“Hey.” Gidi’s voice was low, and he realized that it probably couldn’t be heard. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to be heard. A bomb fell on Gaza. When the noise had passed, he said “Hey” again, a little more loudly, kneeling on the concrete to speak directly into the grate. “Still there?”
Dear readers,
In "Prospero Underground," Sergeant Gidi has a tense conversation with the grandfather from Kibbutz Hosea who locked himself in a bomb shelter after Hamas terrorists murdered and abducted his family. It's the fifth and last segment of "The Crater," which is in turn the first chapter of my as yet unnamed longer narrative. Chapter Two coming up soon.
Illustration by Avi Katz
If you’ve been reading my war stories on an ongoing or occasional basis since October 7, I’d appreciate hearing from you about whether this serial is working for you. Do you easily pick up the story after a week away from it? Or perhaps the installments come too quickly, given that there’s so much to read about the war and about so many other things?
This is a labor of compulsion for me. I’m writing it because I feel I must tell what it feels like in Israel. As always, my aim is to tell small stories and through them make you feel what it is like to be in Israel during this awful time. I’m taking the approach that S. Y. Agnon took in his novella about being a Palestinian Jew stuck in Berlin during World War I, To This Time (עד הנה). Very little happens in the story, but its impact is strong. In one of his concluding paragraphs he writes (my rough translation, which hardly does justice to the original):
As for what happened afterward, there is no measure and no end to the events and the events of those events. If God gives me strength I will find myself a drop of ink to write one of the many thousands of things that happened to me during the days of the war. The eyes of that man do not look high; he writes and records and relates the small events. One thing is clear, however, small things lead to big things. For a bit of a small room that I did not find outside the land I won the merit of living in the Land of Israel. How and when, if God gives me strength, I will find a drop of ink to write a bit of those deeds.
One more thing—Avi Katz, who has provided the wonderful illustrations that have accompanied the five segments of “The Crater,” like me is not being paid by The Times of Israel for this work. He’s informed me that he can’t continue to do so. If any of you readers might be willing to chip in to help on that score, please let me know and we’ll see how we might be able to get that help to him. I’m not looking for money for myself from these stories, at least not now. But I’d really love to continue to collaborate with him on this chapter.
Besorot tovot,
Haim