An Urgent letter to Sir Martin Gilbert

Dear Sir Gilbert,

I've just read in the Haaretz Hebrew online pages about your work on a new film relaying Righteous diplomats' courageous acts during the Holocaust.

I am a published writer of Hebrew literary fiction and narative non fiction. May I bring to your attention a name I have not seen mentioned in the article - that of the Portuguese Aristides de Sousa Mendes. By now there is plenty of information on him on the net.

Please allow me to quote from my book How Far From Paradise - encounters with international women writers on Childhood dramatic recollections.

The quotation is from the Lidia Jorge chapter:

"...we have a hero here, like Schindler: the Consul Aristides, Portugal's Consul to Bordeaux during World War II, who saved thousands and thousands of Jews despite Salazar, the terrible dictator, and Salazar
threw him out of a diplomatic career and he became a poor man who ate the soup of the poor.
He and his youngest son.
It's a marvelous story.
In France, in Bordeaux, he issued visas for thousands of Jews, to allow them to pass through Portugal on their way to freedom, to the United
States and England.
Now we remember him and there are many books about him.
He risked more than Schindler - his life, his son, his wife. When he was far from Portugal, in a dangerous situation.
One of those books about Aristides is titled, A Good Man.
Can I write the name of this man? It's so important.
Aristides Sousa Mendes. Yes, only now they're talking about him.
My son is twenty three years old. Last year, when he read the book, he wept. He said, "But there are good people, there are heroes in Portugal.”

With warm regards, Yours,
Corinna Hasofferett

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Haaretz on Unknown Territory

(in Hebrew: Beretz Lo Yadaaty)

It's one of the more unusual books to have been published recently in Israel. It's also a book that's hard to categorize. It's not a novel, not really a book of memoirs, not actually a work of history - but it is a book that offers a different, surprising take on Israel's first years. A loving and painful take, to resort to a cliche.

Corinna Hasofferett, embarked on this literary journey in the wake of two friends who were with her in a youth movement and were killed in Israel's cross-border reprisal raids. For years she collected testimonies of people who knew them, taping and editing.

She interweaves the testimonies, almost without intervention on her part. The result is a narrative flow that revives the period without any prettification or mythologizing.

She herself describes the book, "Ba'aretz Lo Yadati" ("Unknown Territory," in English), as a kind of "Fighters Talk" - referring to the famous book ("Siah Lohamim") in which soldiers described their experiences in the 1967 Six-Day War - but with no censorship.

There are a few interesting revelations in the book, apart from the story of Yehuda Kan Dror. For example, confessions about the killing of captives, or a surprising confession from a member of Unit 101 - the precursor of the Paratroops, Unit 101 was established by Ariel Sharon in the early 1950s - that the unit did not have any fatalities because it operated almost exclusively against civilian targets.

But concentrating on these aspects of the book could be misleading. It offers a far broader picture of a society that was still licking its wounds from the War of Independence, the picture of a country in which the signs of the previous Palestinian inhabitants were still visible, a picture of people whose memory of the Holocaust is not something they learned in school.

This is Corinna's sixth book, and she has published it herself - both for economic reasons and also to avoid having an outside eye that might cut sensitive passages. So it's not easy to find the book in bookstores. But it's worth making the effort.

DORON

The son changed too. When she hugged him, he hung his hands dryly at his sides, unlike once, "when you were three years old you said that I was the most beautiful one in the world."

"I can't be responsible for everything I blurted out at the age of three," he bent over to rummage in his mother's suitcases and pulled out the record of Tristan and Isolde. "And by the way, just so you won't make any mistake, the poster's mine. I'll take it out of here tomorrow."

Went off to close himself in his room with the music.

While she was away, he slept in her bed and hung on the wall a big poster of the statue of David. At the sight of the silky skin and the tender line of the knee, she wanted to touch it, but reined herself in. The testicles were levels with her lips, and the organ seemed sound asleep, restrained. A slight whimper, like the warning signal of an approaching train, suddenly burst out of her, followed immediately by many freight cars of thoughts: Why did I go there. Why not to Greece, for a rest. I could have lain in the sun with some warm Nikos. She stood between the closet and the suitcase and put the clothes away in slow motion as if each garment were a memory that had to be shaken out and arranged so as not to cause damage.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav