The war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Iran and Syria continues. Meanwhile, I wrote this piece for the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade Daily. You can read it here where there are other writers on the war or continue here.

My library books are long overdue. 

I took them out from a kib­butz library near where I live in the West­ern Galilee, a few weeks before the Octo­ber 7 mas­sacre. Most of the peo­ple on the kib­butz — four miles away from the bor­der with Lebanon, where Hezbol­lah, Iran’s proxy ter­ror army, has more than 150,000 mis­siles and rock­ets aimed in our direc­tion — have left. And the library, with its sur­pris­ing col­lec­tion of Eng­lish books, is closed until fur­ther notice. 

That’s just one of the many ways my life in a beach vil­lage on the Mediter­ranean Shore has changed so abrupt­ly, a place I’ve lived with my fam­i­ly since 1991.

I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t con­cen­trate enough to read a book. And I’ve always loved read­ing! But what could I read, any­way, dur­ing the war? From my book­shelf, I picked up John Le Carre’s The Lit­tle Drum­mer Girl, and leafed through it, find­ing a few sen­tences about a char­ac­ter who mused about Israel, ask­ing, ​“What are we to become… A Jew­ish home­land or an ugly lit­tle Spar­tan state?” I thought about how we returned to Israel after an exile that last­ed near­ly 2000 years. We revived the Hebrew lan­guage. We wel­comed Jews from all over, from Afghanistan to Yemen. We became the start-up nation, fueled by a Do-It-Your­self inge­nu­ity and cre­ativ­i­ty. We have a diverse pop­u­la­tion of almost ten million. 

As a writer, I want my nov­els to reflect a per­fect­ed real­i­ty, and I want real­i­ty to be as redemp­tive as a nov­el. But liv­ing in the Mid­dle East has crushed my roman­ti­cism. Israel still has to act like Spar­ta, even though since its found­ing in 1948, we’ve kept dream­ing about how to beat our swords into plowshares.

So what have I read dur­ing the war? The only book I’ve been able to focus on is Daniel Jon­ah Goldhagen’s The Dev­il Nev­er Dies: The Rise and Threat of Glob­al Anti­semitism. It con­firms what I sus­pect­ed: Israel does not cause anti­semitism, but rather, anti­semitism caus­es the demo­niza­tion of Israel. I’ve come to under­stand that, before Octo­ber 7, I lived in denial about the pow­er of that hatred. Now, I can no longer pre­tend that there are those out there who don’t real­ly mean it when they use the same words that Hitler used. Anni­hi­late. Exter­mi­nate. Eliminate.

But it’s wartime and there’s lit­tle time for reflec­tion. There’s too much work to be done. A few days ago, I start­ed vol­un­teer­ing at a local school to teach Eng­lish to junior high school stu­dents. They come in the after­noon; ele­men­tary school kids study there in the morn­ing. The schools where the kids usu­al­ly study have been closed because of the threat of Hezbol­lah attacks. There is also a lack of teach­ers: many of them have been called up for the Israeli Army’s reserve units while oth­ers have moved far­ther south.

The Eng­lish teacher, Mari­na, explained to me that the stu­dents do not yet have books or study mate­ri­als; they’re all stored in the school that is now part of a closed mil­i­tary zone. So Mari­na set up her com­put­er to project vocab­u­lary words on the board in the front of the class­room. I didn’t bring a com­put­er; instead, I took a pho­to of the words with my phone and then sat with a group of eighth-grade stu­dents in the bomb shelter. 

The kids were row­dy, unruly, bois­ter­ous. Still, I wor­ried about the words they had to learn for a sto­ry: crime, scene, blood, evidence.

I asked the stu­dents to write sen­tences using the words, hop­ing they wouldn’t write about Hamas or the war. They didn’t. They wrote about crim­i­nals, rob­bers, and detectives. 

They laughed. They sang ​“Head, Shoul­ders, Knees and Toes.” They joked. Some of the kids didn’t have pen­cils. One asked to go to the bath­room because he didn’t want to read his sen­tences out loud. I’ve giv­en pri­vate Eng­lish lessons but I’ve nev­er taught in an Israeli school before. I impro­vised the way a neigh­bor who owns a sec­ond-hand cloth­ing store now guards the entrance of our vil­lage, or the way high-pow­ered tech exec­u­tives are now pick­ing lemons and cher­ry toma­toes in south­ern Israel because of the short­age of farm workers.

After school was over, I walked out­side and sud­den­ly there was an explo­sion. The boom sound­ed close.

“If it is out­go­ing, you don’t have to wor­ry about it,” my hus­band always tells me.

Out­go­ing means Israel is shelling Lebanon. Incom­ing means a rock­et or mis­sile from Hezbollah.

I rode back to my vil­lage on the shore of the Mediter­ranean on my 250-cc scoot­er, the one I usu­al­ly ride to the library, and tried to act as if I’m a char­ac­ter in a nov­el who doesn’t give in to fear. 

I thought about the books I want to take out and read once the war is over. I thought about the books I want to write. I thought about the his­to­ry of the Peo­ple of the Book and the present moment. Some­thing enor­mous is hap­pen­ing right now, and I am part of it. I am writ­ing the sto­ry of my life. I am writ­ing the sto­ry with my life.

I took the photo on the beach in nearby Nahariya early one morning. It’s amazing to find beauty in the midst of war.