Matti Friedman Introduces Us to Heroes

[1:47]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram zibbyowans. Maddie Friedman is the author of Out of the Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. Matti is an award winning journalist and the author of four non fiction books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Smithsonian and elsewhere and he is currently a columnist for The Free Press. He is also the author of Who by the Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, which was selected by Vanity Fair as one of the year's best books. Also, Spies of Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, which won the twenty nineteen Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award, Pumpkin Flowers, A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War, which was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times notable book and one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year, and the Aleppo Codex, which won the 2014 Sammy Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem. By the way, when we were speaking on the podcast, he expressed concern about how, given the current climate, it was impossible to plan anything. And then I think two days after we spoke was when The US attacked Iran. So as I'm recording this bio even, Israelis continue to go back and forth into bomb shelters, Mady included, and we are thinking of him as he goes through this. And here is his episode. Welcome, Mady. Thank you so much for coming back on Totally Booked to talk about out of the sky heroism and rebirth in Nazi Europe. Congratulations. Thank you so much for having me again. You're welcome. Can you tell listeners about your book? Why did you decide to tackle this topic? What exactly is covered? Although, I know because I read it, but, you know, tell everybody else.

[4:11]Matti Friedman: Sure. This this is a book about a very strange episode, which is, at once, very well known in Israel and at the same time, completely unknown. It's a strange mission. In 1944, a British operation that takes a group of young Jews who've escaped the Holocaust and who've made it to what was then British Mandate Palestine and gets them to volunteer to parachute back into the Holocaust. And it's a story that, becomes part of the mythology of Israel in its early years. There's one character in particular who becomes a national heroine whose name is still known pretty ubiquitously to this day. That's Hannah Senesch. And and I I never quite understood what the story was, and I knew the name Hannes Senesch, but it was kind of like Davy Crockett or, you know, George Washington or something where you have some very vague idea of who this person was, but you don't really know. And a few years ago, I decided that I would investigate and see what the what the story really was. It was also an attempt to kind of ask what what Zionism is, what the state of Israel is trying to achieve, kind of peel away eight decades of very complicated and controversial history and get at the the core of of what this country was in the eyes of the people who who founded it. And the people who embarked on this mission were really kind of some of the earliest heroes of of of Israel. And understanding who they were, it seems to me, would help me understand something deep about the place where I've lived and reported for the past thirty years. Another aspect of it is the the nature of heroism. It just struck me as interesting moment to investigate what heroes are. We live in a kind of anti heroic moment where our tendency is to tear down heroes. And I wanted to look at a moment where people did not have that that instinct and to ask what heroes are and what the connection is between heroism and literature.

[6:00]Zibby Owens: So not not a big goal or anything. Just, like, a little fun project on the side. Yeah. Basically, a tweet. Yeah. Exactly. Basically, a tweet. What do you think that's about? Why why is there an era of antiheroism now? It's interesting to think about it. I mean, the moment that really stands out for me is when

[6:16]Matti Friedman: when president Trump kind of belittled the heroism of John McCain. There was that moment when, you know, you have John McCain who's this incredible war hero who survives years in Vietnamese captivity and is tortured and kind of comes out of it comes out of it in this very noble way. And you have an American, a very senior American politician who who says think this is a more or less an exact quote. He says, I like the kind of heroes who weren't caught or or or something like that. So you kind of instead of admiring someone like John McCain, felt the need to kind of bring him down a few notches. And I think that's a pretty common response, and I I I encounter it in different ways when people look at whether even it it's just like a sports hero or or a celebrity, the the urge is to kind of tear people down and bring them down to our level. So when looking at a hero, your response could be, wow. That person is amazing. I wanna be like that person. Or you can kind of reconcile the the very disturbing gap between you and this heroic figure by by belittling the hero and saying, no. This person isn't a real hero. They're doing it for the money. They're, you know, mentally unstable. There are many explanations for why people, you know, aren't as great as they seem. And if we look back at this story, which happens in 1944, the world is very different, and people are willing to accept that there are heroes in the world, and people understand that a national movement is gonna require heroes. And, of course, there are many examples of in those same years of World War two heroes. People could look up to, you know, bomber pilots and heroic women working in the armament factories and, you know, a marine who stormed the the beaches and, you know, on some Pacific island. This was pretty accepted in those years. And I I think the the cultural chain has change has been very, very interesting. And and it's not something that I discuss at length in the book, but it's definitely in the subtext.

