“To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”

This review was published in this week’s Jewish Journal

Hannah Senesh occupies a unique place in Israeli history and memory. Only 19 years old on the eve of World War II, she left her hometown of Budapest to build the land of Israel with her young Zionist peers. At 23, she made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe. The mission ultimately failed in its stated purpose and resulted in Senesh’s execution. But it left the fledgling Jewish State with a national hero, whose poetry and diary entries still reverberate today. Senesh wasn’t alone, she was one among a small group of Jewish members of the yishuv who donned British army uniforms in an implausible bid to try to save Jewish lives from the German killing machine, often their own families included. A few of these figures, such as Enzo Sereni and Haviva Reik, also entered the national consciousness, with streets and settlements named in their honor. Others are less well-known. For a story that is this iconic, one would imagine that its details would be more or less widely understood. Yet as Matti Friedman demonstrates in his riveting new book “Out of the Sky,” one of Israel’s greatest legends is also riddled with mysteries and open questions.

The heroic operation was the result of a collaboration between the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah and British intelligence. The idea, at least as the British understood it, was for a group of Jewish men and women, almost all of them recent refugees from Europe, to join the British army and leverage their skill in their native languages in order to assist British POWs and local resistance fighters behind enemy lines. On the Jewish end, motivations were more multifaceted. The Jewish conscripts sought British military training, which would help them when the time came for their own inevitable war of independence. Even more so, they desperately wanted to try to help the Jewish communities of Europe in some way. A total of 250 men and women were recruited to take part in this unusual mission, but only 37 of them completed the training. Of this number, 12 were captured and seven did not make it home.

Friedman lays out the extent to which this improbable mission, rooted in the loftiest ideals, never really had a chance of succeeding. Firstly, by the time it took place in 1944, most Jews in Europe had already been murdered. No allied powers, including the British commanders overseeing this secret mission, seemed to prioritize saving their lives. Even the safety of the Jewish volunteers was not viewed as urgent. Enzo Sereni, the brilliant Italian Labor Zionist and polymath, who Ben-Gurion tried to prevent from jumping because “there wasn’t another man like him,” was carelessly dropped atop a German army installation in Northern Italy.  As Friedman notes in an interesting aside, the Mossad unit operating out of Istanbul at the time had been infiltrated by German double agents, who likely knew about the parachutists’ missions before they even landed.

A visitor could walk through the entire Hannah Senesh House in Sdot Yam — a beautifully renovated museum in the kibbutz where she lived for two years before setting out on her perilous mission — without seeing any mention of a seemingly important fact: that her mission was doomed from the start. Yet Friedman’s aim is not to diminish Senesh’s extraordinary bravery, or that of her fellow operatives. Rather, he seeks to understand their courage in a new light.

In recent years, Friedman has become one of the most compelling English-language chroniclers of Israeli history and society. What distinguishes his work — whether he is examining the brilliant letters of a young Israeli soldier on a Lebanese outpost or recounting Leonard Cohen’s sojourn in Israel after the Yom Kippur War — is his tendency to frame Israel’s turbulent history through a literary lens. While the canon of modern Hebrew wartime literature remains relatively sparse — perhaps because most writers keep their distance from the battlefield — Israel has never lacked for fighters with poetic souls in the state’s early years or today.

Throughout the book, Friedman explores the intellectual worlds of his unusually thoughtful protagonists, suggesting that “if they showed up at a military recruiting office now, they’d probably be turned away.” Senesh, the daughter of a well-known Hungarian-Jewish playwright, dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps and wrote poems of startling quality as early as age 15. Sereni held a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rome. Friedman recounts how, in addition to having already written a novel and novella, he dreamed of writing a great Italian novel which would depict the conflicts and controversies of his time through the lens of his own Jewish family.

In this sense both Senesh and Sereni follow in the path of other great Zionist leaders, like Herzl and Jabotinsky, who began their careers as journalists and writers of fiction, eventually putting aside their universalistic literary ambitions for the more particularistic cause of Jewish sovereignty. Friedman makes the terrific observation that this is no coincidence: “To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”

Part of the book’s premise is that the exquisite literary sensibilities of these proto-Israeli heroes helps explain why they made the jump. Friedman writes: “The parachutists aren’t commandos. They’re storytellers. They’ve been sent to write, with their lives, a Zionist story about the war – a story that will lead others not to despair but to action.” Senesh’s military achievements may have been miniscule – hardly any time passed from the beginning of her mission until her execution in a Hungarian prison, only three months before liberation.

Yet we remember Senesh because of her literary achievements: among them the diary she wrote vividly portraying her transition from a precocious, assimilated 13-year-old girl into a fervent Zionist activist. At every major juncture in her short life Senesh seemed to find the time to quickly craft a phenomenal poem. She handed her fellow fighter “blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame” right before entering occupied Hungary. Shortly before her execution she managed to pen a short lyric poem: “I gambled on what mattered most/The dice were cast. I lost.” While Senesh failed in saving other Jews, and even herself, she succeeded in her larger objective. As Friedman summarizes it: “The mission isn’t military, it’s literary, and she’s the best writer.”

In writing “Out of the Sky” — a book equally about a remarkable episode in history as it is the act of crafting and telling stories — Friedman certainly crafts his own. While many fascinating and heretofore little-known stories about Senesh and her fellow parachuters make it into the book, others do not. Friedman leans toward a portrait of Senesh as a clever, cosmopolitan European. He reminds us of her youth and her theatrical family. In her precocious diary entries, Zionism feels like a role she has chosen to play. He clearly admires her heroism but does not exaggerate it. Yet alternative accounts remain.

In his introduction to the first edition of Senesh’s collected writings, Abba Eban wrote, “all the definitions of giant courage come together in Senesh’s life.” Joel Palgi, another parachutist who followed a similar path to Senesh but inexplicably managed to survive, wrote about her in his memoirs as a force of nature, the undisputed leader of their group, fiercely admired by fellow resistance comrades as she transformed from a poet into a fighter. Even the Gestapo, in Palgi’s telling, were in awe of Senesh. He describes the sadistic prison warden who used to visit Senesh’s cell every day to argue about politics. Senesh’s mother Katherine, in her own memoir, describes the mesmerizing power Senesh held over guards and fellow prisoners alike. Children gravitated toward her, fellow prisoners drew strength from Senesh’s whispered encouragement, her Zionist education campaign, and her ingenious secret broadcasts from the window of her cell. One SS guard told Senesh, “I’ve never known a woman as brave as you.”

“Out of the Sky” does not contradict these remarkable testimonies, which contain a whiff of hagiography, though surely have some grounding in truth. It’s not really a book about superheroes, unusual people with uniquely phenomenal qualities who changed the course of history. Rather, it’s a book about regular people, highly intelligent and talented to be sure, who met the challenges of their age with bravery and foresight.  What distinguished them as heroes was that they understood, both in their lives and their deaths, they could contribute to the writing of a story much larger than themselves.

For the original article see this week’s Jewish Journal