my life, I am amazed by how deeply embedded within me that childhood environment remains.

My native landscape was a tapestry of refugees—men, women, and children from all around the globe. To us, young Sabras born in Israel, this seemed normal. The only normal. And we accepted, just the same, the message that we would grow up to be superior, tough, and strong, capable of defeating any calamity that came our way.

At the age of four or five, I cried because I had to get an injection. The nurse looked at me and said, “What is this crying? What kind of soldier are you going to be?” I was so ashamed that I can still remember that moment.

My father reacted similarly when I cried. He would say only, “Stop crying”—not loudly or angrily, but firmly, coldly, and with disapproval. That was the expectation. You didn’t cry. You endured. Even at the age of four or five.

At the same time, my childhood was very joyful and full of fun. I was active most of the time, probably hyperactive, and lived in an environment that allowed for it. There were no organized games or guided sessions. We made up our own games and our own rules.

In one incident with my sister Rachel, who is five years older than I am, she chased me after I had done something that really bothered her, and she was determined to hit me. We ran round and round between two rooms in the house, and she could not catch me. Then she realized I was not tall enough to reach the door handle, and she closed one of the doors. Brain over speed, at age nine. But when I came around again to the closed glass door, I simply smashed through it. Power over brain, at age four. I got badly cut on my left hand, and I still have a distinct scar from it.

What a microcosm of my life: running fast with some fear and some laughter, hitting a closed door and smashing through it, succeeding, and being scarred for life by it.

My parents regularly got together with friends on Friday nights to play cards, laughing constantly as I fell asleep. On Saturday mornings, they would go for walks around the neighborhood and hang out with neighbors they met along the way. Joking and teasing were a normal part of almost every conversation between adults, but so were tension and anxiety.

Adults’ conversations were usually in good humor about current political differences and challenges, past wars and their heavy casualties, fear of future wars—always with banter about people’s origins: Polish, Moroccan, Romanian, Iraqi, whatever. Just about every origin had its own tongue-in-cheek stereotype, to the point that there were common expressions such as Polish mother, Moroccan knife, Romanian thief, cheap Persian, lazy Yemenite, Yekke potz, and a few others best left unmentioned.

My early childhood memories of my mother include seeing her working constantly and being content, even happy. She was always on the move—slowly, calmly, and deliberately—cooking, cleaning, straightening, sewing, and mending.

Our next-door neighbor frequently came over to chat, and the picture I have from these daily scenes is of the neighbor, plump and stout, standing at the door, waving her hands and speaking Hungarian in indignant tones, and my mother, small and quiet, answering calmly while working on something.

But I never heard anything about the Holocaust or the trauma of sudden displacement. By the time I was old enough to remember, it had become almost taboo.

I don’t remember ever hearing about anyone’s personal experience during the Holocaust, or about their lives before they were forced out of their homes. I asked my mother about it a few times, and she was responsive, but I could see that it was painful for her to talk about it, so I never dwelled on it for too long. Still, the effect of everybody being a refugee after trauma cannot be overestimated. It was always there, in the air we breathed.

***

My mother would talk about her childhood in Hungary with bright eyes of pleasant memories and a soft tone of longing and nostalgia. She had two sisters close in age, and they played and shared chores together. Their house was used as a kind of pub, where food and drinks were served, and there were a few rooms for lodging. So there were always lots of chores. Her mother was always working hard, waking up first and going to sleep last. Her father had contracted tuberculosis while fighting in World War I in the Hungarian Army, received a medal for his service, and died a few years before World War II.

My mother always seemed to need to prove her loyalty to Hungary, and I heard her say many times, always with the same sad bitterness, “We were loyal to Hungary, but Hungary wasn’t loyal to us.” She considered herself Hungarian like every other Hungarian, and never got over being rejected with such horrific cruelty and inhumanity.

At the same time, she never expressed anger, let alone hate, toward the Hungarians or the Germans. That became a deep and lasting lesson for me: first, that expressing anger or hate was poor form, and later, that anger and hate hurt me first, and more than anyone else.

