Nahariya

October 7, 2023

I read the Facebook message from Elise before the dozen or so emails and texts I received about the massacre. So, I learned about October 7 not from news alerts, but from an old girlfriend I hadn’t seen in forty years. And I read her note all the way through, even paused for ten minutes, shutting my eyes, rolling the memories around my brain as I wrote my reply, before clicking on CNN, and moving from bittersweet nostalgia to the abject horror I would feel for—who knows how long? Maybe for the rest of my life. Here’s what Elise wrote:

Elephant,

How do I begin this correspondence? Do I offer condolences for the losses of your brothers and sisters in Israel, the babies, the grandmothers, the soldiers (especially the tank gunners)? Do I express my solidarity with Israel, with you, with your struggle during this most difficult and pivotal time? Do I repeat the now stale speech I recited to you before, when we first met, about the responsibility Germans of my generation feel to support Israel, and now I can add my deeply held conviction that this sacred responsibility extends to the next generation and the next?

Or do I simply tell you that even as a grandmother of three, twice married and divorced, facing retirement, surrounded by loved ones in the land of your fairytale nightmares, I think of you often and remember you with fondness. All of it, Elephant, all of it. But especially Nahariya. And I wonder, is this my arrogance, or my foolishly romantic imagination? Which is to say, I wonder if you even remember me?

Oh, and Elephant? I forgive you.

B’ahava,

Elise

Grandmother of three? That’s what jumped out at me after my first reading, and then lingered through subsequent analyses. Grandmother. “Are we really that old?” I asked myself. We are! Then, of course, there was this amazing sentence: I wonder if you even remember me. I recited it to myself three times. Then I closed my eyes.

1981-1982

I was assigned to the wrong unit. An odd mistake, especially for an army renowned for its competence. My IDF mobilization letter ordered me to report to the Seventh Armored Brigade. This was an elite unit. Some ten thousand Israeli teens suffered through a rigorous application process each year. Less than one hundred were accepted. You needed to demonstrate outstanding physical prowess, as well as exceptional intelligence, excellent health, and clear leadership potential. I was a weakling—5’8, 140 pounds—and an infection-prone asthmatic. I was also an introvert with eyeglasses. I was smart enough, I suppose, but I wasn’t fluent in Hebrew, so I came off in my pre-army interviews as kind of slow. I was the only recruit from my North American garin, my immigrant group, assigned to an elite unit. And—I hadn’t even applied! A native-born Israeli friend joked that it was like a mediocre American high school student being admitted to Harvard, without having submitted an application. It was, in other words, totally impossible.

But how does one point out the mistake to one of the most powerful fighting forces in the world? The young, apathetic officer I spoke to in the Talpiot office, as I expected, flatly refused to admit that it was an error. Harried and bored—a disconcerting combination—she assured me that the only way the army could have made a mistake was if another recruit had exactly the same name and birthday as me. And since, she told me, my name, Phil Liebstein, was, shall we say, unusual—oh, and, by the way, did I know my first name was close to Hebrew word for Elephant? (I’d only heard that a million times since I was six)—there was no possibility of a mix-up. (I found out years later that this was exactly the issue. Another Phil Liebstein, my age, wandering around Israel. Who would have thought?) She took a sip of coffee, a drag from her cigarette, and removed her eyes from my file, and looked at me for the first time. She must have seen something, probably my skinny arms, because she handed me the card of a commander I could speak to if I wanted a transfer. Then she gestured to the next guy in line.

“Does anyone get a transfer before they even start?” I asked quickly.

She looked up, surprised I was still there. She considered my question for a second. “No,” she answered.

“Then why. . .”

She tilted her head and looked me over again, but this time with genuine, appalled curiosity.

“You should ask for a transfer.”

But the commander didn’t want to transfer me. After three days of phone calls with the wrong offices, knocking on the wrong doors in the wrong buildings, more phone calls with subordinates who refused to put me through, more wrong doors in Tel Aviv and Bet Shemesh, I found the right commander in the Jerusalem Talpiot recruitment office where I’d started my search. Tall, muscular, and tan, with dark brown eyes, hair slightly too long, top uniform button undone, and two falafels (military insignias) on his fatigues, he was exactly who a casting director would want to play a tank commander, which is to say he looked nothing like me.

“Elephant,” he said. Like the recruitment officer, he kept his eyes on my file, not on me. “You don’t want to be in a tank?”

