A Poet, a Parachute, and the Birth of Modern Israel

- Today is January 18th, 2026. I'm, my guest is journalist and author Matti Friedman. This is Matti's fourth appearance on the program. He was last here in December of 2024, talking about Israel's war with Hezbollah and his book, pumpkin Flowers. Our topic for today is his latest book out of the Sky, heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, which is the strange tale of a group of Jews living in Palestine under the British mandate during the Second World War who parachuted back into Nazi occupied Europe. And the most fam famous member of this group was a woman, Hannah or Hannah ish, a name. Some of you may know Matti. Welcome back to EconTalk.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- Now, Hannah's famous in Israel, I, and I want, and I knew of her before I moved here as a, an American Jew. I knew about her before I moved to Israel. You grew up in Canada. You may have heard about her when you were a a boy, but in Israel, the way you might encounter her name is much more ubiquitous. So give us a flavor of her cultural importance here and why you would write a book about someone who actually, sadly, did not accomplish what she had hoped to accomplish.

- It. Hanes is one of four main characters in this book and the, the operation that I'm describing, which is a very strange episode in which a group of young Jews who escape the Holocaust to British mandate Palestine volunteer to parachute back into the Holocaust. The group is a, is is 32 Parachutists. I've chosen a core group of characters who are participants in the most dramatic part of that operation. And of those four, the best known is, is Hana. So while some of these characters have kibbutz named after them, or a street named after them, HANA Sene has 32 streets named after her. She has a kibbutz named after her. She has a forest named after her. She is one of the most famous national characters in Israel. She's probably as famous as someone like Judah Maccabee, just to a, in terms of name recognition to an Israeli, my, one of my kids brought home, I mentioned this in the book a couple years ago, a deck of patriotic playing cards. And there was a set of four cards that, that had a kind of pantheon of the nation's greatest character. So one of them was Theodore Herzl, who's of course the founder of Modern Zionism. One of them was Gold Mair, who's the only woman to ever become Prime Minister in Israel. One was Moe Deyan, the famous one-Eyed General. And the fourth was Hanish, who was a 23-year-old woman who had come to Israel from Hungary and was here for a few years and, and wrote some poems that have become among the most famous texts in Hebrew. So sene is, is is a legend, but it's not a hundred percent clear, or at least it wasn't to me before I wrote the book, why she was a legend. 'cause as you hinted in your question, she doesn't seem to have succeeded at her mission. So that, that mystery is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. How could you become a hero if you failed?

- And let's talk a little bit about what you did to write this book. I was actually in Tel Aviv over this past weekend, and I was thinking about you 'cause I was looking forward to our interview. And I know you spent some time in an archive in Tel Aviv and I was having coffee and I think it's no memo. No memo, no. And it's the kind of building that would house the archive that you found. You also did some other strange things. You parachuted, you visited Dau, you went to Budapest. What are some of the things you did and why did you do them in the search for what had happened to these, these four people?

- Unfortunately, all of the characters in the story are dead. Even the ones who survived to the end of 1944. And I had no one to interview and I wanted to bring the story to life. So there were two main ways to do that. One was the incredible amount of documentation that turned out to survive from the operation. Most of it kept in Tel Aviv, in the Archive of the Hana, which is the pre-state militia. It's kind of a Jewish underground militia that becomes, it ultimately becomes the IDF. And their archive is in Tel Aviv, in this old mansion that used to belong to one of the militia commanders. So I spent a lot of time there going through thousands of, of documents that were kind of telling the story of this operation in, in real time. The operation stretches from the, basically from the beginning of 1944 to the end of 1944. That's more or less the time spent. So that's one way that I, I recreated the, the action. But another way to do it is to go to the places that, that I'm writing about and see if I can breathe, you know, the smell that these characters would've smelled and, and walked to the extent that is possible on the streets that they walked. So I tried to do that by going to Roam, which is where one of them, one of the main characters is from a character named Enzo Reni, who was one of the commanders of, of the mission, very literate, kind of aristocratic Roman Jew. And I went to Budapest, which is where ha es is from. I, I went to DACA as you, as you mentioned, because one of the characters ends up there. And maybe the funnest thing I did was to take a, an incredible train journey from Rome over the Alps to Munich and to daca, which must be one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world. Although I was retracing a train journey that one of my characters took in much darker circumstances. But it was certainly something that helped me recreate for myself the world that these characters inhabited. And then I hope to recreate it in an accurate fashion for the readers.

- You mentioned in passing that you had not, I think you say you did not visit a a death camp until you went to Daco. Why not?

- I've always had a, an ambivalent relationship to, to the Holocaust. You know, recognizing of course that it is one of the most important events in Jewish history and certainly one of the most important events of the 20th century. But I never wanted to let it define my own Jewish story. I don't see my own story as being one of victimhood. And I think that in, in the time that we're in now, victimhood is really the currency that is, is exchanged in cultural discourse and everyone wants to be a victim. And I'm not interested in that. And I think that the, the Zionist movement was not interested in that. And that's another reason I think, or that's one reason that the Zionist movement always had an ambivalent relationship with the Holocaust and never quite wanted to remember it quite in the way that it happened. They wanted to remember it in a slightly different way. Holocaust Remembrance Day here is called officially the Remembrance Day for Holocaust and Heroism. And there wasn't always, there was always an emphasis on heroic events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. So the Zionist movement never accepted that Jews were victims because the whole idea of Zionism is that Jews are actors in history that were agents of our own fate and not victims. And I think that that very much was my own mindset. So, you know, I don't, I've never been drawn to visit Auschwitz or, or any of these places. In fact, I once went to Krakow, which is right next to Auschwitz, and I considered going to the camp 'cause I was already in Krakow. And there are signs up all over Krakow advertising tours to, to Auschwitz. And I was really turned off by the whole thing, the idea of going to a, a camp that's also a tourist site. So I ended up just hanging out in a bookstore in Crack, how I found a book by Primo Levy and bought the book. And I sat in the, in the bookstore cafe reading Primo Levy with a couple Polish goths. That was my alternative to actually going to a Nazi death camp. I've always thought that the, the history of those places and the history of the Holocaust is something best pondered by the societies that perpetrated it. And I'd like to tell a different story about myself. So it turned out that when I went to Dout, because I was researching the fate of one of my characters of Enso Senni, and I wanted to see the camp, and I wanted to research in, in the archive that's at the camp. And I, I, I went to daca, really unprepared for it because I was just going for technical reasons and I was quite bold over as I recount in the book just by how evil the, the place was. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it was, and probably the most evil place I've ever been. You could just feel it, it was in the air, it kind of seeped from the ground. And I'm glad I had that. I'm, I'm glad I had that chance and I'm glad that I went when I did in my, in, in my mid forties and not, you know, as an impression impressionable 16 or 17-year-old, many Jewish teenagers get taken to these places, I think at a time when they're not really capable of understanding what, what they are, placing it in the right location in, in their own story about, about themselves and, and about the Jewish people. But I, it was one of the most powerful experiences that I had writing this book.