[8:07]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I feel like without the hope of heroes, you lose something as a society. Right? We have to collectively wanna uplift or it becomes sort of dark.

[8:18]Matti Friedman: I I couldn't agree more that there's something about the cultural vibe, which is very much about down lift. I don't think that's actually a word. Guess Let's make it a word. But the idea of kind of looking up to someone who sets an example, that that idea has it's it's very, very much battered and and and in many cases, I think nonexistent, and and it's certainly very partisan. So the heroes to one group of people are villains to another group of people even in the same society and the idea of agreed upon heroes. You know, someone like George Washington or Lincoln, someone who basically the entire society can look up to and say, wow. That person is amazing. I wanna be like that person. Even that idea is really under fire in an age of extreme sectarianism and and division. So this story happens in a very different Yes. World. And it's one that is oh, it's a world that in many ways is much darker than our world, but it's also a world that's more innocent and makes more room for people's idealism

[9:17]Zibby Owens: and for their best instincts. What you do so beautifully in the book is take us really closely, sort of zoom in on a couple different characters who we don't know that much about, and we track their coming from the sky, which is what one person says in a camp, basically, about how this person sort just fell from the sky and and helped them. But we see what their lives were like before in many cases, what they were like during. You have examples of people who were just going about their lives sort of a la Anne Frank, like wanting to be a writer, wanting to do this, like looking up to their parents or wanting to you know? And then they end up in these military situations and becoming, you know, heroes, if you will, or their trajectories now you've uncovered, some of which you point out weren't even written in English or you found obscure texts and translated. And you've really, like, highlighted these characters in a way that it's like watching a movie and finding out all about people whose whose stories were were somewhat lost and now really refined and and clear detail. And you have scenes in here which are so compelling that make the reader feel like we are trying to get through the almost impossible to understand and put ourselves in moments, like clawing out from being buried under snow and, you know, trying to charge I mean, I'm all over the place here. But you you put us in these moments that feel practically impossible to survive and somehow are survivable. And I don't know. Tell me a little bit about how you did it. And you also, in the book, talk about how you go back to all these places, and you're now you're visiting this place, and now you're here and showing us what it's like today and contrasting it to how it was. Talk a little bit about sort of the scope of the project and how you focused on the characters and some of these powerful moments. That was a long rambling thing.

