A New Year’s Resolution That’s a Keeper: Absorb Some Atmosphere and Flavor of THE Jewish Event of Our Time
Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for you that’s a Keeper – read a riveting book about THE Jewish event of our time – our homeland’s sovereign redemption eighteen hundred years in the yearning by generations of our people despised and maltreated as targeted outsiders in Christian Europe (even after the Holocaust) and in North Africa and the Mideast.
By “riveting,” I mean books that aren’t broad academic treatments but gripping participant-told accounts of particular aspects in the homeland and abroad that give a sense of what it was like for Jews in their accounts’ place and time.
Am I making too much of Israel’s rebirth and of what can be conveyed by books by and about its participants? I’m not alone in believing I’m not. Rummaging recently through my, all right muchly unread, thousand or so collection of Jewish homeland history books, I ran across an unpretentious little volume, The Return to Zion, part of a “Popular History of Jewish Civilization.” Here are two excerpts from its Introduction:
“There can be no doubt whatsoever that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 is one of the most important events in Jewish history. That a nation cut off – in the main – from its land for nearly two thousand years should regain its sovereignty is amazing enough. That it should do so immediately after suffering the worst disaster any people in recorded history has ever suffered and, from a military point of view, against overwhelming odds, compounds the astonishment and indeed awe that any spectator must feel….”
And
“As in the other volumes of the Popular History Library, it is not our intention to give a detailed historical account but rather to try to impart to the reader some of the atmosphere and flavor of what led up to the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel. It is hoped that this prelude will lead the reader on to further investigation into one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Jewish people.”
I would broaden that perspective a little. This most important Jewish history event did not end in 1948 but continues on – through the 1967 and 1973 wars and more – to this day. So without, as they say, further ado, let me commend to you as vehicles for fulfilling this keeper New Year’s Resolution four first-person participants’ accounts imparting to the reader in gripping prose some of the atmosphere and flavor of the events that they chronicle.
Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate
This book is not a full account of the Six Day War. Pressfield follows a handful of participants through the agonizing waiting period, their particular battles, and the astonishing victory’s aftermath, grippingly telling in these participants’ – fighter and helicopter pilots, recon company, armor and paratroop officers and soldiers alike, and others’ – own words their actions “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet.” Interspersed are brief pre-1967 war participant-connected flashbacks to 1956, 1948 and earlier events, national and personal, shaping Israel and Israelis. Pressfield succeeds fully, in my opinion, in conveying vividly not only what these Six Day War participants did, but what it was like then and there for themselves and other Israelis. If you seek a glimpse of the Six Day War as Israelis experienced it, The Lion’s Gate is a good way to see it.
Jeffrey and Craig Weiss’ I Am My Brother’s Keeper
The Pledge, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem and other well-known books describe the involvement, against American law, of American Jews in isolated Israel’s post-WW II struggle for independence. This involved acquiring and getting to Israel, against the British blockade, desperately needed planes and weapons, rescuing survivors and surviving resistance fighters from DP camps in Europe, and fighting, most critically in the air, alongside Israelis.
One sterling book on this you may not have heard of is Jeffrey and Craig Weiss’ I Am My Brother’s Keeper. I stumbled on it somehow, and I agree with the rave reviews of it on Amazon. It will give you a most moving glimpse of the desperate 1948 war and courageous role that American and other foreign participants, not all of them Jewish, played in it.
Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua
The saga of the Exodus 1947 and post-capture British maltreatment of its Holocaust survivor passengers rightly comes foremost to mind at the mention of the Aliyah Bet. I’ve read a number of books on the Exodus, all well worth the reading. But there are two other gripping books in English that I’ve encountered on other Aliyah Bet ships – Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua and Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade – that I commend to you earnestly. Two encounters of the Ulua will stick with you permanently.
The British, whose policy regarding the Jews of Europe before, during and after the Holocaust, was to keep them in Europe, learned that the Ulua was involved in “illegal” immigration of Holocaust survivors to Palestine well before the first refugees got on board. The British brought strong pressure to bear on Sweden, where the first hundreds of mostly young female refugees were to board, to prevent that from occurring. The Swedish inspector comes aboard and queries the captain, Eliav masquerading as a Dutch sailor “van Groot,” what are all these multi-tier shelves filling the cargo holds, are they bunks? Well, says van Groot, the ship is going up to the Arctic to study the base of the ocean fish food chain, and the shelves will hold fish tanks holding the little fishes. All right, says the Swedish inspector, “scientific expedition, free to go,” then under his breath: “But I want to ask you one question, Captain van Groot or whatever your name is. How much are the Jews of New York paying for this fishing expedition?”
After close calls with disaster, the Ulua, bearing its Jewish refugees who’d boarded in Sweden, arrives at a small port in Italy for clandestinely boarding more Jewish survivors there. One of the “Swedish” girls recognizes among those boarding in Italy her sister, each having thought herself their family’s sole survivor. You cannot make this up.
Howard Blum’s The Brigade
If you would grasp a measure of the Ingathering of the Exiles, you have to have a glimpse of how Jews were hounded, not only by the Nazis themselves, in Europe. You have to have a glimpse into how the survivors survived during the War, in the death camps and the wild, and afterwards in DP camps and moving inexorably under bitter conditions to the Aliyah Bet ships.
So let me tell you about Howard Blum’s The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WW II. Like Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, it tells its true story through the experiences of just a few people, in this case three members of the Jewish Brigade which the British trained and sent to Europe and in the end were sorry they did. These three Brigade members knew each other, and worked sometimes together, first in the War and then after, initially in vengeance against Germans and ultimately in rescuing Jewish refugees. But they each had their own motivations. One’s was a long-shot search for his sister who just might have survived. She had, and her tale of fleeing the Nazis during the War and of surviving after it is that of the author’s fourth main character. The Brigade too is gripping reading, and if you’d seek a glimpse of Jews in Europe in the 1940’s, and their meaning for the Jewish homeland of Israel, you’ll find it here.
In that second quote from The Return to Zion’s Introduction above, the editors of that series expressed the hope that absorbing a glimpse of the atmosphere and flavor of the place and time of Israel’s sovereign rebirth would lead the reader “on to further investigation into one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Jewish people.” Who could argue with that?
But I’d have you look too at something further, at three maps – of the original Palestine Mandate, encompassing today’s Israel and Jordan; of what was left for the Mandate’s Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land – i.e., Palestine west of the Jordan – following Transjordan’s excision; and of Israel and the invader Jordan under their ceasefire lines of 1949, showing the big chunk of Judea-Samaria (“the West Bank”) and historic Jerusalem in Jordanian hands.
Study that last map showing a twice-shrunken, historic Jerusalem-less, at best militarily perilous Jewish national home. That status lasted only nineteen years that ended more than a half-century ago, when, thanks again to Jordanian aggression, the secure natural boundaries of the second map with western Palestine, the historic land of Israel, in Jewish homeland hands (and eastern Palestine, Jordan, with its majority of Palestinian Arabs in Arab hands), were restored.
Armed with an absorption of the atmosphere and flavor of homeland Jews’ unrelentingly courageous redemption and continuing defense of the Jewish people’s national home, ask yourself this: What standing have we, Diaspora American Jews, safe and secure in America, to add our voices to those of, e.g., the UN and EU, in clamoring for Israel to retreat to that third map of a ghetto rump of our homeland?
Happy reading.