- Let's digress for a minute and talk a little bit about the Holocaust and Zionism, which you just obliquely referenced the discomfort or lack of interest that Zionism had with the traditional historical account. And certainly as an American Jew growing up in America, this idea that the Holocaust was uncomfortable to many Israelis struck me as weird until I lived here and learned more. And the Israel's treatment of Holocaust survivors is also disturbing, troubling. There was a certain disinterest might be a little strong, but discomfort would not be incorrect. And I, and there was a, I think for, for people who don't live here, the self-image that Israelis want, the identity that people here want to embrace is, is very different. The role the Holocaust plays in that is very different than say, as you say in America where the currency of victimization is, is often exchanged. Explain what you mean by that and, and try to give listeners a feel for what, how the Holocaust is seen here.

- So the way the Holocaust is seen in Israel has really changed in the past 20 or 30 years. But traditionally, Zionism was uncomfortable with it, and they were uncomfortable with the fact, it seems ludicrous to even say this now, but this was really a prevalent way of, of, of thinking about it in the early days of Israel. They were uncomfortable with the fact that the Jews hadn't rebelled or that they had, you know, the, the, the line was that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter. And that was, that was anathema to Zionism. I mean, Zionism was all about Jewish power. And, you know, the, and Jewish military bravery and the, the Zionists were very much concerned even before the founding of the state with inculcating an ethos of, of military prowess and Zionism abandons, the, the original Jewish heroes who are these, you know, rabbis and scholars and timid intellectuals and, and replaces them with, with military heroes, people like Barba, who was the leader of a disastrous revolt against, against Roman in the second century sea. And he'd always actually been hated by the rabbis because he very unwisely rebelled against the superpower and brought an absolute disaster on the Jewish people. But he gets reborn as an example of Jewish prowess or Judah Maccabee who'd been a relatively minor character who, who led a successful rebellion against the Saed Greeks a couple centuries earlier. So Zionism is very much interested in that kind of Jew. And then there's this terrible thing in Europe, which seems to be about passive Jews just getting on trains and being shipped to their deaths. And, and that that's not true, that's not accurate representation of what happened. And it's actually a terrible insult, I think, to the people who, who went through it. But that was very much the, the vibe in Israel and in the early years and, and eventually the, the Holocaust is commemorated in a very Zionist way, as I mentioned. They called the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Remembrance, stay for the Holocaust and Heroism. And there was really an emphasis on people who had resisted the Nazis. And there was a lot of discomfort with those, with those who didn't. And many Holocaust survivors who came to Israel were misunderstood at best, sometimes treated with disrespect. There was an assumption among some people that if you survived the Holocaust, you must have done something shady. So you must be crooked in some way, or you must have collaborated in some way, or you must have done something untoward in order to survive when so many other people were killed. So it takes decades for that event just to be digested by, by the psyche. Of course, it makes perfect sense. I mean, somethings can't be understood right away. And the Holocaust is certainly, certainly an example of something that maybe can't be understood at all, certainly not within a decade or two of, of it happening in the past 20 or 30 years. I think things have become much more sane and Israelis have learned to think about it, think about it differently, but there's still an unwillingness to see ourselves as victims. We've seen it over the past two years or so since October 7th, where we've had to participate in a discourse in the West where it's all about victimhood. The question is who is the bigger victim? And the greater your victimhood, the more cultural power you have an an increasingly political power you have. So everyone wants to be a victim and, and we have to play that game. So we have to kind of play up the way we were victimized on October 7th. But you can see that for a lot of Israelis that doesn't come naturally because the Zionist story is not about playing up your victimization, it's about being strong. And, you know, if you're victimized then you go and you know, you kick ass, you don't whine about being victimized. So there, there is a tension that exists to this day, which is still the one that the Zionist movement felt in, in the, in the days of the Holocaust. In fact, this operation, the Parachutist operation of 1944 is, is essentially a product of that tension. So you have the Zionist movement in what was then British mandate, Palestine watching this catastrophe unfold in Europe, they're unable to stop it despite their ethos of heroism and prowess. The Jews don't have an army, you know, they need to get people into Europe, the Jews don't have an air force, they have no way of doing anything. They're completely helpless. So they come up with what seems like the only plan at their disposal and send these people who escape the holocausts back into the Holocaust.

- And to set the stage a little bit for where they were headed in 1944, the year where these events take place. I mean, it's, it's, it's unspeakably sad when you read the history of it because the Nazis kill and come close to exterminating with near completeness entire communities throughout Europe and to the point where, you know, you talk about one town where 18,000 people get put on trains and 18 come home. But Hungary had this privileged, the Jews of Hungary were spared for the first years of the war until 1944. And it's just so sad because they almost made it, and some did, but hundreds of thousands were murdered in a systematic way. And if you're watching this from Israel, and you were had come from there as some of the people in the story had also with Italy, where again, there were, there was a lot of relatively cheerful news in the beginning of the war for the Jews, but eventually the Nazi death machine comes for them. And so these, these survivors in Palestine, under the British mandate were desperate to do something. So what did they have in mind? And as you point out this mission that many of them were on wearing British uniforms, often were, was had two prongs. One, the people who dispatched them from British military headquarters had one goal, but the Israeli soon to be leaders of a new state in a few years had a different mission. So how did those, what were those two missions and how did that work out?

