At 11:00 a.m. on a May morning in Israel, 2003, a siren goes off. Unusual for a country in which the unexpected is the only routine, the siren is scheduled, and once it arrives, searing the air with its monotonous shrill, the people are prepared. It marks Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, and is observed with a moment of silence. Israeli drivers, on any other day darting down lanes as fast as they cam, hear the siren and stop their cars on the side of the road. They get out of their cars and, for one minute, lower their heads and remember those who have fallen while fighting Israel’s wars. It is not a theoretical exercise; almost every Israeli has been personally touched by loss, has experienced firsthand the unbearable grief for a life ended too soon. On the streets and in shopping malls, in army bases and on college campuses, in elementary schools and gyms and coffee shops, everywhere, the country stops, its citizens standing silent.
The siren dies down, but life refuses to return to normal. It is a day in which Israelis, so many of them, go to military cemeteries, so many of them as well, to lay little pebbles, as is the Jewish custom, on the tombstones of their friends or relatives. Looking at the tombstones, one is struck by the terror of sheer math: this one, whispers the legend on a tombstone, was born in 1976 and died in 1995, and another tells of a life begun in 1955 and ended in 1973. Here, the dead are all young, and those who visit them are older, sometimes feeling guilty for having survived, always mindful of the fact that they could easily have been the ones covered in earth and their friends the ones walking away, black yarmulkes on their heads and tears in their eyes. On television, a special channel broadcasts slides with the names of every fallen soldier; even allotting just five seconds for each slide, the list still takes more than a full day to run in its entirety. Every year, new names are added. Other channels broadcast documentaries, mainly stories of sacrifice, and on the radio a playlist of several dozen sad songs repeats itself, sending listeners into a ghostly state of moroseness.
As the day unfolds, a few Israelis in particular are pondering their lives. Like all Israelis, they, too, are overcome by melancholy, taking the day to reflect on friends who have died. Like many Israelis, they were born elsewhere, choosing, at different times in their lives and for different reasons, to make aliya, to immigrate to Israel. Unlike most immigrants, however, they arrived in Israel not out of necessity, not having been persecuted by malicious regimes, but out of choice; they were all born in the United States, and all led lives of relative comfort before moving to Israel, where they endured hardships and even risked their lives.
In Jerusalem, Marlin and Betty Levin are at home. Their house is in the Nayot neighborhood, which they helped found forty years ago, along with a group of other American-Jewish immigrants. Then, they orchestrated a massive artificial landfilling, creating just enough space to form two rows of homes on the newly created hill. Now, overlong the valley below, the Levins’ house is shrouded in memories. For six decades, Marlin has been working as a journalist, keeping every single one of his stories filed. He is an amateur photographer, and when he and Betty came to Palestine in 1948, he was the only person in the region to possess a camera with color film, taking thousands of pictures, all of which are now stored, in perfect order, in rusty filing cabinets cluttering his house. He is also an avid painter, and his drawings, which cover the walls, show the progression of the artist as well as that of the man. In the late 1940s, Marlin drew cheery portraits of young men and women, bubbling with robust colors and broad brushstrokes; in the late 1990s, he drew a scene of a stormy night in Jerusalem, black on gray, dark and ominous.
Talking to the Levins, one would be hard-pressed to guess their age. They are both octogenarians, and as such are afflicted, naturally, by the scars of time. But as they talk to each other – teasing, cooing, tenderly touching – they appear to be just as old as they were when they came to Israel, two people in their twenties, spending their honeymoon on a crowded boat to Palestine, eager to quench the burning of their ideology. None of that passion was lost; now it is simply directed elsewhere, toward other goals. For Betty, it’s her garden, a splendid blanket of pink and violet and green; she spends hours toiling over her flowers, forgetting herself, her age, and sometimes even her husband, who from the porch above begs her to come on in already and have tea with him. For Marlin, it’s his painting, and writing, and Betty. Once or twice a week, they get into their tiny, antiquated car, drive through the serpentine streets of Jerusalem, and go out to a restaurant or a show. They live in the present, but they cannot escape their past.
Their past is filled with the dead. On Yom Hazikaron, they go for a drive. They drive past the hospice across from the Old City wall and remember their friend Moshe, who fell there after being struck by a Jordanian sniper. Another place reminds them of Hannah, a young and enthusiastic acquaintance who was a nurse and died tending to her patients. Even in the city center, bustling as it is with traffic and shoppers, teeming with the hubbub of humanity, they remember those who were killed in explosions that happened here many years ago, those who were gunned down, those who were stabbed and burned and crushed. Death, they realize, has been their constant companion in the city, and on every street it has left its mark, a token to remember it by.
They return home. They turn on the radio, and the sad songs pour out. Marlin and Betty, energetic even in their eighties, are affected; it is the only day of the year on which they allow themselves to slow down, to slow down and think.