“It’s a mistake,” I said, trying but failing, to sound polite.

He looked at me for the first time. Noting my physique, he did a double take. But then he shrugged. The orders said what they said. “There is another Elephant?” he said. “With the identical date of birth? I don’t think so.”

“I think there might be,” I insisted. Then added “sir” for the first time in my life.

He smiled, then handed me back my file. “Give us a try, Elephant,” he said. “Otherwise. . . ” he shrugged. Otherwise, what? I thought. He never answered. I joined the Seventh.

Three weeks later, I considered running away. It wasn’t the six-kilometer midnight mud runs on cold nights, where I always finished last; it wasn’t my wretched slowness in scaling the splinter-filled wall; it wasn’t our sergeant screaming into my ear during our daytime runs so his spit bounced off my cheek, his Hebrew so fast I only caught every fourth word, even though he knew my Hebrew wasn’t fluent. This was all torture, but also clearly the point of basic training. And there were benefits. My fellow soldiers all rooted me on. My Hebrew vocabulary expanded, especially all the colorful slang words for female body parts. I got in shape. But there was one essential task for a tank soldier that was simply beyond me. I couldn’t load the shells into my tank’s turret because I couldn’t physically lift the shells on my own. The ordnance was half my size and weighed much more. There was a reason for the strength requirement. I wasn’t strong. One day, after three weeks of sweaty, back-breaking, humiliating failures, I let the missile fall through my sopping hands and I ran into the barracks, sat on the floor with my back against the wall, and lit a cigarette (I’d just started smoking a week before). Thirty seconds later I heard army-boot footsteps clopping up the steps. I expected my sergeant, and waited for him to scream his spit-filled profanity at me and then drag me back to the field. But it was the unit commander. He eased himself down next to me, his muscled legs stretching long past mine. He leaned back and put his arm around me. “Elephant,” he said. “You are the strongest soldier in the unit, Elephant.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

He nodded toward the door. “All these boys. They go home to Mommy on Shabbat. She cooks for them, washes their uniforms. They see their friends, their brothers, their little sisters. Everyone treats them like heroes. I know you, Elephant. You’re alone here. You chose to be with us. You are the hero, Elephant.”

I stubbed out my cigarette on the floor. “I can’t lift the fucking shell.”

He shrugged. “Elephant. Here’s the plan. Every day, before breakfast. You and me, Elephant. We’ll lift weights. I also need to be stronger. In six months, I swear to you, Elephant. You’ll lift two shells. With one arm, Elephant.”

After six months of pre-dawn workouts, I still couldn’t lift a single shell. By the time I finished my service, with luck, and ten minutes of screaming, grunting, and fighting, I could sometimes wrestle the missile into the turret. But not often.

I was a “lonely soldier,” my semi-ironic translation of chayil boded—the Hebrew designation of an immigrant soldier with no immediate family in Israel. The word boded could also mean “lone,” but during my time in the army I was rarely alone. Like most soldiers, piled on top of each other in cramped barracks, I craved aloneness. On the other hand, I was often lonely. As a chayil boded, I was assigned a “family,” folks with a house I could escape to on weekends, or other earned leaves. My army mom and dad, the Feldmans, treated me like the stranger I was. They were polite, hospitable, even generous. Mom—she insisted I call her Ima, Hebrew for “Mom”—learned to cook macaroni and cheese, and Dad (Abba) took me to shoot baskets in a local park. But they only ever asked me one question: How is the army? I hated the army with a dark passion, so this was a difficult question to answer. I stuck to “Fine,” which gave Abba the opportunity to regale me with stories from the Sinai campaign, when he apparently chased the Egyptian army in a jeep, armed with only a Hungarian pistol. He’d recite the same story, then drive past me on the basketball court, tsking about my slowness and wondering how I ever made it into Tanks. After my fourth week of basic training—that is, after the second time I tried to transfer out—I stopped spending my weekends with the Feldmans and switched to Minna and Willy.