She saw the Hungarians as a mixture: a few were outwardly antisemitic, many were more or less neutral, and some were openly not antisemitic and spoke against it. She mentioned a guest at their pub saying, in response to accusations that Jews were liars and untrustworthy, that he knew only two kinds of people: those who paid their debts with money, and those who paid them with sighs. Many nearby villages had a large cross at the village entry, where the custom was to say, when going past it, “This is what the Jews did.” That was my mother’s childhood landscape.

She remembered walking to the train station with the rest of the village’s Jews after being told to leave. They had hired horses and a cart from a neighbor to carry their luggage, and the horses were decorated as was customary on holidays and festive occasions.

And when she returned to her home after the Holocaust, it had been completely stripped, including the windows and their frames. She remembered noticing that she wiped her shoes before entering, as she had done growing up, even though there was no floor mat. She also remembered noticing, in the months after returning home, some of their furniture and curtains through their neighbors’ windows. My mother never confronted these neighbors, but she stopped in the street and stood there when she saw it. Eventually, some neighbors brought things back, while others came out and cursed her.

As my mother started to adjust to living back home, other survivors from the area came trickling in, gathered at her house and lived there for a couple of years. One of these survivors was my father, who collapsed before arriving home. Fortunately, it was close enough that he was recognized, and his sole surviving brother, Elya, took him to the nearest hospital. Like many other survivors, my father was so emaciated that his body was unable to absorb nutrition, even when he could eat. The doctors told Elya that there was little they could do, and that my father would most likely not survive.

Fortunately for him and me, my father did survive, and a few months later he joined the group at my mother’s house. But most of his family did not survive. As soon as my father was well enough, my parents joined a gar’in (meaning “Seed” in Hebrew), of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, which trained and prepared Jews to establish a new kibbutz in Israel. After about a year, they boarded their ship, the Knesset Israel, and sailed to Haifa, becoming part of the tens of thousands of ma’apilim (literally “ascenders” in Hebrew), the name given to refugees trying to defy British rule and immigrate to the Land of Israel.

They never mentioned what made them leave their homeland, but they must have been desperate to brave emigration to 1947 British-controlled Palestine. A civil war was already underway, and the surrounding Arab states had made clear their intention to fight the emergence of a Jewish state by all means.

Like most Jewish refugees at the time, my parents were caught by the British Navy. The ma’apilim put up a fight when the Brits tried to board the ship, and gave up only after tear gas reached the ship's infirmary. They were all detained and transported to an internment camp in Cyprus. After a few months there, my parents got married, and my father wrote the ketubah by hand. Family legend has it that my father wrote it from memory, as there was no way to obtain a ketubah text in the internment camp. A few months later, they received entry certificates, which were distributed by lottery, and they were allowed into the Promised Land.

So, when the Government of Palestine allowed my parents to enter and live in Palestine, they made them Palestinians, just like all the other Arab and Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. And like the vast majority of Palestine's inhabitants, they did not feel Palestinian or have a Palestinian identity.

At the ages of 24 and 26, after years in German concentration camps and a British internment camp, my parents finally ascended to a Machaneh Olim, literally an "Ascenders’ camp" (or immigrants' camp), in British-occupied Palestine. A few months after arriving, my father was drafted into regular service in the nascent Israeli army, where he served for well over a year, even though their first daughter, Tcippi, was born just about one year after they had arrived in Palestine.

My father is in uniform, including the “Hitelmacher” hat worn then. The name means ‘hat-maker’ in Yiddish, which was the name of the first New York manufacturer.

My parents felt betrayed and deeply offended for the rest of their lives. When my mother’s sister telegraphed from Vienna in 1956, after escaping Hungary, and asked if it was okay to go to Israel, my mother replied that she should go only to Israel. She said something like, “You may not always have butter for your bread, but hungry you won’t be.”

Not a bad way to summarize 1950s Israel.

Every Holocaust Day, we were shown films from concentration camps: piled bodies, skeletal survivors, large groups of men, women, and children being shot at close range. It was deeply unsettling, even traumatic. The combination of showing us the horrors of what had taken place, without talking about what the people had actually gone through, led to a fairly absurd conclusion that we all accepted: that they could have fought back but didn’t, that they went like lambs to the slaughter. We were also convinced, as children, that we would not let this happen again.