[11:12]Matti Friedman: There were 32 parachutists who took part in this in this mission. I I chose four. Mhmm. So the book really revolves around four characters, and I don't think it's ruining anything to say that not all of them survive to the end of of the book. And so I mean, and even the the the the characters who do survive the mission are not available in 2026, for interviews, so I had to reconstruct it in a different way. Mostly that involved archival research. There are thousands and thousands of documents in mostly in Tel Aviv that recount the mission. Day to day was very well documented, so it really comes to life in these very old files that are kept in a few different places in here in Israel. And there were some obscure memoirs written about it, and and there's been you know, there has been writing about this mission over the years, so I tried to bring the characters to life that that way. The amazing thing about them, and this kind of relates to what we were talking about at the beginning, is that they were incredibly literary people, so they they wrote. Mhmm. Hana Senesch, who's really the dominant character here, a very young woman at the time of the of the operation. She's 22, and she jumps into occupied Yugoslavia. She was a superb writer. I mean, she left a great diary, and she wrote poetry, and she wrote a song that today is probably the most famous song in modern in modern Hebrew. So, and this is true of the other characters as well. So I actually had quite a bit to work with because they were so verbal. And when I when I was trying to think about how these people who are very nonmilitary characters, as you know, you know, like, today, if they showed up at a recruiting center, they probably would have been turned away. They were, like, bookworms. You know, Hannah Senesch is basically a theater kid. She's the daughter of a playwright, and they weren't military figures. And what they were was literary characters who had a very concrete idea of what heroism was, what a heroic narrative is, and how to exist as a hero in the world, which is an idea that they drew from books. So there's a really kind of deep connection here between books and their heroism, and it also means that they left us a lot of really excellent writing even though, unfortunately, most of them could not write about it in retrospect because they did not survive the the mission in 1944. But that's how I put it together. And and what I was really missing after spending many, many months in the archives looking at documents, what I was missing was the feel of the landscape because I'm writing this from Israel. So part of the story happens in Israel, but most of it happens in Central Europe, mainly in what was then Yugoslavia, Hungary, and what was then Czechoslovakia. So I I had to go back, and I had an incredible time retracing the steps of my characters. And I I went I went to Hungary. I went to Budapest, which is where Hannes Senesch is from, and I went to the site of a mass grave in Slovakia. And I found a hotel where some of the characters had stayed during a partisan uprising in Slovakia in 1944. And perhaps the most striking trip for me was a train journey that I took in Italy retracing the the steps of one of my characters whose name was Enzo Sereni. He was Italian. And he I won't give it all away, but he ends up on a train going through Northern Italy over the Alps and ends up in a concentration camp called Dachau next to Munich. So I I retraced that journey on a train. And, of course, it's a beautiful journey. I mean, I I think he didn't appreciate it, when when he did the train journey, but it's just a stupendously beautiful train journey over the Alps. And you can really feel what the characters felt or at least see what they would have seen eighty years ago.

[14:37]Zibby Owens: Well, I love that because it feels like as the reader, we then got to see. And even when you use text of what it was, I think there was a whole book on Hungary at the time that you contrasted with, you know, the the streets then and how you see it now and even a place in Tel Aviv, I think, said, and then you compared that to the thriving metropolis that it is today. And so we all feel we got to go on this on this journey with you, which was so interesting. And to your point about the literary influence on everybody, you even mentioned that you uncovered this anthology, I think Settlers on the Kibbutz, of essays written by women, which has not been really publicized or really uncovered. And you quoted from some of the women and what it was really like at the time, which I found fascinating as someone who loves anthologies. What did you what did you take away from that?

[15:27]Matti Friedman: One of the amazing things about this this story is that the strongest characters in many ways are women. So my four main characters, two of them are are women. One of them is Hannah Senesch, and one of them is Haviva Reich. And Haviva's favorite book was this anthology, which was published a few years before the mission. It's an anthology of writing by women. It's called members of the kibbutz. In Hebrew, it's called, which means specifically female members of the kibbutz, because in Hebrew, the the words have gender. So it's specifically referring to the female members of of the kibbutz. The kibbutz movement was a socialist, kind of radical socialist Zionist movement. And part of the idea was not just building a Jewish state. It was freeing women from the, you know, from the the bonds of bourgeois capitalism and the families. So kids would be raised communally in children's houses in order to free the women for work. And the the book is an anthology, which is really just a fascinating document, completely forgotten. I'd never heard of it until I started researching this story, and it tells you know, there's a chapter about what it was like to to work in a dairy barn, and there's a chapter about a woman who's a tiler. She's laying tiles in the Port Of Haifa. Then there's a fascinating essay about the erotic life of the kibbutz. How is a woman supposed to navigate biological realities and radical socialist ideas, which are very critical of things like monogamy? So it's it's a really interesting document, and Khalifa absolutely loved this book. And she loved it so much that she put it in her pack and took it with her when she volunteered for this mission, and she travels from Herkibbutz in British Mandate Palestine. She takes it to Cairo where she undergoes a period of training by British intelligence. The the operation is run by an arm of British intelligence called MI nine, And she is given radio training. She's taught to, you know, use Morse code, and then she's flown to a recently liberated port in Italy called Bari. And from there, she's inserted into occupied Slovakia by an American airplane, and she takes this book. It's in her pack. She refuses to part with this book, and she will not part with this book until a few days before a kind of climactic battle in the forests of Slovakia when she realizes that she has to get rid of it, and she buries it in a forest in Slovakia. And a few months later, someone retrieves the book, and it was sent back to her kibbutz. And, actually, two days ago, I was on her kibbutz, and I held the book in my in my hands, which is quite amazing to do. And it's this incredible feminist document that inspired her to undertake this this act of heroism perhaps in the hopes of becoming herself a chapter in the anthology of,