Minna, my grandmother’s first cousin, was a Holocaust survivor, her Auschwitz tattoo prominent on her chubby forearm. Willy refused to call himself a survivor, but he’d spent the war hiding in the forests of Lithuania, climbing trees to avoid SS killers. They’d met at a DP camp in Cyprus and got married two weeks later. I met them a year before I enlisted in the army. I was spending my junior year of college in Israel and they were my only family. I didn’t enjoy the one Shabbat I spent with them in their tiny apartment in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. Minna spoke only Yiddish, so I couldn’t converse with her, though she kept trying, as if somehow I’d magically pick up the old language if she spoke it quickly enough. Willy was fluent in Hebrew, but he only wanted to talk about how much he hated the Labor Zionists who, he claimed, ruined the country. I didn’t dislike the old, childless couple, but my dominant mode of being that year was having fun, and no one would describe Willy and Minna as fun.

But a year later, ensconced in the wrong unit, with frozen mud runs, limited sleep, and shell-wrestling as my daily curse, fun was no longer on the table. I longed for family. I called Willy and he quickly agreed to take me in, beginning that weekend.

Minna had evidently learned some English since I’d last seen her, since she greeted me at the door with the word “Food.”

“I have food,” she said, completing an entire sentence, and my nose told me she wasn’t lying. I smelled fried peppers, fried onions, fried garlic, fried tomatoes, and some kind of fried meat, probably chicken, but the frying garlic overwhelmed everything. Even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday, we immediately sat down for Shabbat dinner. That was fine with me. In my army years I was in a state of permanent hunger. I could eat any time; for that matter, I could also sleep any time. “Food,” Minna called for the third time. She brought in a tray heaped with chicken schnitzels, coleslaw, and shakshuka.

It had only been a year, but Minna somehow looked a decade older. Blue varicose veins now accompanied the Auschwitz tattoo on her fleshy forearm. Her limp had become more of a waddle, and she winced every time she took a step. I jumped up to help her, but Willy pulled me down. “It makes her happy to serve you,” he said. And she did seem pleased, possibly from successfully utilizing a new language, though she switched to Yiddish as soon as she sat down and babbled on for the rest of the meal. Willy translated her first sentence, “We’re happy to see you,” then ignored the rest.

After dinner, Willy led me by my arm to the living room, poured two glasses of brandy, and lectured me on Israeli politics. I made it through half a glass, then passed out in my armchair. When I woke up hours later, I was lying prone on the sofa, covered by a cool comforter. Without washing up—I was in the army—I peeled off my uniform, burrowed into my pillow and slept until 1 p.m. the next day.

And that was my first eighteen months as a lonely soldier. Backbreaking training as a tankist, where I gradually rose to a slightly less than mediocre level of performance. I could drive a tank in something resembling a straight line. I could execute a turn as long as I was fully braked. And, on rare occasions, I could heave a shell into the right place. I spent Shabbat and holidays with Minna and Willie—always the same meals: fried chicken schnitzel, fried vegetables, fried eggs in the morning, then re-fried leftovers. Minna never learned another English word and Willie never changed the subject from his hatred of the political left.

On the first day of my eighteenth month, an official army letter astonished me. I was being released. When I’d enlisted, they told me I’d be in for two years. But someone had miscalculated, and it turned out, based on my age when I joined, that I’d served my term. One more week and I was free.

I was still pumping weights with the commander every morning. When I saw him the next day, I held out the letter. He grabbed it and held it in his fingers while lying flat on a mat and pushed up a 150-pound barbell. He read the orders while holding up the weight. Then he bounced the barbell on to the mat, handed me the note, and shrugged his wide shoulders.

“Don’t leave,” he said. “You don’t have to. I’ll recommend you for officer’s training.” He added two ten-pound weights to the bar.

“Are you joking?” I asked. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe he was.

He shook his head. “Elephant. What can I do with you, Elephant? You still don’t know?”

“Sir? Don’t know what?”

“Elephant, you’re the strongest.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Enough with the—”

“Shah!” he hissed sharply. Israeli army officers constantly amazed me with their ability to hiss with a volume loud enough to carry through a room. When I taught high school much later in life, it was a skill I tried to develop, unsuccessfully. That morning, the commander reinforced his silencing shush by cupping his right hand and pointing it at me, a signal that for ordinary Israelis meant “hold on a second” but in the army meant “don’t you dare fucking interrupt me.”

“You don’t see it?” he asked. “Your leadership potential? Everything you’ve learned? How you’ve grown? Everything you could give to this country?”

In my mind, I’d already given eighteen months. But the commander was a career officer, and I didn’t expect him to understand. I didn’t say anything. He stared at me, and for the first time in eighteen months I held his gaze with no difficulty. “Go then,” he said. “Take your trip to India. To Brazil. Go back to America, Elephant.”