The thought of trying to put myself in that situation, of trying to imagine what I would feel or do, occurred to me only much later. And when it did, I found it impossible even to come close to understanding. Never mind the horrors of Auschwitz—how would I feel if two policemen knocked on my door one morning, as my mother told me happened to her, and told my family we had one hour to get to the train station? Where they would take us away with all the other Jews in town, although they were not sure where. Her mother panicked and said, "Oh God, they are going to kill us now." And my mother responded, "Mom! How can you even say that? We are in Hungary in 1944 and we are Hungarians.”

Just that alone—that first moment of the Holocaust’s horror for my mother—is incomprehensible.

There were other glimpses or moments that I did not make much of as a child but whose significance I understood later. For example, a few times I came home hungry and said, “What’s for dinner? I’m starving.”

My mom replied in a quiet, sad tone, “No, sweetie, you are not starving. You’re only very hungry.”

And when I asked what the difference was, she said, “Oh, what a difference. I hope you never find out.”

Many years later, I understood what she meant: you live in a different world, one that does not include the experience of starvation, and I hope you stay in that world.

Once I saw my mom peeling potatoes, biting into one of the peeled pieces, and spitting it out with a chuckle. When I asked what she was doing, she told me with a sad smile, “A memory from the camps came up. We were given potato peels, and they were so, so wonderful. I was curious how it would taste now, so I tried it.”

Talking about the Holocaust with my father was taboo. He never said a word about it, and if the subject somehow came up, my mother quickly changed it. Once, I asked her why, and she said, "He can't talk about that. It makes him faint."

Only once did my father mention his family. It was a few weeks before Passover, and my homework was to write about Passover customs in my parents' countries. He told me they used to start Passover cleaning as soon as Purim was over, and that it was very intense. He had that soft smile and distant gaze that my mother has when she talks about her childhood.

I could never know what memories they carried, or what it meant to live through a world in which annihilation had suddenly become real one morning. But growing up in the country that was supposed to be the answer to that annihilation, I did know something about danger as a constant presence. Not the same danger, not even close. But the wish to kill Jews, only for being Jewish, was not history. It was still there, around us, still happening.

For those of us who were born into this reality, the scale of the hostility around us was simply part of the landscape. Israel was a tiny country, about ten miles wide where I grew up, surrounded by a vast Arab region that had already tried more than once to destroy it. That was not an abstract political idea. It felt normal and natural, like the sky above and the ground below, like the seasons of the year. And just as rain sometimes fell and storms came, sometimes people around us attacked.

Unlike my children, who were warned in American kindergartens not to talk to strangers, we received no such warning. I understood the concept of a “stranger” much later in life because there were no strangers during my childhood. Literally every person I saw as a child was Jewish.

In kindergarten, we were taught never to touch anything we found in public—on the street or in garbage cans—a toy, a pen, anything, because it could be a bomb, as had happened from time to time.

A classmate in grammar school was badly hurt by a hand grenade while playing in his backyard. His name, by coincidence, was Menachem Golan, though not the famous filmmaker. His face remained scarred for the rest of his life.

But just as bad weather doesn’t prevent kids from being kids and having fun, war and terrorism did not prevent us from being kids and having fun. I was always in a group of good friends, playing and involved in one activity or another. In school, we had long breaks between classes and roamed around the schoolyard with no supervision. As soon as I came home from school, I did my homework as fast as I could so I could get back outside to play.

For many hours each day, we were on our own in the neighborhood streets, nearby open fields, orchards, and playgrounds. In addition to the normal games, we made up new activities and all kinds of mischief. We devised a kind of gun that could shoot S-bent electrical wires a long distance and used it to pester the neighborhood’s stray cats, which we ambushed from the tops of trees.