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[20:47]Zibby Owens: Well, it really gives me goosebumps because these characters who want to be writers, and here we are almost a hundred years later, and they are writers now. Like, we are reading them in your book. Their words are getting out there, and it's just amazing. It's just it's I mean, I guess just never give up on your dream of being a writer. You never know who's gonna read it when.

[21:10]Matti Friedman: It's it's really true. I mean, I it's a shame that they didn't live to see the writing be read by by anyone else. Certainly, Hannah dreamed of being a novelist. We know that because she writes it in her in her journal. That's that's her dream. And and if you read her writing as a very young woman who's also writing she writes in Hungarian until she arrives in Israel at age 18 and then starts writing in Hebrew. So she's she's operating in a language that she's acquired just a few years before, and she's incredibly proficient in in Hebrew, and she writes beautifully. And and her poetry and her writing is still it's the writing of a young person. She's not quite there yet, but she will get there. You know, had she been given a few more years, she would have been a great writer, and we would know her name. And and we don't, which is tragic, but at least we can can recreate who she was because of the amazing writing that that she left. And the same is true of someone like Enzo Cereni, the Italian, who I mentioned. He he written had a book by the time the mission happened, and and posthumously, another book of his was published. And he was a writer. He dreamed of writing the great Italian Jewish novel, which was supposed to tell the story of his family, a family from Rome, kind of an aristocratic Jewish family from Rome. His father had been a doctor, the physician of the at the court of the Italian king, and his novel was going to tell the story of it was gonna be a multigenerational nov novel about a family of Italian Jews who are pulled in different directions by, you know, secular revolution and communism and traditional Judaism and fascism, and and he never got to write the novel. Instead, he kind of became a hero himself. He became almost a literary figure himself. He enacted

[22:48]Zibby Owens: the novel, but never never got a chance to write it. Oh my gosh. Sometimes I think about the wall of books that would have been had all the Jews lived and how instead now there are just a couple books here and there as opposed to a full bookshelf and all the stories that were lost in addition to everything else, but the loss that we all have as a society of readers and people who long to understand others. Anyway They believed in the power of words. Yeah. And then and and I think more than anything, they thought that they were writing

[23:21]Matti Friedman: a different story about the Second World War. Yep. I don't think they really expected to have a military impact. I mean, they knew they weren't gonna defeat the Wehrmacht. They knew they weren't gonna save the Jewish people. I mean, what could a handful of, you know, young Jews do in occupied Europe in 1944? What they knew that they could do because they believed in literature was tell a different story about the war in which they were heroes and not victims. And this is the story that the Zionist movement wanted, and they were essentially sent to act out a story. So the mission fails in practical terms. It achieves nothing, basically, in in in real terms, but real terms were not the important terms here because the mission was essentially a literary mission. And that's why eighty years later, we're still talking about

[24:10]Zibby Owens: these heroes and what they accomplished and what they loved us. And then contrast this to, like, Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin, which is what The US is contributing to this this era. Right? We have with these, like, brave warriors and, you know, here we have, like anyway, whatever. It's just it's great to have role models in in any way we can find them. And there are moments in this book that feel like I mean, I keep referencing movies, which is sort of a default to just how visual and and, you know, impactful the moments are. But there's one moment that you write about in the woods where this group of sort of bedraggled refugees are are are wandering through, and they come across a Jewish soldier who says Shabbat Shalom, and they all start crying. I hope I'm getting this totally right, but another goosebump inducing moment where they couldn't even imagine that they could have a Jewish soldier savior like this from where they were bespeckled in the in the woods and all of that. Like, tell me a little more about that moment.

