Book Review: ‘When We See You Again,’ by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
WHEN WE SEE YOU AGAIN, by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
He was a vegetarian who ate no greens or fruits, preferring beige meals. At 13, he recognized the dishwasher, racks eliminated, as a spot the place one may disguise a small refugee. He picked his pimples and had smelly armpits. When he kissed his dad and mom goodbye he would say “luboo” for “love you,” a holdover from toddlerhood. He was imperfectly useful round the home, by no means fairly getting the reducing board clear.
He was left-handed, and every thing beneath his dominant elbow received blown off by terrorists. He most popular his lengthy hair, and after he was executed with six bullets fired at shut vary, it was dusted in gunpowder.
Born Oct. 3, 2000, in Oakland, Calif., Hersh Goldberg-Polin will likely be eternally 23. He was one of many Beautiful Six, as they have been named by their bereaved: Jewish hostages killed 66 ft underground in a Gaza tunnel on Aug. 29, 2024, aka Day 328, after they have been seized by Hamas-led militants from the Nova Music Festival and a close-by kibbutz in southern Israel.
Eight days earlier than, his father and mom, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, had pleaded for their release at the Democratic National Convention. Like bricks in a fortress round her grief, her mom stacks such numbers in “When We See You Again,” her new memoir that’s, in essence, a homage to Hersh.
The grief itself is shapeless, infinite, towards Kubler-Ross stageless; and Goldberg-Polin explains, in painful economic system, precisely how. “It is not going anywhere,” she writes. “It is infinitely painful and determined. Steadfast, in the worst way. It sits in the fluorescently lit waiting room filled with vinyl couches and outdated magazines. With a dusty plastic plant in the corner that somehow has an errant fake leaf on the floor next to it.”
If you already know somebody who has buried a toddler, she makes clear, the previous tense is inaccurate. It remains to be occurring to them and it’ll all the time be occurring to them and they’re going to by no means recover from it.
Memoirs of mourning and religion are sometimes described as “raw.” This one is refined, exact and finely carved. “It was the start of my acting career,” Goldberg-Polin notes wryly, of getting to cope with individuals’s reactions when Hersh was first kidnapped. She describes herself as “a knot of flailing muddlement,” “a colossal, coriaceous, brittle, breathing, talking, blinking and swallowing scar” and an “ailing empty balloon of existence,” reinflated by a surviving hostage giving her particulars of Hersh’s final days.
These included him quoting Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and carrying round “Shadow and Bone,” a fantasy novel by Leigh Bardugo that was the one studying materials made out there in his captivity.
“When We See You Again” is a guide of books, testomony to the Jewish custom of steady studying. Raised an solely baby in Chicago, the place she attended Orthodox colleges, Goldberg-Polin didn’t fall in love with literature till taking a spot 12 months in Israel earlier than Brandeis, when she found “The World According to Garp” and “The Godfather.” Shown prisoner movies together with Hersh after his loss of life, she sympathizes with Michael Corleone within the final of the movie trilogy: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
She compares herself to Jean Valjean of “Les Misérables,” counting the times since his seize, jailed by her torment. She examines the parable of Sisyphus as interpreted by Albert Camus. She cites different authors of parental bereavement: Yiyun Li and David Grossman. She relates deeply to the threadbare Velveteen Rabbit.
Goldberg-Polin remembers being placed on a aircraft alone to go to her grandparents when she was 4 and fantasizing about turning into a stewardess (planes are one of many solely locations she feels inside placing distance of OK now). She grew to become a trainer. Jon, who she met in highschool, labored in model administration they usually started their life collectively, after the Bay Area, in Richmond, Va., earlier than transferring to Jerusalem. These recollections are like Kodachrome slides yanked from a damaged projector.
Passover, a celebration of freedom, turns into a specific order. Numbly Goldberg-Polin describes assembly with Important Congresspeople, and Powerful, Wealthy, Prominent Men — all ineffective, and at the very least one careless. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s identify is notably absent.
Two youthful sisters, Leebie and Orly, survive Hersh. The fractured household is now divided into the Before and a unending After, when individuals attempt so ineffectively to assist what can’t be helped, bearing an excessive amount of lasagna and too many platitudes. (There are additionally glimmers of a fairytale-like Ever After when, because the guide’s title suggests, they may be reunited.)
Their lives have been fantastically peculiar till they weren’t. Another lesser-known guide Goldberg-Polin quotes is “All but My Life,” by Gerda Weissmann Klein, about her time as a youngster through the Holocaust. She missed being bored in the lounge together with her household. “Let’s have a Gerda Weissmann Klein boring night at home tonight,” Jon used to say. Still able to a dad joke, he addresses an afterword on to his son, “like a junior screenwriter adding a few sentences to the end of ‘Gone With the Wind.’”
Hersh’s reminiscence is a blessing, and the blessing is messy in the way in which of most males hardly out of adolescence. “When We See You Again” brings the miracle of the on a regular basis into sharp reduction. It is a ache to ache; a troublesome reward.
WHEN WE SEE YOU AGAIN | By Rachel Goldberg-Polin | Random House | 288 pp. | $30