The houses in the neighborhood had backyards that we regularly crossed through, one after another, hopping fences and startling people who were resting there. There were fruit trees everywhere, and we climbed them and picked clementines, oranges, guavas, loquats, and other fruit. In my own yard alone, there were three different orange trees, a lemon tree, a guava tree, plum trees, a grapefruit tree, a pomegranate tree, a quince tree, and two clementine trees.

Trees were an integral part of the environment, and being good at climbing them was as important as being good at soccer, or at hunting cats, snakes, or scorpions. We built fortresses for playing various war games. There was a large open area where we played soccer, usually with a few of us splitting into two teams. On Fridays, older kids came to play in larger mixed-age teams. There was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement in those games, and often adult neighbors came to watch and cheer.

There was a large open field on one side of the neighborhood, used for growing peanuts in the summer and potatoes in the winter. During harvest season, we picked peanuts and potatoes in the evenings from the back of the harvesting equipment that had been left in the field overnight.

After the field was plowed, we used the furrows as hiding places in games we developed for that terrain. The field was divided into two sections, separated by an uncultivated terrace with thick wild bushes, through which we cleared tunnels and passages. That strip was a haven for making up new games, hiding, and hunting snakes and scorpions.

Dead snakes and scorpions were perfect for petrifying the neighbors who shooed us away because we were too loud while crossing their backyards. They inspired another game we invented.

We tied a small belt to a thin thread and left it on one side of the road while we hid behind bushes on the other side, waiting quietly for people to walk by. When someone came close, we started pulling the belt slowly, mimicking a snake. We did this in the dark, so people noticed the “snake” only when they were almost on top of it and reacted accordingly. Some reactions were so funny that we couldn’t help laughing out loud, which gave us away and triggered angry yelling and sometimes attempts to catch us as we ran away.

In all these activities, we were on our own. There was no adult supervision or guidance of any kind. We were not expected to be polite or follow any generally accepted societal rules because there were none. Everyone was from a different diaspora with different customs, foods, clothes, accents, and demeanors. So we made our own rules. To gain social influence or standing, one had to be tough, imaginative, enterprising, energetic, persuasive, assertive, and resilient.

But we weren't always up to mischief. Here is a group of us serving cold drinks to hitchhiking soldiers at the intersection in front of our neighborhood. The caption at the bottom reads: “The children of Ra'anana found a nice way to combine the pleasant with the useful. Instead of wasting their summer vacation days playing in the streets, they erected a small stand on the main road, set up a large bucket with a cold drink of their own making, and started distributing it to soldiers and passersby. As the picture shows, the children are enjoying the initiative no less than the soldier who is drinking.” At the forefront of the picture is Avi, who was with me from kindergarten through high school, and I am at the back right with a big smile.

Like the rest of our environment, school, too, propagated the same message in different ways: that we must be tough and ready for the next imminent threat. There was a ceremony every year on the 11th of Adar, commemorating the death of Joseph Trumpeldor. From fourth through sixth grade, I stood in front of the whole school lined up in the schoolyard and read a poem about him. I can still recite it by heart:

Bagalil betelchi Trumpeldor nafal	In the Galil, in Tel Chai, Trumpeldor fell
Be’ad ameinu be’ad artzeinu gibor Yosef nafal	For our people, for our homeland, the hero Joseph fell
Bechol makom u’bechol rega tizkeru oti	In every place and in every moment, you will remember me

His famous words, supposedly spoken right before he died, were, “It is good to die for our country.”

Good to die! Nowadays, it seems inconceivable to teach that to little kids, but during Israel’s first decades, it was mainstream education.

My own parents did not quite participate in trying to toughen me, but they came from a different time and place. Both my parents were gentle and loving, but spanking was a normal form of discipline when they were growing up, and my father did it a few times.

My mother looked very uncomfortable whenever my father was about to hit me and would say softly in Hungarian what sounded to me like “neh baanch-ot.” Ne bántsd őt in Hungarian means “Don’t hurt him.” Not understanding Hungarian, I still picked up that it was to my advantage and would repeat it in distress, trying hard not to cry: “Neh baanch-ot, neh baanch-ot.”