- Well, at the time, I guess we should say for listeners who may not be familiar with the history, this country is a British mandate territory called Palestine. The British conquer it in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks and are given the mandate by the League of Nations to create a Jewish national home. And, and they've been running it essentially since the end of the first World War. And they're about to, to leave in 1948. So, you know, the whole thing lasts about 30 years. And this is the, the waning years of, of the mandate, although that's not at all clear at the time that we're talking about, this is the middle of the second World War. So the, the Jews are trying to form a state in Palestine, but the ruling authority is, is British and the Jews do not have a military or a government. They have a quasi governing authority that they recognize called the Jewish Agency, but it's not, it's not a real government and they don't have any military force. And at the beginning of the war, the Jews are begging the British to allow them to form Jewish fighting units and, and go to Europe to fight the Nazis. And you know, the Jews, of course are, they have good reason to, to wanna fight the Nazis. However, they're also at odds with, with British authorities. So the Jews also hate the British, so they hate the British, but they hate them less than they hate the Germans. Why do they hate the British? Because the British having promised to create a Jewish national home that will be a refuge for the Jewish people in the 1930s, they basically slammed the door on on on that in order to placate Arab public opinion, which is very much opposed to Jewish immigration and opposed to the British Empire in general.

- And they have their own national aspirations, which they're pressuring the British to give voice to and absolutely not going so well for them. The British are, are caught between a rock and a hard place.

- Right, exactly. So there are two competing national movements that are, you know, kind of alive and, and at odds in this place. So the British are in a, in a bit of a pickle. What they do is they, they stop Jewish immigration with, with few exceptions, precisely at the time when the, it's a matter of life and death for millions of Jews. And, and people have nowhere to go and they, and they can't come here. So the, the Jews of course are furious at the British about that, but they, they have no choice but to be on the allied side in the war. So they're trying to get the British to allow them to form fighting battalions. And the British won't do it because they're worried about forming military units of Jews that could, after the war, boomerang against the British. And, and I think that concern was quite well placed and indeed

- Yeah, would

- Prove to be, prove to be completely justified so we can understand where the British are are coming from. But this is intensely frustrating for the, for the Jews. So what remains of these grandiose plans to form specifically a plan to drop a battalion of paratroopers, Jewish paratroopers into Europe in order to lead a Jewish uprising? That was the original plan. This is whittled down by British colonial officials into a plan that will see just over 30 Jewish parachutists dropped, not as a fighting unit and not together. They'll be dropped in twos and threes and they'll be dropped mainly by an outfit called MI nine, which is now largely forgotten. But it's the arm of British military intelligence that deals with escape and invasions. So their, their job is to pick up downed allied pilots or escape POWs, people who are behind enemy lines and get them back to allied lines so they can be, you know, put, put on new airplanes and sent back into the war. So that's, that's MI nine and it's being run out of Cairo in, in, in this part of the world by an officer named Tony Simmons, who's a very pro Zionist officer who's been in Palestine for a while and who the Jews trust. So because of this relationship that Simmons has with the Zionist leadership, they create this plan to recruit newly arrived Jews, mainly from central Europe. People who speak the local languages know the territory, and these people will be recruited into the British Army. They'll be given British uniforms, they'll be given radio training and parachute training, and then they will be dropped via an allied air base in Italy back into central Europe. That's what the British think they're doing. These people are meant to maintain radio contact between British military headquarters and partisan forces, resistance forces behind enemy lines. And they're supposed to help locate and rescue allied personnel behind enemy lines. That's the British mission as far as the Jewish leadership is concerned. And this is mainly a group of men who will ultimately be the creators of the Mossad. So in, in, in my book in English, I call them the Mosad because they're actually part of a small office that's called the Mossad, which means the, basically the illegal immigration bureau, but it will eventually morph into what we now call the Moad. So I refer to the Moad, these are intelligence men, although of course there's no state and they don't actually belong to an official intelligence service. And, and they have a different plan. And their plan, of course is to save Jews. The, the Allied mission is secondary to them, their idea to get Zionist agents back into Europe to fight the Nazis and, and save Jews. And eventually they also want people who will have gained enough military experience to be able to use it against the British after the war is over. So this British operation is also an operation against the British. So it's, it's a complicated affair, but there's a confluence of interests here for a while between the Zionist leadership and certain British military officers that allows this operation to take place. The Jews wanna get people into Europe, but they don't have their own air force. The British need agents who can fit in behind enemy lines, and they have almost no one who who can do it. And they realize that the Jews in Palestine have this incredible reservoir of agents because the place is full of people who come from what are now occupied countries in Europe. So if you need someone who, you know, can pass in, in, in Nazi occupied France, no problem. You know, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Jews have, have whatever you need. So that, those are the conditions that create this strange operation in 1944, which was at least officially a British operation run by I nine out of Cairo.

- And how do we know anything about it? It's not on the surface, which is a phrase I'm gonna use a lot in this rest of this conversation. On the surface, this is not even a footnote to a footnote, to a footnote. It's such a minor thing. 32 people parachute into what was then I think sort of Czechoslovakia, but who knows what it's called really. But they're near the Hungarian border and they and a few other places, they don't achieve very much. Most of them die, not all of them, but most of 'em are, are killed in the process. And how do we know anything about them? They're in a way, they're, they're lost to history. One of the beautiful about your book is you've, you've brought them alive, which is wonderful, and in a minute we'll talk about why we might care under the circumstances of a footnote to a footnote. But how do we know anything about this experience?

- Well, the, the operation is, is documented in a very, in a very thorough fashion. And I wa I was surprised when I went to the Hana archive in Tel Aviv to see what I could wrestle up. I I had no idea that there would be so much. So the, the Jewish intelligence men who leave these documents are, are very organized and everything is, is documented, cataloged and eventually saved in the, in the Hana archive. So there's actually a lot of material that allows us to recreate the mission, not from a distance, but from, you know, from the, the perspective of the people who are running it in real time. So we have letters from my characters sent to headquarters. We have radio transmissions, we have telegrams, we have personal archives of some of these people sene, for example, because she became a legend afterward. Her diaries and letters have been published. Another one of my characters, Aviva Reich, who's a very interesting woman who is probably the most efficient of the parachutists, but she's not the most remembered of them. She left, she, she has an, an archive, she left an archive of, of fascinating letters on her kibbutz, which is a kibbutz called Mait. One of the characters who's the only one of my characters to walk out of this mission alive. He wrote a very, a really superb memoir about it that has been forgotten and is out of print and was never translated. But if you're looking for material, it's, it's there. And you know, all i, all I lacked was an opportunity to actually speak to the people who, who participated in the mission. But I had a lot of material to work with. And that allowed me to create a story that I think, or I hope has, is very rich in texture. I'm not, this is not a, a bird's eye view of the story. This is a very kind of high resolution take on, on the mission as viewed through mainly through documents telling us what this felt like day to day. And I try to zoom out and give us some context and try to think a bit about what all of it means. But the narrative rests on a very granular portrait of four characters who are part of this pretty small and marginal mission that somehow becomes a legend and, and the subject of, of myth to such an extent that, again, you can say haen to an Israeli kid and they'll know exactly who you're talking about.

