Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

This Saturday night, after Havdallah, as part of our celebration of Israel’s 60th we will have a chance to watch the Israeli movie that got nominated for last year’s Oscar. Beaufort is the story of a group of Israeli soldiers stationed in an outpost prior to the withdrawal of forces of 2000. It is based on a novel by Ron Leshem. Here is a short excerpt from the book, courtesy of Zeek magazine,

Yonatan will never know how River the medic cried over his body, how he wouldn’t calm down, how he fell apart, to pieces. Wailed like a baby. Yonatan’ll never know how Furman and I spent a whole day in the trenches and down the slopes looking for his missing head. When the missile hit the guard post his head blew off and rolled down to the Litani River. We didn’t want to believe it had rolled all the way down, to the river, but that’s exactly what happened, and in the end we gave up. Nothing we could do about it. I leaned over in that heavy smoke and grabbed his body with both hands, a body with no head. He’ll never know.

While we do not have the book (yet), but if you want to bush up on your Middle-East history I recommend to check a volume do have: Myths and Facts ; a guide to the Arab-Israeli conflict.