Across the country, on Israel’s border with Lebanon, about a four-hour drive north of the Levins’ home, Mike Ginsberg is in his command room. As director of security for kibbutz Misgav Am, where he has lived for the past thirty years, moving there shortly after he came to Israel in 1969, he is in charge of operating the kibbutz’s siren, to announce to the members the moment of silence observed on Yom Hazikaron. Elsewhere in Israel, most communities are served by regional sirens, which automatically go off at the same time and alert everyone at once. Misgav Am, however, is too far away from other cities and towns, and the sound of the regional sirens fades and dissipates before arriving at the hilltop on which the kibbutz is built. So Mike operates a local device, the same siren used to alert members to rocket attacks launched by Lebanese terrorists based several dozen feet away, across the border. At 11:00 a.m. sharp, he pushes the button.
Then, a minute later, he pushes it again, the siren winds down and dies, and Mike joins the rest of the kibbutz members in the cemetery. The cemetery is located to the northeast of the kibbutz, so close to the border that Mike loves to joke and tell everybody that the cemetery is really inside Lebanon itself. The joke, however, is partially true: the cemetery lies just outside the kibbutz’s fence, and in 2000, as the Israel Defense Forces ended an eighteen-year military presence in southern Lebanon and a new borderline was designed, Mike had to fight with army officials to guarantee that the cemetery remained under Israeli control.
There are approximately twenty-five graves in the cemetery. Only half of those buried there, however, were fortunate enough to die of natural causes; the rest died in military actions or in terrorist attacks. Here is the tombstone for Yoav Gross, who died as a soldier fighting the battle for Jerusalem in 1967, and here lies Mike’s friend Schori, who fought with him in the desert peninsula of Sinai in 1973 and was killed there by Egyptian artillery shelling. Some, however, died as civilians; Mike passes by the grave of Sami Shani, the kibbutz’s secretary who was killed when a cell of terrorists infiltrated the kibbutz in 1980, taking over the children’s house. Sami saw them, tried to stop them with his body, fought with his bare hands; he was killed on the spot, shot at point-blank range. Next to him lies Eyal Gluska, who died in the same attack. He was two and a half years old at the time of his death, his skull crushed with the butt of a rifle because he wouldn’t stop crying. To relive himself from the burden of memory, Mike looks up at the view. This is his favorite piece of scenery in the world: here, he can see the snowy Mount Hermon, and south Lebanon, all the way to the Mediterranean. He made some calculations once, and found that the cemetery offers a 270-degree view. He looks at the verdant Saluki River valley below, and at the Lebanese village of El Adaisa on the opposite hill, not more than a few feet in aerial line. He looks at the Israeli town of Metula to the northeast, where the official border passage between Israel and Lebanon – called, with some irony, the Good Fence – used to be. He feels as if he were hovering, not quite in the sky but no longer on earth.
Then the ceremony starts. There’s a black plastic bucket containing red roses, and each member takes one. On the ground, in the middle of the cemetery, is a military steel helmet, turned upside down. In it there’s a torched rag, a makeshift memorial flame. There’s also a flagpole, and today the flag is at half-mast. The kibbutz members are not religious Jews, so no Bibles are to be found. Instead, someone carries a black folder labeled Takanon Avlut, Hebrew for mourning procedures. The procedures include a few well-known poems, the most famous of which speaks of the fallen soldiers as the silver platter on which the State of Israel was handed over to the Jewish people. They also include the reading of the names of the kibbutz’s fallen soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks; with each name read, some of the members walk silently to the gravesides, laying down their roses. Shortly thereafter, the ceremony is over.
In central Israel, approximately halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, another ceremony begins. It is held in Hashmonaim, a small settlement just miles east of the Green Line, the much-contested demarcation between Israel and the West Bank. Hashmonaim is home to several hundred families, many of whom are newly arrived immigrants from the United States, most of whom are Orthodox and politically committed. One such family is the Kalkers; Sharon and her children Rachel and Micahel are standing, along with their neighbors and friends, in Hashmonaim’s basketball court, watching as local residents take turns reflecting on the meaning of the day. Although the Kalkers arrived from New York not long ago, in 2001, they have already, like all their friends, experienced firsthand the ravages of violence. Ever since the autumn of 2000, when the second Palestinian intifada (Arabic for uprising) started, thousands, on both sides, have lost their lives. The Jewish settlers in particular have been a convenient target: like Hashmonaim, all the settlements are isolated dots engulfed by Palestinian villages. Given the hilly topography of the West Bank, settlers have often found themselves like ducks in a shooting gallery, driving their cars on angry roads, snipers aiming from above. Many have died that way, including some of the Kalkers’ friends.
But even to the west of the Green Line, inside Israel proper, violence is rampant. Rachel, taking the bus every day to her high school in Jerusalem, realizes that one day she, too, may fall victim to the murderous wrath of a Palestinian suicide bomber, dozens of whom have blown themselves up on Jerusalem’s buses, in its cafés, and on its streets. She knows some who were wounded, and knew others who lost their lives. Standing silent as the siren’s wail culminates in a grating screech, the Kalkers, new Israelis, are already intimately acquainted with death.
All throughout Israel ceremonies are held, and people listen to the same songs on the same radio stations. Like most Israelis, Marlin and Betty, Mike, and the Kalkers mourn, but gradually a soothing calm envelopes their minds; soon, they know, Yom Hazikaron will be over, and at that exact moment Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, will begin, a magical transformation, a ceremonial reminder that freedom was never possible without sacrifice, that in Israel, redemption is always preceded by sorrow.