- Yeah, we're gonna get into why that is, but I, I just wanna add that the texture is there that you're talking about. It's, it's a very vivid account, but equally vivid is your reflections on it as a modern Israeli looking back at it and it's really quite moving. I I finished the book an hour or so before our conversation and it put me in a very reflective and contemplated mood, which I thank you for. Let's, let's talk, you don't quite make this comparison, but it's, it's hanging in the era around the book. Two young women had diaries and writings had aspirations to be writers. That's Anne Frank and Hannah Sene both Die during the War. And Anne Frank becomes a lot more famous than Hannah Sene. I think there are many reasons possibly, but one of them is the appeal of how she has been portrayed by history. I don't think it's quite fair, but she's portrayed as a universalist, and this is very appealing to many people. Hannah Sandis is not a universalist. And reading her writings in your book, which, which is, which is scattered through the whole book, is, is especially moving to a Jew. But it, it reminds you of the contrast with Anne Frank. So talk a little bit about Hannah's Ana's aspirations as a writer and what we have of her writing and, and why it's important.

- I guess you'd say that sene was a universalist who was mugged by reality. Yeah, I think at, at at at heart that's the world that she wanted. And she came out of this very liberal environment in Budapest. Her dad's a playwright and a novelist and a bohemian and she fully expects to have a liberal life as an equal citizen in a European state. And and like many Jews, she's disabused of that notion in the late 1930s. And she realized it's just, it's not gonna happen. And her solution is to become a Zionist. And luckily for her, she gets a visa really on the eve of the war. It's the fall of 1939, she gets an, a very rare immigration certificate to British Palestine and she leaves and her mother remains behind in Budapest and she, she makes it out just as the door is, is closing. So her her lesson from this is not a universal lesson. I think she would like to see that a kind of world where, you know, all people are, you know, are, are are siblings, but I think she's, she's lived long enough and seen enough to know that, that that world does not yet exist. And if she wants to be able to exist in the world, it's going to be as a Jew and the Jews are gonna have to defend themselves because no one else is going to do it. And she's not the only one to reach that conclusion. And in those years, and it's interesting to, to make a comparison between these two young women because I mean they literally have the same name and Ann Hana Hana's, it's the same name. I mean Hana is Hahan and Anne is the sa Ann is a, is an English translation of, of the, of the Hebrew name Hana. But even more than that, her name in Hungary was actually Anna Sene, that's her Hungarian name. And when she becomes a Zionist pioneer, she Hebraic sizes the name and becomes Hana. So she has consciously made a decision not to be Anne, but to be Hana, who is a different person in that she's not part of a universal or European story. She is definitely a Jew and her name is Hebrew. So even there's a story, even just in the names of these two young women. Sene is a bit older than Anne Frank and Frank is a teenager ish, is a, is a young woman, but they, they both write, I think they, they would recognize each other as, as kindred spirits in many ways. They, they're both very literary. They both read, I'm sure they read some of the same books and they, and they have the idea that they're, that that, that they can write. So, and of course has her famous diary, which becomes one of the bestselling books in, in the World after the war. And it's, you know, it's a bestseller in Japan and, and Frank really becomes a global icon. Hanish writes initially in Hungarian, and then after she moves to Israel, she begins writing in Hebrew. And she's incredibly adept at languages and she manages to write some really excellent poems, even though there are poems written by a young person who's not quite there yet. But it's quite clear when you read her early writing that she, had she been allowed to live past age 23, she eventually would've been probably an important writer. I think that's, that's clear. She had incredible powers of observation. She was, she had, she was really skillful with language, even in a language that Hebrew, which she only spoke for four or five years, and she was already writing things of worth in that language. So I think we, you know, we would, we could have seen some important literature come from Ish's Pen had she, had, she lived and, and her, her observations about the world or cut off of course by, by her death. So she's remembered for Universalist pro pronouncements, like her famous sentence where she says that, you know, deep, I'm, I'm not quoting this verbatim, but she says, deep in my heart, I I believe that no deep, you know, deep inside I believe that people are good at heart. That she has that famous sentence. That's

- Anne Frank.

- That's Anne Frank, right? So that, and that is her most famous sentence. And as my friend and colleague Darl Horn pointed out in a great book called People Love Dead Jews, she pointed out that Anne wrote that of course, before she was, you know, arrested by murderers and killed in a camp. So had we been able to speak to her a few years after that, it's possible that her conclusions about human nature would've been different and it's possible that her worldview would've been closer to that of, of Hans. We, we don't know. But it's certainly true that the universal message of Anne Frank and the fact that she is a perfect victim, she's just a girl and she's murdered, that makes her a much more palatable character for people outside this story looking in. They want Anne Frank, they want someone who believes in the goodness of, of humanity. They want someone who doesn't really do anything threatening. Anne Frank just dies and doesn't, you know, live after the war to disturb the peace of Christians or Muslims by trying to set up a state where Jews can be at home. So sene, who is the more heroic character. It's no fault of Anne Franks that she wasn't a hero, but Hanses lived long enough to be able to make a decision about whether or not to take action. And she decides to take action. Hanses is known and venerated mostly among Israelis and Jews who value what she did. And outside that, that group, she's, she's, she's barely known. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this book once it comes out. If people can kind of maybe better understand her, her character, if we understand what made her tick and the way that she saw the world. It's, I i i it, you know, I'm not giving anything away to say that. I think that Hannah's analysis of, of the world and human nature was closer to, closer to the accurate one, unfortunately.

- So I, I promised you before we recorded this, that I have a Hanen story, which I'll, I'll, I'll try to make brief is it'll be a nice lead into our, the next thing I wanna ask you, which is we were in, my wife and I were in Budapest for the first time. We spent four or five days there and there's, there's a skating rink. And Saturday night my wife and I decided to go skating. Well, that's not true. My wife decided to go skating. I don't skate, but she skates and I take pictures of her when she comes around. So we go to the locker room, we're gonna rent skates, she's gonna rent skates, and they ask for a deposit in, in euros. And I realize we have no euros. They don't take credit card for the deposit, you've gotta have gas. So I pull out of my wallet, a set of Israeli currency, I said, would you take this? Which of course is absurd. It's worth, they have no idea how much it's worth. I I actually, it actually was somewhat akin to the amount that was the amount of deposits. And to be honest, this was shortly after October 7th and wasn't particularly interested in advertising. I was traveling from Israel, as many Israelis have discovered since, since October 7th. Sometimes I'm open about it, sometimes less so. But I'm talking to this very nice 20-year-old girl who is asking for currency. And I take this out, the a hundred shekel or whatever it was, note. And I had a couple and I showed 'em to her and she says, instead of going like, why, why would we take this? Or, or what's this word? She says, these are so beautiful because on an Israeli currency, they've got this lovely portrait of various people embedded in the, in the, in the paper currency. And she proceeds to call the entire staff tenor people or so to admire Israeli currency. It's like, it's a very funny moment. And, and I had like a, a weird brain freeze and I didn't know who was on the 100 or 200 shekel note or 50 that I was showing her, but it was a woman, and I think it's Leia or Raquel, Israeli poets. But for some reason it just crossed my mind. I said, you know, I I think maybe it's ha zish and of course this 20-year-old Budapest woman. And I was thinking of Haah because I toured the, you know, the Jewish synagogue two days before and it heard about ha ish. And, and she of course looks at me and says, who's ha sene? Right? This woman who's world, who's not world, she's very famous in Israel, she's Hungarian, she's from Budapest. And this woman goes like, well, who's ha ish? And I'm kind of like, have this moment of pride. And I said, well, she was a hero. She parachuted back into Nazi or or into Nazi controlled Hungary. And she looked at me and said, puzzled, deeply puzzled, troubled. Why? Why would she do that? A fair question. So that's my question, Monty, what was she thinking?

- Right? I guess that that the question asked by the woman at the skating rink is essentially the question I'm asking in this book. What, what motivated these characters to embark on a quest that seems quite hopeless? And, you know, the chances of success were very small if they, if they existed at all. Certainly they had the idea that they were going to go save Jews or fight or fight the Nazis. I mean, it seems, I mean, it seems quite, quite unrealistic. There's actually, I mentioned this in the book, a very funny skit, kind of funny in a painful way, done by an Israeli satire program called The Jews Are Coming By. It's a, it's a famous satire program here. Very funny,

- Very funny.

- And they riff on biblical stories and on they kind of make fun of Israeli national myths. And they have this skit where you see it's in the forties and you see this Jewish militia commanders really tough guys standing in front of a map of Europe with a big swastika on it. And he's saying, we're gonna go, we're gonna fight the Nazis, we're gonna, you know, kill the Germans. And then the camera swivels and you see there's just one person in the room, and it's this very young woman and it's ha sene. And, and she raises her hand and she says, I'm sorry, who's we? You know? And, and, and the commander is forced to admit that actually it's not we, it's just you. And what was ha sene supposed to do against, against, against the Nazis. And that, I guess was more than anything else, the mystery that led me to write the book because there's this incredible gap between the legend of the mission and the actual accomplishments of the mission. And there's this gap between what they said they were going to do and what they could have reasonably expected to do. Again, this is 32 people dropped in twos and threes and about a half dozen access countries, it, it, you know, in the middle of, of the war. So, you know, I try to unravel it in, in the book. And my, my conclusion is that it's related to, to storytelling. And it was interesting, you know, to write a book, which is essentially about the act of storytelling. But Zionism has always been a movement based in telling, based on telling a different story about ourselves. And it's not a coincidence that the greatest minds of Zionism are often writers, most prominently Theodore Herzl, who is playwright and journalist. And he comes up with political Zionism because he understands that the story that the Jews are telling themselves in the 1890s in Cosmopolitan, Vienna, which is a story of increasing assimilation and liberal liberalism and acceptance in a Christian society. He realizes that this story is not true. And he understands that the Jews are gonna need to tell themselves a different story and mobilize themselves for a different purpose. And his idea is that, which seems insane at the time, is that there's going to be a Jewish state and the Jews are going to immigrate from Europe and they're gonna go to this state and they're gonna be free people in their own land to quote what ultimately becomes the Israeli national anthem. So it's, he's, he's a writer. Jabotinsky Iss a writer, bain's a journalist, and these people are, are writers. So the, the, the Zionist movement is essentially a storytelling movement and it tells people that they're not refugees, they're pioneers, which is a very effective form of storytelling because it takes people who are victims and turns them into agents of their own fate. And, you know, they're not, they're not running away from their home in Poland because that was never their home. They're, they're going to their real home. And whether or not this is real or fake is almost beside the point. It is a great story that saves the Jews in the 20th century. So there's a real connection between Zionism and the ability to tell, to tell a story. And here too, in 1944, we have an example of a mission that I think was mainly about a story. It was the, the Zionist movement using, using the story weapon. What was the idea? These people would go to Europe and they would write a different story about the Second World War. And in this story, the Jews would not be victims, they would be heroes and they would not be miserable people in cattle cars. They would be parachutists jumping out of airplanes into occupied countries to bravely fight the Nazis. And this story would be so powerful that it would of course not change anything about the war, but it would change the way the war is remembered and then change the actions of people after the war. And I, I think that if you understand the, the mission in those terms, it makes sense and it also then makes sense why the participants in the mission tended to be very literary people. Han Sanish is a good example, but Enzo Senni was also a writer. He wrote a history of Italian fascism. He wrote a, a treatise, or he edited and wrote a treatise on Jewish Arab coexistence under Zionist socialism, which is very interesting to read from 2026. But it made sense, I guess at the time it was written in the 1930s. So these, these are people who wrote, you know, he dreamed of writing a great novel. So these people, these people understood storytelling and they understood themselves as characters and a story. And no one understood that better than sene, who was the daughter of a playwright and, and the daughter of a novelist and a book worm and a theater kid. She literally grows up in, in Amelia of theater, people in, in Budapest. So she knows exactly what a heroic quest is. She knows what the role of the heroine is, she knows who Joan of Ark was. She knows what's expected of her. She is not remembered because she's the best commando she's remembered because she's the best writer. And and I think that she instinctively gets this. And when we understand that this enterprise is not a military enterprise, it is at its root a literary enterprise, the thing begins to make more sense.

