Beni's War by Tammar Stein

Author:Tammar Stein [Stein, Tammar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 1970s, Bravery, Chapter Book, Chapter Books, Courage, Historical Fiction, Israel, Jewish History, Jewish, Judaism, Kar-Ben Publishing, Kar-Ben, Older Readers, The Six-Day Hero, Yom Kippur War, Bullying, Moving, Emigration, Jerusalem, Syrians, School, Conflicts, War, Prisoners of war, Middle East, Family, Friendships, Maybe, Hope, Egyptians
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

On October 26, twenty-one days after the war started, a ceasefire is declared. The fighting has stopped.

To the north, the Syrians have been pushed out of the Golan. Our tanks came within forty kilometers of Damascus, their capital. To the south, it’s more complicated. The ceasefire left Israeli forces in Egypt and Egyptian forces in Israel, like that black and white yin-yang symbol I’ve seen in a book.

You could call it a win, since we still have a country. But even if we technically won, it doesn’t feel like it.

A total of 2,600 Israelis killed. Seven thousand wounded. Hundreds captured as prisoners.

Every town center in Israel has a wall papered with black-bordered death notices. The newspapers are full of more black-bordered announcements for fallen soldiers. My dad’s cousin has lost her son. My grandmother’s hairdresser has lost her husband. A different cousin’s boyfriend was killed. It feels like every day, the phone rings with someone telling my parents about another funeral, another shiva.

We move out of my grandparents’ house and return to the moshav.

Our moshav is a mess: the fields scorched, cars burned. The shelling damaged a lot of the houses, including ours. The impact of a nearby mortar hit shattered all our windows. There’s been some looting and graffiti on our street, but our home was left alone, probably because the blown-out windows made it look structurally unsafe.

The structure of the house is actually okay, but inside there’s broken glass on everything. When I enter my room, my bed looks like it’s covered in glittering frost, but it’s all glass. We spend days sweeping, mopping, wiping down, and shaking out every centimeter inside. We throw away the food that rotted while we were gone. My mom finds a twisted piece of shrapnel embedded in the kitchen cabinet like an arrow. She digs it out, and it leaves a gouge in the thin wood.

I’m outside watering the new flowers in our front garden while my mom is chatting with our next-door neighbor, Miriam, and admiring Miriam’s six-month-old baby. We all freeze as a military jeep pulls up.

Two carefully dressed soldiers step out. They walk with purpose up the narrow path that leads to our neighbor’s house, toward my mom.

I was six years old when soldiers came to tell us that Gideon had fallen. Until this moment, if anyone had asked me, I would have said that I didn’t remember anything about that day. I was only a little kid. But as soon as I see the jeep, I start to remember. As if the past and the present are merging in some awful loop, sudden memories flood me. A knock on the door that woke me from a nap. Stumbling into our living room to find my mother screaming at two soldiers to go away, to leave and take their horrible news with them. I remember terror and fury. I remember running to my mom, hugging her legs, yelling at the soldiers to leave her alone. I didn’t understand that they hadn’t hurt her on purpose.

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