A Young Woman Volunteers for the Israeli Army

When I was still living in the US and longing to make my home in Israel, I used to rent Israeli movies from Netflix. Even if the story line was not my genre, I would watch the movies from start to finish, in order to connect myself to Israeli streets, scenery and people. A glimpse of something familiar would fill me with glee, just to remember Israel.

 

Today, deeply entrenched in my Israeli life, I read books about Israel with the same sort of drive. My favorite books about Israel are the stories of people’s lives, lived in the Land.

 

Dorit Sasson’s forthcoming memoir An Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces is such a book. As the story opens, Sasson is a New Yorker, a young woman whose divorced parents, an artistic, neurotic mother and an artistic, Israeli father, hold very different visions for who she might become.

 

Having spent significant chunks of time in Israel as the more-or-less bilingual child of an Israeli, Sasson makes an uncharacteristically bold decision to escape the oppressive mothering to which she is subject in New York and join the Israel Defense Forces.

 

An Accidental Soldier is a traditional coming-of-age story, blended with the story of making the adjustment to life in another country. The beginning of Sasson’s army service is exceedingly rocky. Early chapters reveal her tremendous social insecurity. After a time, her extensive recollections of feeling left out became painful to read. As she meets important role models and gains self-confidence through her army service, perhaps you’ll cheer that much more for knowing how many emotional, social and cultural challenges she overcame.

 

An Accidental Soldier delivers a unique window into Sasson’s service as a woman in the IDF. Throughout the book, she addresses many of the differences between her service and the service of men in her garin (a military cohort that serves together). For example, relatively early in the book, Sasson describes being challenged by an explicitly sexist male member of her garin who took an instant dislike to her.

 

Today, the idea of lone soldiers, young men and women who come from all over the world to serve in the Israel Defense Forces without immediate family in Israel, is relatively well-known. Special programs, like The Lone Soldier Center in Memory of Michael Levine, the Lone Soldier Program of the Friends of the IDF and the Lone Soldier Project of the Israel Forever Foundation exist to offer them support. When Sasson served as a lone soldier, none of these supports were available to her.

 

The chapter about holding down an entire base with one other soldier during a heavy snow storm was particularly well done. And at the very end of the book, you'll find out what eventually happened to the mother whose influence Sasson ran to Israel to avoid.

 

An Accidental Soldier was written more than 20 years after the events occurred and relies heavily on the personal journals Sasson kept during her time in the Israeli army. As a result, I occasionally experienced a fuzzy, slightly distorted sense of time and place. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and looked forward to the slices of time I found to return to it.