- So when the cashier at the skating rink asked me, why would she do that, which was a rhetorical question to be sure not a quest question for for information. I said, well, to save her people. And there was a long pause and this 20-year-old nice Hungarian young woman who had really no interest in a philosophical conversation on a Saturday night, nodded and said, oh yeah, I get it. So she didn't save her people, she couldn't save her people, but she could make a brave gesture about what it meant to be a member of a people that had this crazy dream of a, of a country. And in parts of the book we see Hanah and from her diary talking about working on a farm in Preis Israel, Palestine. And it's not her cup of tea, it's a hard, a lot of European Jews found themselves doing agriculture when they arrived in Israel, either before or after 1948 and struggle with it 'cause it's not what they were used to. But she, at one point, you call it her second most famous poem, read that poem, if you would, do you have it handy in, I'd love for you to read it in. I think she wrote it in Hebrew so you can read it in Hebrew. And then you translated it and you, you pointed out it's sometimes mistranslated, but it's, it's an anthemic there. It's very brief.

- And so the poem that I refer to as Hana's second most famous poem is, is called in Hebrew, it's called Afu. And there's, there's a debate about how to translate that name. Most of the translations will translate that as most of the translations you'll see in English translate it as blessed is the match. That's the most common translation of it, which in my opinion is a mistranslation of it. It's much closer to happy is the match, the the word as. And Hebrew comes from the, the prayer book. We, it's from a prayer that we say multiple times a day, which is happy, as happy are those who dwell in your house. So Hans playing on the words of a prayer and, and I'll read it in Hebrew and then I'll read it, I'll read my own translation into English so that in, in Hebrew it reads like this. So that's, that's the poem in my translation, which differs a bit from the most common one in English. It means something like this, happy is the match that flared and lit the flames. Happy is the flame that burns secret in the deepest hearts. Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop happy is the match that flared and lit the flames. So this is a poem that we have because we're pretty incredible series of series of events. Hana is about to cross the border from Yugoslavia where she's been with Tito's partisan army for a few months in the spring and early summer of 1944. And she's about to cross into Nazi occupied Hungary. And she knows that she's crossing a hostile border and that there's a very good chance she's not coming back. And her comrades are actually trying to convince her not to go. They think it's too dangerous and she is not listening to reason as they see it. And she's insisting on, on crossing the border. She, she needs to get into Hungary, she needs to complete her mission. And, and her mother is trapped in Budapest. Literally a few, you know, streets away from the villa where Adolf Aman is planning the liquidation of the Jews of Hungary. So she's, she needs to get into, into Hungary. And she, and she insists on going. And as she parts from a comrade named Reuven Daphne, another one of the Jewish parachutists in the forest near the border, she shakes his hand and he feels that she's pressing something into his hand and she leaves and he sees that she's left him with a folded piece of paper. And when he unfolds the paper, he sees that she's written this poem. So in many ways this poem is Hana's last will and testament. She will write a few other documents in prison after she is, after she's captured. But, but this is something that she's writing with the knowledge that it might be her last communication with, with home. So Daphne says in in his account of these events that he was so annoyed that that at this theatrical gesture that he throws the palm away, he throws it into the bushes and kind stomps off back to the partisan camp and then regrets it and comes back to look for the, look for the piece of paper. And he finds it in, in, in a bush and brings it back. And it eventually travels from Yugoslavia across the Mediterranean back to British mandate Palestine. And, and I've seen it, I've seen the note it's kept at a kibbutz in Northern Israel. So that's how this poem makes, it, makes it home. And it, it, it's a very famous poem at the time. It's printed almost immediately. It's put to music, it becomes kinda a staple of youth movement meetings and, and rallies. And, and what Hannah's saying here is something I that I think is very important that the ideological style of the poem, I think hasn't aged well. So, you know, we kind of have to re-inhabit that world where people felt comfortable making high minded ideological pronouncements, which is what she's doing. But it's quite clear here, I think what, what she's saying, if you look at the common English translation of the poem, the first line reads Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. That's the way it's, it's usually translated. And when I went to the Hebrew, I, I realized that that's a mistranslation and in fact that mistranslation tells us something very important about the mission because the whole point of the first line is not that the match is consumed in kindling flame, the point is that the match lights, the flame, the match is consumed after lighting the flame. And in fact, that word, I think explains what Hana thinks that she's doing. And it kind of explains her transformation from a young woman living, you know, in Bohemian Budapest into a Zionist pioneer. Because what differentiates Anna ish from Hanah Ish's action, she's a woman of action and she knows the match might be consumed, but first it will light, it will light the flame that that consumes the match. And that's what this poem says. So the poem has kind of been forgotten. It's much less known today. Then Han's most famous poem, which we could talk about if, if you want, but it still, we'll, we'll it's still quite, it's still quite a famous poem in, in, in Hebrew and it kind of falls on hard times along with all of the simple sounding ideology of, of early Israel. And they're, they're eventually, of course there's a discomfort with martyrdom and there's a discomfort with this whole story and what it seems to, what it seems to mean. But if we recreate the headspace of this very young woman in, in the summer of 1944, I think we can understand what she's saying. She's, she knows she's about to cross the border between life and death. And she explicitly tells us that she's happy to cross.

- One of my students said, Israelis don't do lofty modern Israelis, but they do have their lofty moments. And, and I think this poem speaks to that, what's her most famous poem and why is it famous?

- Han's most famous poem, which is probably one of the most famous Hebrew texts in our times, is a song that is now called Ali Ali. That's the, the song title as it as it eventually becomes famous. Hannah actually gave that poem a different name. She called it The Walk to Caesarea Ali. Caesarea is a Roman ruin that was not far from the kibbutz where, where Hannah lived, which is called, and it's this very short poem, it's just a few lines. And she writes it in 1942. And it's just, it's, there's no ideology in it. There's no pronouncements about anything. It's just a very personal moment on the beach looking at the water, seems to be during a storm. And it's discovered in along with Hannah's belongings after she vanishes in Europe. And it's put to music immediately, it's put to music in 1945. And, and it's given this absolutely beautiful tune. And there's, it's kind of a perfect marriage of a melody and, and words, the composer adds a word to the text to make it match the melody. So he, he repeats the first word of the poem, which is Ali, which in Hebrew means my Lord. So Haah writes that once in her poem and he adds another one. So it becomes Ali Ali in order to make it fit the, the scheme of the song. And that song becomes what Hanses is known, is known for. And it's been covered hundreds and hundreds of, of times. As I was writing this book during the Russian invasion of, of Ukraine, this was a couple years ago, I happened upon a video on YouTube of these very burly Slavic guys in camouflage uniforms singing Ali Ali. And it was a Ukrainian military choir doing a version of Eli. So people who may know nothing about Israel or about Hebrew literature know this song. And anyone in any of our listeners who attended Hebrew schools or Jewish summer camps or, or something like that, probably encountered n Dali. They might not know the story behind it or the woman who who wrote it, but it remains one of the most famous songs in modern Hebrew.