[25:12]Matti Friedman: It's really hard to recreate from the current moment because we're all used to the existence of the state of Israel. In fact, in the eyes of many people, the, you know, the state of Israel is too powerful, and it's almost impossible to remember a moment when Jews had absolutely no power. And in 1944, that is very much the state of affairs. So you have this incredible, really industrial slaughter of Jews in Europe. 6,000,000 people are are murdered. They have nowhere to go. People can't escape anywhere. The doors are closed. There is no Jewish state. There's a Zionist movement that's trying to build something in British mandate Palestine, but it hasn't happened yet, and the British will not allow anyone to come. So there's no Jewish army. There's no Jewish air force. These parachutists have no way to get to Europe, which is why they become British agents. That's their only way to get to Europe and make contact with the local Jews. They need they need the British you know, they need the Royal Air Force to drop them into Europe. There's no other way to get there. So the idea that there are Jewish soldiers who are preoccupied with helping, you know, Jews. This this for someone in 1944, was completely mind blowing, certainly if you're a Jew wandering around the forests of Yugoslavia, which was the case in in the scene that you're that you're mentioning, and this is a there's a group of refugees among the trees in in the forest. It there are no young men. Something has happened to all the young men. So it's old men, and there's women and children, and they've been kind of kicking around in the in the forest. And and they encounter two of the parachutists who've come from from the land of Israel, and and one of them speaks to them in Hebrew. One of the parachutists addresses these people in Hebrew, they just can't believe it. I mean, they've never seen anything like it. So it's an incredible scene because the existence of these soldiers suggests a different future. There is a future where where these people will not be powerless, and they've been sent from, you know, a country that these people have heard about from the Bible, same same country, and it it gives them hope. But there's also a tragedy there, which is that beyond giving them hope, they can't do anything for them. There there's no way to get them out of Europe. The the, you know, the British airplanes that are flying the parachutists in, they can't take anyone out. The planes are reserved for military personnel. So no one prioritizes saving these people to the extent that their enemies prioritize killing them. And that's just the state of affairs, and it's one reason that this mission is very touching in a sad way because they're sent to Europe. In in their understanding of the mission, they're sent to Europe to save Jews, they can't. They have no way to do it. All they can do is tell them a story, which kind of returns us to the theme of storytelling. All they can do is say, survive until the end of this war, and you'll be able to get to this country, which does not exist but will one day. So it's just a story, and it's an incredibly powerful story. It's so powerful that it ends up working. But in 1944, it all feels incredibly tenuous and unlikely.

[27:59]Zibby Owens: Can I read, like, the two paragraphs around what we're talking about? Is that okay? Of course. Yeah. Okay. The refugees shout questions in German, Serbo, Croat, and Yiddish. Hayim understands that they were interned in an Italian camp, escaped when the fascist regime of Mussolini collapsed, and had been wandering for months. He finds that he too is crying and can't speak. In his next transmission to headquarters, Hayim asks his British commanders to fly the refugees to safety, but space on allied aircraft is scarce and reserved for military personnel. M nineteen needs trained air crew who can be put on new bombers, not useless civilians. Hayim knows this. The position of the Western allies is that the particular problems afflicting Jews in this war will be solved by the general defeat of Nazism, which is why no airplanes are ever sent to disable the death camps. There is not a country on Earth that prioritizes saving these people to the extent that their enemies prioritize killing them. The parachutists from the land of Israel, Haim the Scythe, can tell the people in the forest a story. There's a place for them in the world, the same one they know from the Bible. He made it there himself, then flew back to this hell and jumped from an airplane to reach them. Maybe knowing this will give them strength to survive a while longer. Other people control the planes, the ports, and the sea. He has nothing to offer but this story. So beautiful.