Actually, unlike most native Israelis, I wasn’t planning a liberating post-army trip. I’d been offered a teller job in an Israeli bank around the corner from Minnah and Willy’s, and I figured I’d start a few months early. I had a ticket to visit home in Cleveland but it wasn’t for another six months and I’d return after two weeks. I could tell the commander was pissed off at me, but I couldn’t figure why. Most soldiers didn’t stay for officer training, and he couldn’t have been serious about my qualifications. From driving, to navigating to firing, not to mention lifting the goddam shells, I had hands down, the worst skills in the unit. The joke among the men was that you knew Israel was in deep trouble if I was ever ordered into battle. The line didn’t offend me. I came up with it.

“Well, we’re done, Elephant,” the commander said. We stood and faced each other. Was I supposed to salute? Salutes were rare in the IDF.

“I want to thank you,” I said.

“Go,” he said, flicking his hand. “Go.”

I turned to leave. But he called me back. “Elephant. You follow the news?”

I used to, I thought to myself. Before the army. Now, after an exhausting day, I only wanted food, then sleep. I only used my radio for music. But I nodded. “Lebanon, you mean?” For the past several weeks PLO terrorists in Lebanon were shelling Israel’s northern cities, mostly Nahariya and Kiryat Shemona. Like everyone in the unit, I heard rumors of an invasion but, to me, that seemed unlikely. So far, no one had even gotten injured.

“Maybe don’t leave the country so fast.”

“Seriously?”

“Lehitra’ot, Elephant,” he said, and marched away. I wondered why he said that to me. Lehitra’ot in Hebrew means “I’ll see you soon.”

A week later friends from my North American garin threw me a party at Mike’s Pub in downtown Jerusalem. I was the last of the group to complete army service, and the only one to have served in a combat unit. So, the point that night was to drink ourselves silly. I was an inexperienced drinker, a former frat boy who stuck to beer. But it felt like the right time to experiment. I ordered a dry martini, not knowing what the word “dry” meant (how can a drink be dry?) or really, what it was the word modified. I took a sip and struggled not to spit it back. Then I chugged down the rest, as if it were the punch at a sorority party. Immediately the room swayed, and I fought to stay on my feet. Hoping no one noticed, I slipped out the door, praying the cool Jerusalem air would soothe my nausea, and stop me from throwing up Minna’s schnitzel all over King George Street. That’s when I saw Elise, leaning on the building, smoking a cigarette.

It was dark, and she wore an Israeli dubon —a drab, gray, winter coat that covered her whole body. She’d pulled the hood over her face, and she was wearing glasses, so all I could see clearly were her cheeks and lips. But I could tell she was beautiful. Cheekbones can reveal a lot, and her red-coated lips were turned up slightly into a charming, mischievous smile, as if she were recalling some mildly naughty act. I was drunk, otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything to her, but the martini seemed to have given me as much confidence as bench-pressing my body weight.

“You don’t have to smoke out here,” I told her loudly, in Hebrew. I had a tendency to speak up when I was drunk, especially when I was speaking Hebrew. I might even have yelled. I took a step toward her, but, for some reason, kept my volume high. “You can smoke in the bar.”

“You are Jewish?” she said softly, in English. Those were her exact words. The first words she ever spoke to me. I could hear a slight accent. French, I thought. Or possibly Dutch. The truth is, I had no idea.

“I have some questions for you,” she said. “But only if you’re Jewish.”

I leaned on the wall with her. Partly I was flirting, but mostly I needed something to lean on. I didn’t want to fall. “Probably not hard to find Jews around here,” I said.

She swept off her hood, faced me and waited, as if she’d been hiding her identity but now expected me to recognize her. “Do you hate all Germans?” she asked.

I could now see the green eyes through her glass lenses. Her short brown hair. Her thin neck. It had been a long time since I’d spoken with a woman other than Minna. “Are you German?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t hate all Germans.”

“Walk with me,” she said. Without waiting for a response, she turned and headed toward Jaffa Road. I quickly followed, surprised that my heart was beating so fast. I was after all in the best shape of my life. “I am Elise,” she said, looking straight ahead, not even checking to see if I’d caught up with her. I almost told her my name was Elephant, but caught myself in time and stuck with Phil. It felt good to use my real name. When we got to Jaffa she turned left, and sped up even more, as if someone were chasing her. She wore black boots that clicked loudly on the pavement. Walking just behind her, I could see her thin, pale legs. “Where are we going?” I asked. She pointed straight ahead. “The Old City.”