My mother spanked me once and cried while doing it. But by far, the most common form of discipline in our home was aspirational and exacting. “Much is expected of you,” I was told. “You are already six years old and need to behave like it.”

In what seems to me now an amazing Jewish balance, high expectations were offset by admiration and support. “You are the best ever” was balanced by “You must do better.” A very early childhood scene I recall is being made fun of in kindergarten because I had freckles. I came home crying, telling my mother, “Other kids make fun of me because they say I have bird poop on my face.” My mother smiled and said, “Of course it’s not bird poop—it’s a gift from the sun, and only you have it. They must be jealous of you.” In an instant, she turned “different” or “weird” into “special.” Instead of being ashamed, I became proud of my freckles.

My parents never bickered or argued with each other or with anyone else. Never. Not once. In fact, I can’t recall any memory of adults quarreling or raising their voices—except for our next-door neighbor, whom we regularly overheard shrieking inside her house, though never face to face.

Only as an adult did I realize how uncommon that was. Among the Holocaust survivors I grew up around, there seemed to be very little appetite for ordinary conflict. Maybe they had had enough excitement. Maybe, after what they had gone through, most daily annoyances seemed too small to fight about. They seemed united by a shared, profound trauma, by the intense drive to rebuild their lives, and by a desire to protect the next generation. They appeared to prioritize solidarity, emotional support, and the future over personal grievances, having already lived through extreme deprivation. Growing up, I thought this was normal, and later in life I had to teach myself how to quarrel with my wife.

When I was around eight, I broke my arm playing soccer. The pain was immense. I had never felt anything close to it, and I had to use all my willpower just to speak. By that age, the “thou shalt not cry” edict was fully internalized, and I was determined not to cry.

My mother took me straight to the hospital, where the X-ray showed an overriding fracture, meaning the bone fragments had shifted and bypassed one another. After I had been lying down for a while, two doctors approached and spoke calmly to me and my mother. Then, very casually, one of them gently held my arm and the other held my hand. They looked at each other and signaled with a nod.

Now.

Then they pulled my hand and arm apart to realign the broken bone. I heard an ear-piercing shriek right next to me, and then realized that it was I who was screaming. It lasted only one or two seconds, and I stopped.

But what stands out most from that moment is my mother’s facial expression. It was a strange combination of agony, compassion, and esteem. I saw immediately that she was with me, that she understood what I had gone through, and that she respected how I had endured it. She could not spare me the pain, but she made sure I did not face it alone.

The adults of my childhood seem to have come from another world—one that demanded extreme resilience and left little room for weakness. Most had lived through profound trauma, not for a moment or a day, but for months or years. They had been forced from their homes and from everything familiar. Many had seen family members killed. Then came the anguish of beginning again in a completely new environment: a new culture, a new language, new weather, new rules, new everything.

And yet, despite the pain, grief, disappointment, and heartbreak—or perhaps because of them—they persevered. They built new lives from scratch. They recreated everything life requires: food and shelter, physical and emotional safety, community, belonging, love, dignity, agency, and some measure of personal fulfillment.

My parents consistently put us kids ahead of everything else, and that was how most of my friends’ parents acted. They didn’t go out to restaurants or movies or buy furniture or toys for themselves, but we kids always had toys, games, and a first-rate education. The message we received was: this is how it is supposed to be. We are not sacrificing our gratification for you; we are doing our job.

More than anything else, they seemed desperately to want a better world for us than the one they had known. I can only hope that I did the same for my kids.

One cannot help but be awed by this immense collective achievement. It takes extraordinary strength to continue to love, trust, work, build, and stand for what is right after watching one’s world disintegrate.

After living in the United States for decades and coming to identify as American, I realize how different it is to grow up here—and how difficult, perhaps impossible, it would be for someone who grew up in the U.S. to fully understand the world I grew up in.

My first response to that realization was envy. It seemed so lovely to be born into a world where, when you looked toward the horizon, you saw only the sky meeting the earth—not an existential threat. A world where people worried about the weather.

Now I feel more ambivalent. I still feel envy, but also gratitude for what that broken world gave me. I feel enriched by the very world that broke me—by the gold that fills my cracks and holds my pieces together.

***

Visiting Israel now, it is hard to imagine how undeveloped it was only a few decades ago. My childhood memories include ice blocks being distributed from a horse-drawn cart on the unpaved road. Milk was delivered by a donkey-drawn wagon, first scooped out of a large vat into one’s own container, and later in glass bottles. A motorized cart distributed kerosene for heating.

I also remember my mother doing laundry by hand. First, she boiled water with a Primus kerosene pressure burner, then used a bar of soap to rub the clothing, then rinsed everything repeatedly in big tubs of water, wrung each item by hand, and hung it on a clothesline to dry. We called it “laundry day” because it took all day.

There were no TVs or telephones. No one in my neighborhood owned a car. Owning a car was so unusual that a personal vehicle was known simply as a “private.” And as backward and undeveloped as this sounds, I was born right as the Tzena period ended. In order to feed the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who flooded the country in 1948, the government instituted rationing and price controls during Israel’s first decade. My sisters, who are a few years older than I am, remember going to the grocery store with ration coupons to collect the allotted bread, sugar, oil, and other basics, determined by strict calorie allotments for each person.

They also remembered that during this austerity period, what came to be known as Israeli schnitzel was created, using chicken or turkey instead of the veal used in traditional Austrian Wiener schnitzel. Ptitim, or Israeli couscous, nicknamed “Ben-Gurion rice,” was also created as an affordable, nutritious, wheat-based, and easily mass-produced staple.

The interactions among the adults around me were often warm and friendly, but there was also a distinct fear of, or deference to, authority figures such as teachers and doctors. Even though these authority figures were Jewish, the attitude toward them seemed inherited from the diaspora, where authority figures were rarely Jewish and Jews were treated as inferiors, or at least as “others.” Only much later did I realize how significant and unusual this was.

There is a TV documentary about the different ways American middle-class and poor parents prepare their children for encounters with authority figures, such as teachers, doctors, and police officers. Middle-class parents tend to explain what will happen, present these figures as helpers, and teach the child how to cooperate. Poor parents, by contrast, often tell their children to be quiet and careful, framing the encounter as something that could go badly.

In that sense, diaspora Jews of the 1940s and 1950s were humanity’s poor—socially, if not always economically. But instead of simply internalizing fear of authority, as vulnerable people often do, my generation rebelled against it. We did the opposite. Deference to authority was seen as weak and wimpy. Acting tough, even boorish, was considered cool.

Everyone around me growing up was Jewish. Everyone. All the kids in school, all the teachers, the principal, the custodians, and the cleaners. The garbage collectors, the policemen and criminals, the beggars and athletes—all were Jewish.

My first notion of being Jewish was almost the same as being human. It was normal. It was the default. On Yom Kippur, for example, there was not a single car on the roads, anywhere. And on Shavuot, the town’s main street was closed for the procession of all the schoolchildren, all in white shirts, carrying a teneh—a decorated basket with bikkurim, the first fruits of the season—to the town park for a holiday ceremony with all the town’s schools.

But to the best of my recollection, no one in my neighborhood or school wore a kippah, the skullcap worn by observant Jews. There were separate schools for religious children, which taught more about observance and religion, and there were a few neighborhoods in town with more observant Jews. We had little contact with them, but there was no estrangement. They were part of “us,” only a bit different.

Not being Jewish was an abstract concept, and a bit strange. I knew there were people who were not Jewish, but only because I had learned about it in school.

I was once sent to the principal’s office with another boy because we were fighting. The principal, who was a new immigrant, said, “I cannot understand how a Jewish boy can raise his hand to another Jewish boy.”

We looked at each other, confused, and said, “Who else would we raise our hands to?”

The only non-Jewish people in my world were the Arabs, who, strangely enough, seemed almost nonexistent to me. There was a bus stop on my way to school where I regularly saw Arabs. Their different clothing and headdress made them easy to distinguish. And if I was close enough, I could hear them speaking Arabic. But there was no contact or interaction of any kind with them.