[29:16]Matti Friedman: Thank you. At the time, it must have struck them as being not very much. You know? They must have hoped for some kind of concrete assistance in our mission. Thanks a lot for the story. Yeah. It's a great story. Thanks. Do you have any food you could give us? Can you perhaps get us out of here? And and the answer was no. I mean, they really had they really had nothing to offer. And yet here we are still talking about it. It's amazing. Really amazing. The story right. Because the story I mean, they understand this, and that's what's amazing about this mission. The story isn't nothing. Mhmm. It kind of seems like like nothing, and and the mission would seem to be a failure if you judge it according to any, you know, military measure. They don't really save any Jews. They don't kill any Germans. You know, the whole thing doesn't really add up in military terms. So you you could say it's just a story, but they understand that a story is something that's incredibly powerful. And in fact, you know, Jewish history is held together by stories. There's no country for most of the history. So people don't share a geography, they don't share a political system, and they don't even necessarily share a spoken language. Right? You have Jews who are living in Yemen and Jews who are living in Poland and Jews who are living in Manhattan and Jews who are living in Toronto, which is where I grew up. So, you know, what holds the whole thing together? Well, actually, it's held together by stories, by books that the Jews read at the same time, and, you know, and it kind of holds the whole thing together. So I think there's a deep Jewish understanding of the power of a story, and it's not it it's it it seems very intangible, but, you know, I'm speaking to you from Israel right now, which is a country that is born of a story, and it became real. So stories are powerful.

[30:55]Zibby Owens: Famous and our characters certainly understood that. You and I, here we are. Just keep talking about, you know, people of the book. We're just keeping this going. And then just quickly, you know, why you? You grew up in Toronto. You moved to Israel. You've been there thirty years. You write books. You examine history. You spend your time taking trains to recreate these journeys. Like, how did this happen to you?

[31:19]Matti Friedman: First of I feel very lucky that it happened to me. I mean, it's really just I I feel really lucky to be able to, I was gonna say, do this as a job, but it calling it a job is really a bit of a stretch. But I think that I I arrived here when I was 17 in Israel without really understanding much about the country. And since then, I've been trying to explain the country mainly to myself. So before I'm writing for anyone else, I'm writing for myself, and I'm trying to figure out this really kind of wild and surprising and frustrating and depressing and exciting and, like, electric place where I've where I find myself living. And and each book is an attempt to to explain something else about about that. And I've been drawn particularly to stories that are really distant from my own experience, the stories about the Jews of the Arab world. I wrote a book about a crazy rock and roll tour given by Leonard Cohen, you know, at the in the at the Egyptian front of the Yom Kippur War. And this one is a return to a European story, so kind of part of the official mythology of of Israel, but a part of the national mythology that isn't really properly understood and hasn't been investigated in-depth for for a long time. But it it's clear to me that to to understand this country, you need to understand who these characters are. For example, you know, if you're walking around Manhattan and you and I read this in the book, you know, if you're on Lafayette Street and you go to Washington Square Park, who were these people? Obviously, they exist at a at a place that's very close to the heart of what America is, and it's worthwhile to figure out who they were. So if you drive around Israel, you'll, you know, pass a kibbutz called Yad Hana, which is named for Han Senesh. They'll pass another kibbutz called Netzer Sereni, which is named for Enzo Sereni, the Italian parachutist. You'll pass a kibbutz called Labot Haviva, named for Haviva Reich, who we mentioned. There's a place called Alone Abba, which is named for another parachutist whose name was Abba Berdichev. So even the landscape in Israel, kind of these characters are encoded in the landscape. The story of this operation is part of the Israeli landscape. There are 32 straits named for Han Senesh in in Israel. So it seemed to me that if I could just figure out who these people were and why they were important, something would be revealed about about this country and in a broader sense. Something would be revealed about human nature and why some people become heroes and why heroism is is important even in an age that I think insists that it's not that important. Amazing. Well,

[33:43]Zibby Owens: I am grateful on behalf of everybody that you've chosen to direct your intellect at this topic and our people and all of that. So thank you. I learned a lot from the book, and it's just amazing. It's just amazing what we can uncover and share, and thanks for doing the work for the rest of us.

[34:01]Matti Friedman: Thank you so much for having me again, and thanks for this conversation.

[34:04]Zibby Owens: Thank you. Okay. Take care. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.