We entered through the Jaffa gate. I expected her to continue straight on the cobblestone sidewalk toward the Arab Market. It was 9 p.m., and most of the shops had closed, or were closing down, but I was sure we could find an open coffeehouse. But she turned right at the Tower of David, and then left at the police station, down the narrow road which led to the Jewish Quarter. I finally caught up enough to walk alongside her halfway down Mevasseret Street at the road’s narrowest point. She turned her head to look at me, then grabbed my shoulders and pulled me away from an oncoming taxi. After the honking car whizzed by, she pushed me away, and we continued our rapid stroll. She strode through the alleyways and sidewalks with the confidence of a seasoned tour guide. I felt I had no choice but to follow her.

“You don’t hate every German,” she said. “Why not?”

“Uh, well, why should I?”

“We tried to kill you.”

“You tried to kill me? You personally?”

“I’m twenty-one. I was born in 1961.”

“Your parents, then.”

“My parents were born in 1939. They were children during the war. My grandparents were all pacifists. The Nazis imprisoned both of my grandfathers for publicly opposing the invasion of Poland.”

“Then why would I hate you?”

“My culture. My folkways. We conjured the Nazi demon.”

“Demon?”

“You don’t believe in inherited guilt? That sin passes through the generations?”

“No. No, I don’t believe that at all.”

We turned left, and I could finally see where we were headed: to the Kotel, the Western Wall. We passed the closed kosher food stands overlooking the Kotel Plaza and headed down the steps towards the Wall. Elise reached into her backpack and handed a black-cloaked beggar a fistful of bills. I placed a single coin into the same beggar’s outstretched hand and shrugged. Despite the late hour, the lit-up Kotel still teemed with worshippers and tourists. Elise slowed halfway down the stairs and pointed to a bench. We sat, not quite huddling together, but also not far apart. It was an ambiguous distance. It could have meant anything. We both kept our faces toward the shuckling men and boys on the men’s side and the quiet swayers on the woman’s side. We didn’t look at each other.

“And inherited trauma? That you are a victim of the Shoah, even three generations removed. You also don’t believe this?” she asked.

I thought of Minna, her Auschwitz arm. My grandparents, who, between them, lost tens of cousins. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe that at all.”

“A collective conscience? An organic connection to your people? The Jewish people?”

“I’m not sure what that means,” I said. “But my connections are with my immediate family.” I thought of my garin. My Seventh Armored comrades. “Or with my friends. It’s not some ancient, mystical bond.” Of course, there was a strategy in my response. If I acknowledged too deep a connection to the Jewish people, I wouldn’t be able to ask her out. But that clear bias didn’t make my answers inaccurate. Just maybe a little overly assured. “People are people,” I said.

She looked at me, finally. “Why are you here? You are a soldier, yes? I heard you talk, at the bar. No collective conscience? But you fight for all of Israel. Maybe kill.”

Kill? Surrounded twenty-four hours a day by deadly ordnance and advanced killing machines, still, in my eighteen months, I rarely thought about killing. I thought of giving her the easy, cliché answer, the answer you hear from most Israeli soldiers, that they don’t fight for their people, they fight for their comrades in the unit. But Elise’s inquiries were beginning to burrow under my skin, and it wasn’t merely lust or romantic yearning. I thought for a moment so I could best articulate the truth.

“I need my life to mean something,” I said. “I was a frat boy. Even my year in Israel. I drank beer. I traveled to Greece and Egypt. Chased girls. But I wanted more. I hated the army. I’m homesick all the time. But I needed the experience. Strange, huh?”

She paused, swallowed. “I love what you’re saying,” she said. There was just a possibly imagined micro delay between her words “love” and “what.” I swear, I thought she was going to say, “I love you.” But I settled for her actual sentence.

She rose suddenly. Oddly, she didn’t head down the steps toward the Kotel. Instead, she quickly led me back up the stairs, then in a quick series of zigs and zags, ups, downs, rights, lefts, and diagonals, past tourists, donkeys, badly lit coffee shops and closed kiosks, we ended up at a tiny bed and breakfast near the Damascus gate. “My hotel,” she said, reaching into her backpack for the key. A cold wind blew, reminding me of colder breezes from Lake Erie. A familiar scent arose from the air, and I sensed the coming of snow. In fact, it would snow the next day, a rare occurrence for Jerusalem. I could tell Elise had no intention of inviting me in. “Erev Tov,” she said, in perfectly accented Hebrew. “Good evening.”