I don’t recall ever fearing them, being curious about them, or even hearing people talk about them. They were merely there, in the background, and to a child, it was simply how the world was.

Now it is very different, and Arabs are much more integrated into daily life across the country. But when I was a child, they were peripheral figures, barely part of my world.

***

Before the Six-Day War, there was a real fear that we might be wiped out. For months, the tension kept building. The Egyptian Army moved into Sinai. Syria fired heavily on Israeli tractors and Israeli fighter jets downed several Syrian MiG-21s over the Golan. Nasser declared that Egypt would wipe Israel off the map and drive the Jews into the sea. To us, it felt realistic. It felt imminent.

We prepared as best we could. We dug trenches to use as bomb shelters. We taped the windows to reduce injuries from shattered glass. My father was drafted like almost all men. He had previously been called up in 1947, only a few months after arriving in British Mandate Palestine, and later for the war of 1956. One of the last pictures I have of him before he died shows him in uniform, returning home after the war.

On the first morning of the war, we found out it had started when we heard the news on the radio. In a calm, matter-of-fact tone, the announcer said that heavy fighting had broken out on the southern front. I even remember the announcer’s name: Dan Kaner.

Kan Kol Israel mi Yerushalayim—This is the Voice of Israel from Jerusalem.

Ha-shaa shmoneh - The time is eight o’clock.

Ve-harei ha-chadashot mipi Dan Kaner - And here is the news from Dan Kaner.

As I hear that announcement in my head now, I am reminded of the special pronunciation used by radio announcers at that time. Hebrew, too, had only recently been revived as a spoken language. Since the expulsion of Jews from ancient Judea and Israel following the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Hebrew was used largely for prayer, religious study, and writing, but not for everyday speech among most Jews. Now it had to be revived and adapted for daily life. New words had to be created for modern things like toasters and cars. Jews had come from many different parts of the globe, each with its own tradition of pronunciation. That too was still being figured out as I was growing up.

I was very excited that first morning of the war, and I have a distinct memory of my mother’s reaction: she looked at me with a serious, almost pained expression and said, “This is nothing to smile about. War is a terrible, terrible thing.”

Later that day, we were told that our air force had destroyed the Egyptian air force. The next morning, on the way to school, a black, low-flying jet roared right over us. It was a Tupolev-16, and all of us nine-year-olds recognized it immediately—much as most American kids might recognize a Ford Mustang.

We dropped to the ground and covered our heads with our hands, exactly as we had been taught. Later we learned that the jet was Iraqi, and that it had bombed Netanya, northwest of my town. The bombs hit the center of town but, for some reason, did not explode. The jet was eventually shot down over an Army base near Afula, killing fourteen reserve soldiers.

In the days that followed, I could hear artillery fire across the Jordanian border, only a few miles east of my home. First, there were nearby explosions, which we later found out were mortar shells from Jordan landing on the eastern side of town. These were followed by distant thuds and explosions as our forces bombed the Jordanian positions. Even though it quickly became clear that we were winning, I was afraid to sleep at home and asked my mother or sister to come with me to the trench we had dug in the backyard as a bomb shelter.

It was a strange feeling—not only the fear of dying, but the realization that someone nearby wanted you dead, that at that very moment they were trying to kill you.

But six days later it was all over, and the military became our heroes. They saved us. Without them, we would have been as dead as our relatives in Europe 20 years earlier. Everyone in uniform was a hero. The higher their rank, the greater our adulation. With no TV at that time, newscasts were displayed in movie theaters before the movie. For months after the war, when any of the Army leaders appeared in the newscast, the audience burst into applause.

People seemed almost dazed with excitement and disbelief. Thousands ventured out to the nearby Arab town in the West Bank, and to the old city in Jerusalem.

Only a few years later, when it was my turn to join the Army, I saw it as my turn—and my duty—to be a hero. We had been taught from childhood that our highest duty was to sacrifice ourselves to protect our country, and that if we did, we would be honored and loved.

Good going, Abrahams. Way to get your Isaacs to climb eagerly onto the altar.

And it’s not as though I did not see the altar. I saw it. I kept walking, the kindling on my back.

At first.