Family Wars: A Novel of Modern Israel
Published in Issue #2(An Excerpt)
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As funerals go, this one was a pleasure. Honoring a man who’d enjoyed a long, productive life and died peacefully in his sleep lent lightness to Lazar Kagan’s step as he accompanied the coffin to its grave on a hillside. Lake Tiberias shimmered below. Lazar’s eulogy for his first commander was saturated by memory and celebration.
Looking around at old friends nodding, smiling in the sunshine at the memories, Lazar found his own kind of comfort. He needed it now when old assumptions had become painful questions.
He talked about Isaac’s daring after the second World War, when he slipped convoys of damaged survivors from displaced persons camps all over Europe onto precarious boats at Marseilles, Venice and La Spezia and illegally delivered them into British-ruled Palestine. Isaac, he reminded the large gathering, had been a founder of their country; his military exploits, followed by long service abroad had enriched all their lives.
People might think he was nuts to feel this way as he helped to bury an icon of his own early days In Israel. But he hadn’t lost perspective, in spite of everything splintering around him. He’d suffered seventeen straight funerals in the past ten days, each one for a child murdered either by a suicide bomber or by a brainwashed youngster running around with a rifle or a knife and the crazy idea he was serving God, Allah, whatever.
For a guy who’d overdosed on funerals, this one was a...
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