- So we'll put a link up to the musical version of it, but could you recite the Hebrew and then the translation of it for our listeners?

- Absolutely. The original Hebrew song, which is slightly different in one word from the poem that, that Hana wrote, goes like this, Ali, that's it. That's, that's the whole poem. And in, in English it means, my Lord, may these things never end. The sand and the sea, the murmur of water, the lightning in the sky, a human prayer. That's it, it's kind of a perfect, it's kind of a perfect poem. And it's written by someone who writes it in Hebrew and has been speaking Hebrew at this time for three years. And what a funny detail that I discovered when I was looking into this. I was looking at the original copy of the poem from Hannah's notebook where she writes this, this poem, and there's a spelling mistake in it. She, she writes the word, yeah, lit. Which which means in this case never made these things never end. She writes it with, with she gets one of the letters wrong instead of the word I, the letter I, she writes the letter Ali, and it's a reminder, it's kind of like finding a typo in Yates or something. It's, you know, because it's such a famous poem or, you know, finding out that Shakespeare didn't know how to spell, you know, Phish or something like that. She was a, you know, a new immigrant to this country and she was operating in a place that she didn't know very well and in a language that she had only recently learned. And that's, I think, an important insight into her character. Afterward, she becomes kind of a legendary Israeli pioneer hero. So she gets turned into almost the ultimate pioneer. So she loves me, Neil Labor, and she's always ready, which she hated. And as she and she, you know, is ready for sacrifice, which, which she was, and she is of course, she's a daughter of the nation. She's essentially Israeli, even though she never lived in a country called Israel. And when you read this poem, you, you remember that she was a very young woman who came from somewhere else. And the, the character of Hanses the pioneer was to a very large extent, a character that she created. And again, this is a very theatrical literary young woman. She understood character and she made a conscious decision to stop being the character that she had inhabited until she finished high school, which was a Hungarian bourgeois, a girl named Anna Ene. And she becomes something else, she becomes a pioneer ish, and then she becomes a heroic parachutist. And these are all very conscious decisions and she documents it in, in these poems. She has a notebook full of poems that she doesn't tell anyone about because she's embarrassed about writing poems because she's meant to be a simple laborer and, and a socialist pioneer. And, and the, the, the sobras in those days did not respect poets. You know, that you weren't supposed to be an intellectual. The Jews had enough intellectuals, what they needed was, you know, dairy farmers and, and people who were happy to, you know, I guess scrub the pots in, in the kitchen. And, and she had a bit of a, an ambiguous relationship with her own poetry which she hides in a, in a suitcase. And then it is, this notebook is found after her death. And people realize that she'd been writing, that, she'd been writing quite striking poetry. And again, it's not, I don't wanna oversell it, it's not, and it's not the most amazing poetry ever written. And she was a very young person. And what, what it is really, I mean, this, I think, I think Elly is a, is a wonderful poem, particularly one put together with the music. But the, this is poetry written by a very young person who would have been great, who could have been great. So when we read Hans's Diaries and letters and poems and she left a lot, you see that it's potential, it's, it's something that should have been allowed to grow into something amazing and wasn't. And that's part of the tragedy of this, of this story.

- I, I should just mention, by the way, I, I should have said it earlier when we're talking about Anne Frank, Anne Frank's view of the world was very much crafted by people other than herself. The, the play about her and the historical image of her was like all famous people, I suppose, was a distortion in some dimension. It was not literally who she was, but the world used her in certain ways. And people can go read about that if they want. It's an interesting story. But I, I just, I, I just wanted to be fair to her that she was more complicated than a naive 15-year-old who said, you know, deep down, I think all people are good at heart, or whatever is the exact thing she said in her diary,

- Absolutely. These people are, are kind of faded to be remembered as cartoons. Yeah. And the fate of the hero is essentially to be venerated to the point where you're a two dimensional, you know, cardboard cutout of a person. And, and that has definitely happened to Anne Frank. And we can see that now, you know, as Anne Frank's memory is abused by every conceivable political movement, you know, from left to right. And she's a symbol of, you know, immigrants and, you know, progressive ideology and non-conformist sexuality. She's a symbol for Palestinians, if you're on that side of things. She's a symbol of people being forced to wear masks because of COVID, if you remember that, that episode. So she's a symbol of, you know, whatever you want. And it's a terrible abuse of that person who was just, she was just a little girl who was killed because she was a Jew. And she never thought anyone would read her diary. And she never asked to be famous. And there's something tragic about it just says there's something tragic about, about Hana who, you know, she's venerated, right? She's not, she's, she becomes a national heroine and she's remembered beyond anything that she could possibly have expected when she was alive. But part of that process is just this flattening of her character. And one of the great things for me about writing this book was discovering what an incredible character she really was. So I also went in with this idea that she was kind of, it's like Davy Crockett, like how seriously are you gonna, are you gonna take, you know, it's like George Washington and the Cherry Tree. I mean, literally, these are the things that people remember about people who are fantastically complex. And Hanses was young, so she didn't have time to be that complex, but she was an incredibly intelligent and determined woman. And when you read her letters and her diary entries, even from a very young age, you see that this is someone with very powerful powers of observation and very, a very skillful way of expressing herself. And, you know, she turn her into the kind of Sabra sabra poster child actually does her own injustice. And it's better than the alternative, I guess, which is forgetting her. But one, one thing that I'm trying to do in this book is to rescue her. And to some extent her comrades, not just from amnesia, but from mythology. Because when you realize that they're, they're real people, they're much more impressive. The cardboard cutouts aren't impressive because they don't seem like human beings when you understand that she was a human being and she did what she did. I think she's more of a heroine than I appreciated at the beginning of my work on this book.