Everything was moving too quickly. A remnant of the martini, and possibly my loneliness pushed me forward. “Can I see you again?”

Her face lit up. “Yes, please. Come visit me.” She rummaged through her pack and took out a piece of stationery. “Here is the address,” she said. “It’s where I’m studying. I’m writing my thesis on Jewish attitudes towards Germans of this generation. Come soon!”

I looked at the address. “But this is Nahariya,” I said. “It’s, uh, kind of far.” Nahariya was a border town about one hundred fifty miles north of Jerusalem. Just south of Lebanon.

She nodded. “Lehitra’ot,” she said. Just what my commander had said to me. I’ll see you soon.

Two months later I got called up for reserve duty. The PLO had lobbed more missiles into Kiryat Shmona. A Palestinian terrorist assassinated an Israeli diplomat. Israeli radio played war songs—both upbeat and melancholy. I was still living with Willy and Minna. I packed my gear. Minna waited for me at the door and handed me a large, fragrant paper sack. “Food!” she said in English. “A sheynem dank,” I replied, in Yiddish. Thank you very much. My orders were to appear at an army base five kilometers east of Nahariya. I decided to go a day early.

I rechecked the address on the piece of stationery, as if I hadn’t memorized it, and rang the bell. Elise answered the door. She was wearing blue shorts and a gray tank top, a big improvement over the hideous dubon. Her brown hair had grown past her cheeks. She was more beautiful than I’d imagined, and I’d imagined the most beautiful woman in the world. She tilted her head, and for a moment I was sure she didn’t recognize me. In fact, she might not have, at first. But then she made the first move, and we raced upstairs to her small bedroom.

Afterwards she rolled away from me, and smiled slyly—her mischievous little girl expression, as if she’d just stolen some candy, or was staying up past her bedtime. “You’re a man out of history, aren’t you?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Sleeping with a German, just two generations past the great crime. No mystical bonds to your people.”

“Still interviewing me? I’m a research subject?”

“My research is also my passion. I can’t help asking these questions.”

“You’re so connected to history? To your people.”

“Absolutely. I accept responsibility and guilt for the Shoah. Every German must. For a thousand years. Maybe more.”

Is that why you slept with me? I wanted to ask. It seemed like a reasonable question. I’d never had a woman fall into bed with me so easily. But I didn’t ask.

That day, we hit the town, which, in Nahariya back then, meant an ice cream shop for lunch and the single decent fish restaurant for dinner. It meant strolling along the nearly dry canal that wound through the center of town, and renting single speed bicycles and pedaling to the beach. Elise shared stories of her bohemian adolescence, the single daughter of proto-hippy parents. I told her about my perfectly American, middle-class upbringing, my divorced parents, my football obsession, and my fake ID that mostly didn’t work. Nahariya was founded in the 1930s, primarily by German Jews. I assume that’s why Elise chose it as her base. Lots of research subjects who also spoke her language.

We made love again that night. Then we quickly fell asleep, exhausted from our excursions, and also from the acrobatic sex only available to young people falling in love. At four in the morning, I was awakened by three loud booms. I recognized the sound immediately: mortars from Lebanon, landing somewhere near Elise’s flat. Next, I heard sirens and the commanding voice of IDF officers. I peeked out the window and saw a halftrack and three jeeps speeding down the street. Somehow, I managed another hour of sleep. At 5 a.m., I kissed Elise goodbye and whispered for her to go back to sleep. I bought a Hebrew newspaper at the bus stop. In Nahariya and Kiryat Shemona They Slept In Shelters, was the main headline. I chuckled to myself. Well, we didn’t. Then the bus arrived. Uniformed, armed with my rifle, I headed off to war.

A month later, I knocked on her door. I hadn’t shaved or combed my hair in three weeks. Dried mud streaked my uniform. My hands were spotted with scars. Skin was peeling off my forehead from sunburn. I’d lost twenty pounds. Once again it occurred to me that she might not recognize me. But she gasped and covered her mouth, then drew me in.

After a shower and a shave, I wasn’t ready to tell the story. After sex, slow, gentle, comforting, I still wasn’t. We decided to take a peaceful walk. The shelling had stopped in Nahariya the day we invaded. We held hands, strolled down the canal, past the bicycles and the elderly German Jews, to our favorite ice cream parlor. I still wasn’t talking, so Elise filled me in on her research. Israeli Jews, she told me, were much more likely than American Jews, or Diaspora Jews in general, to forgive the Nazis. Israeli Jews, and yes, this includes olim, new immigrants. Even very recent olim don’t think of themselves as part of a historically oppressed minority doomed to greater and greater episodes of danger. Israeli Jews, she concluded, have become skilled at living in the moment and out of history. And for that, she said, they’ve become especially adept at one thing: “forgetting.”

I’d been staring straight ahead, but I turned toward her at the word “forgetting.” She touched my smooth cheek, then softly massaged the scars on my right hand. “I couldn’t lift the shell,” I said.

That was the story I chose to tell her, in Nahariya. I could have told her about the boy soldiers (twelve years old? thirteen?) who charged our tank and forced us to fire at them. The family in Ein El Hilweh who threw a new refrigerator at us from their balcony while we were on foot patrol. My two close friends, shot in the back after tossing grenades, the first day of the war. I didn’t tell those stories. I’ve never told them to anyone.

“I could never lift those goddamn big shells by myself. Usually the driver, Uri, helped and we managed. But that day, we were under fire. Smoke was everywhere, and all the bloodcurdling screams. We couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. Uri . . . wasn’t available. Everyone was shouting at me to lift the shell into the turret. I couldn’t. It just kept slipping through my fingers, scarring my hands. Finally, the unit commander rushed over to me. I . . . knew him pretty well. We finally hoisted the thing together. But he . . . He.” I stopped.

“Phil,” she said. The first time she’d used my name.

“They shot him in the foot. He. . . He lost it. He lost his right foot. They had to amputate.” I took four deep breaths. Then held my breath for at least a minute, until I was sure I wouldn’t cry. I yanked my hand away from her so she wouldn’t feel the trembling.

“Forgetting,” I said. “I’ll have to work on that. Elise, I can’t go back there today.”

“Of course you can’t! They can’t expect—”

“No, no, I don’t mean back to Lebanon. I’m done there. They won’t send me back for another year. I’m in the reserves. I mean Jerusalem. To Minna and Willie. Can I stay with you, just for a few days?”

“Geliebte,” she said. She touched my knee. “I’m leaving tomorrow. But I don’t have to give up the apartment for another day. So stay, tonight, tomorrow. But listen, Elephant. Come to Germany.”

I stared at her.

“No, no,” she said, laughing. “I don’t mean to live. Come for a few weeks. You’re real post-army trip. Tomorrow’s flight is full, but that’s only because our whole group is returning all together. Come the next morning. The flight to Berlin. I’ll meet you at the airport. Ahuvati,” she said, “lover” in Hebrew.

I moved back to Cleveland in 1984, got a teaching degree and taught English for thirty years at my old high school. In the 90s, those pre-internet days, I lost track completely of Elise. Until I was browsing in the kid’s section of a bookstore, looking for something appropriate for my six year old, and I spotted How the Ostrich Forgets by Elise Shonenfeld. The jacket photo confirmed it. The smiling author was at one time my Elise.

October 7, 2023

I wrote her back quickly because I was anxious to read the many emails that, even as I considered a reply, were flooding my inbox.

Dear Elise,

Thank you for the note! I don’t know yet what horrible incident you’re referring to. Before I open a news app and ruin my good mood, I want to tell you what a delight it is to hear from you. Of course, I remember you! I remember everything.

Love,

Elephant

I hit send, then read the news.

July 1982

The day Elise left for the airport, I set the alarm clock she gave me for 4 a.m., so I could make it to the airport for the next day’s 8 a.m. flight to Germany. But I slept through the alarm. That is, I heard the alarm, clicked it off, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Around noon, I caught a bus to Jerusalem. I thought of taking a taxi from the central bus station, but I’d forgotten how much I loved Jerusalem’s cool summer air, so I decided to walk. I was well into Rehavia, just a block from Willy’s apartment, when I smelled the schnitzel and the fried garlic. I turned right on Ramban Street, and then left up the hill to Alfasi. I still had a key. I opened the door, and hot steam escaped into the summer sky. “Food,” Minna called to me. “I have food!”