- So there's a poignant theme in the book. I think you mentioned it explicitly. It might be in a couple sentences, but it hovers over the book for me, as somebody living in post October 7th Israel, and by post-OC October 7th, Israel, I mean a world where Jews are hunted down and killed like animals at a music festival here, the Nova Festival on October 7th, Jews lighting a Hanukkah menorah in Australia are shot and killed inexplicably in, in modern times that we thought we'd never see again. And what hangs over the book that is poignant is that Hertzel has a dream of a, of Jewish state as a way to deal with the fact that people don't seem to be able to get along with Jews. He's reacting to the pogroms of, of his day, where particularly in Russia, in Eastern Europe, Jews are murdered, their houses are burned, their stores are looted. And he thinks, well, you know, we need to try to do something about this. And he says, we, if we only had our own state, this would be solved. So we do get our own state, which is, as you mentioned earlier, remarkably improbable. It is an historical blip, anomaly, whatever you wanna call it that is very unexpected, would not have been predicted in any for a long, long time until it happens. And even after it happened, it seemed impossible. Israel was attacked immediately by its Arab neighbors. It had no real army or air force. Somehow it manages to survive that attack, attacks that continue throughout the last 77 years. And I think there was a hope that the Jewish problem would go away. It didn't. It hasn't. And I'd just like to close, and I'd like to hear your reflections on that as you're writing this book. Hear these characters, Khan and others who are dreaming of a better world, they have their own naive idealism. It's not the same as Aunt Frank's. It's a different one that, you know, if only there were a place where Jews could be safe, there wouldn't be as much suffering in the world. They were wrong. As David Desch pointed out on our program, in my conversation with him, many, many Jews lives were saved because of the establishment of the state of Israel. But it has not solved the so-called Jewish problem. It has not ended hatred of Jews. And you've been here a while, a lot longer than I have, you know, how to spell the olive and the ion correctly. Many new arrivals like myself, make that error all the time because they're both somewhat silent. I say somewhat because, well, that's a technicality, we'll leave alone, but it's a common spelling error. Let's just leave it that, especially for new arrivals. So you've been here a long time. You've fought in the IDF in the Israeli army. You've endured a lot of things I haven't had to endure here, but we both shared the last two years here together. What are your thoughts on what you were thinking when you wrote this book and, and looking at that extraordinary idealism of being the match that lights a flame that they thought was going to put an end to a bunch of, of really horrible things, but hasn't quite managed to.

- I started writing this book in one state of mind and finished writing it in a completely different state of mind. I, I started the research more than a year before October 7th. And when I did, I thought I was writing a book about a very distant historical episode, and suddenly the times that Hana lived in really came to life for me. And I'm not saying that, you know, this is the Holocaust and I'm, you know, I'm not compar, I'm not comparing the darkness of these times to the darkness of her times. But, but it's much easier to imagine her times now than it was when I started researching this book. And I think that when I moved here from Toronto, in my case in, in 1995, I really thought that I was moving from one Jewish solution to another Jewish solution. I did not feel that North American Judaism was precarious. And I thought that actually, you know, liberal, rural, western democracy had essentially solved the problem for people who wanted to partake in it. And, and that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem for people who wanted to live in a Jewish state. And this is the mid nineties. It's pretty optimistic time. And it things, it seems, things seem to be going in the right direction. It's the peace process. And, and I've been through a lot here long enough to, to doubt my, my certainty that, that everything was going in the right direction. But certainly it all crashed down on October 7th for everyone. And I think that anyone with their eyes open in the Jewish world understands that neither of these is a solution to the Jewish problem. And in fact, that we were to a very large extent, diluted about where things stand in in North America in one way, in Israel, in, in a different way. But that, that many Jews have been pretty sanguine about our situation in the 21st century when we, when we should not have been. And I think we're in a very different yeah. Pet space right now. And I think there's not much that's good about it. But one thing that was good about it for me was that I think it allowed me to inhabit more effectively the world of my characters and to understand who they were and how they saw things. And just to understand what it's like to live in a world with where all the doors are slammed shut and where there is no clear that way to progress. And, you know, if, if we feel that way now, then, I mean, Hanan or comrades, you know, felt that a a million times over, we have a state, they, they had nothing and there was no clear path to one. And in 1944, it was the, the heart of darkness. There was nothing good that, you know, was, that seems possible. And, and yet they didn't live in denial. They didn't go into their bed and pull the covers over their head and they didn't run away, and they didn't pretend to be something else. They got on an airplane and jumped back into the, into the fire. And, and they offer us a model for, for how to act in a time where the options are, are unclear. So the Zionist path is, is action. And that's what ha that's what Hannah's saying in that poem. You know, the match doesn't match, isn't consumed in the flame. The match lights the flame. So it's all about action. So in 1944, it seems that there's nothing you can do. Well, Ben Gorian would say, we need to build another farm. We need to pave another road to build another school. We need to teach some more kids to speak Hebrew. You know, it seems like nothing when 6 million people are being murdered, but eventually that nothing becomes something. And just like this mission, which was essentially nothing in military terms, becomes something, becomes something enormous that, that plays, that plays a part in, in saving the Jewish people. And I, that seems like a, a grand claim to make for a mission that clearly did, did not accomplish its goals. But it's the, it's the story that Zionism tells people that allows the Jews to move past the catastrophe and become actors again, become agents of their own fate again, and not fall into the trap of victimhood, which many have, including our most proximate neighbors, the Palestinians who have a story that is about victimhood. And that is a trap. 'cause if you see yourself as a victim, you'll never be able to get anywhere. So the Jews basically make up a different story where again, they're not refugees, they're pioneers, and they're not homeless because this has always been their home. And you know, when you run away to Israel, that's not running away. It's called aliyah, which means ascent. So there's a different way to see your situation. And stories are powerful things, and no one knows that better than, better than the Jews, of course, who survived for 2000 years thanks to stories. That was all, that was all they had, right? That was their only superpower. They certainly weren't, you know, they weren't known for military prowess and they didn't, they weren't known for their architecture or their art or for state craft. You know, what they knew how to do was tell very powerful stories that kept this thing going through, through the generations. Ironically, it's a superpower that we seem to have lost to a large extent since regaining sovereignty. So it's possible that once you have the regular kind of power, you lose that old alchemy of, of storytelling. And you know, what we've seen over the past two years has been an abject failure of this country to tell a story that makes sense about itself and about what it's doing. And we're dealing with the consequences of that, of course. But all of these thoughts occurred to me, thanks to, that's a weird way of putting it, but occurred to me in the context of the post October seven world, which I think allowed me, gave me a different window into the time that I was writing about.

- My guest today has been Monty Friedman. His book is Out of Sky, Monty, thanks for being part of EconTalk. It was a pleasure

- As always.