arts & entertainment
Hybrid History
Novelist Steven Pressman has written a
"first-person" account of Israel's Six-Day War.
Gail Zimmerman
Arts Editor
S
teven Pressfield, an author of
mostly military historical fic-
tion (Gates of Fire), has written
a "hybrid history" titled The Lion's Gate:
On the Front Lines of the Six Day War
(Sentinel), made up of
first-person oral histories
from 63 interviews the
author conducted in Israel,
France and the U.S. The
saga follows three outfits
— Mirage Squadron 119
of the Air Force, the 7th
Armored Brigade's Recon
Company (first to the
Suez Canal) and Paratroop
Battalion 71 (first to the
Western Wall).
As Israel gets ready to
mark its annual Memorial
Day and Independence Day, Pressfield, 70
and a Marine Corps vet, discusses his lat-
est book and his motivation for writing it.
IN: You've made a name for yourself
writing about the wars of ancient Greeks
and Macedonians. What was the impe-
tus for writing about one of the most
influential moments in Jewish history?
SP: I say as a joke, "a Jewish mid-life
crisis:' but there's a bit of truth to that. It
suddenly hit me, "I've been writing about
wars of other nations for years (and even
been made an honorary citizen of Sparta
in Greece). Why have I never written
about my own people?"
The Six-Day War ranks with
Thermopylae, the Alamo, Trafalgar — any
of the epochal military events in history.
A people who had been scattered in exile
Jews
around the globe for 2,000 years, suffering
ungodly persecutions and horrors, had pro-
visionally "come home" 19 years earlier. But
that state was hanging by a thread.
On June 5, 1967, it looked as if Israel
was hours away from destruction. Then,
in the span of less than a week, the tables
were totally turned. News photos of Israeli
paratroopers weeping as
they stood before the Wall
— that moment was what
made me want to write
about this war.
JN: Why write about it
now?
SP: On the shelves in my
office are 127 books about
the Six-Day War. Almost
every one (except Michael
Oren's great Six Days of War)
was written in its immedi-
ate aftermath; these books
addressed the war as a topical event. Even
Michael Oren's book treats the war as his-
tory.
I wasn't interested in any of that. I felt
like the State of Israel and the Israeli peo-
ple were, and are, under siege in the media
today. There are movements to divest
investments in Israel. The IDF is portrayed
as an army of occupation, brutally sub-
jugating the Palestinian people. Worse,
a huge part of the anti-Israel sentiment
these days comes from Jews themselves.
I couldn't stand that. To me, it's a crime
— a well-intentioned crime, but a crime
nonetheless.
Address injustices, yes. Strive for greater
empathy and open-handedness, you bet.
But blast Israel with both barrels? Portray
it as a fascist state? Compare it to Nazi
Germany?
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
At The Movies
Marvel rebooted the Spider-Man
movie series in 2012 by replacing
Tobey Maguire in the title role with
Andrew Garfield, now 30. The first
Garfield reboot flick retold the story
of how Peter Parker,
a teenager, became
the superhero Spider-
Man. The sequel, The
Amazing Spider-Man,
Part 2, finds Spider-
Garfield
46
May
—
1 • 2014
Man fighting off a
veritable hoard of
super-baddies.
Part 2 opens Friday, May 2, and
features Stan Lee, 93, the co-creator
of Marvel Comics/Spider-Man, in a
cameo role. Unlike Lee, who never laid
out Spider-Man's background, Garfield
is prepared to call the character "cul-
turally Jewish."
He recently told a Brit paper:
"Spider-Man is neurotic. Peter Parker
is not a simple dude. He can't just
switch off. He never feels like he's
doing enough. And Peter suffers from
self-doubt. I hope Jewish people won't
mind the cliche, because my father's
Jewish. I have that in me for sure."
Also check out Garfield as the host
of Saturday Night Live on May 3.
Also opening May 1 is a comedy,
Somebody had to speak up, and I decid-
ed to be one of those voices.
IN: Your book tells the wider story of the
conflict through the personal tales of a
small number of individuals. Why did
you write The Lion's Gate in first-person
narrative?
SP: Partly because that was the way it
was told to me in the interviews I did. But
mainly it was for the immediacy. I wanted
the reader to be under the helmet, in the
cockpit, inside the tank.
111,11.16'
10I•
1111111 . 1
1 ■ 1111*—
Steven Pressfield is perhaps best
known for his novel-turned-film
The Legend of Bagger Vance.
1981. Clearly, I couldn't interview him. I
made the decision to write Dayan's part of
the book in the first person as if I had. I
spelled this out in the introduction to the
book so the reader would not think I was
trying to pull some trick.
I had a number of Dayan's books and
writings. I was able to interview his first
wife, Ruth, his daughter Yael, his nephew
Uzi, plus a number of close friends and
colleagues.
The Lion's Gate is a mix of straight inter-
views, i.e. journalism, and the techniques
of documentary filmmaking and New
Journalism.
IN: You spent nine weeks in Israel. What
was it like?
SP: I had never been to Israel before.
The only word of Hebrew I knew was
"Shalom:' I knew no Israelis. I had to
phone up my friend [playwright] David
Mamet and ask him, "Who do you know
in Israel?"
I said to myself before I got on the
plane, "Steve, this is going to change you:'
And I wanted to be changed.
A big part of the challenge of the writ-
ing was to try to make the individuals I
interviewed come alive on the page and be
as funny, as smart, as interesting and as
idiosyncratic, as they are in real life.
JN: What makes the Israeli army so good
when it's so small?
SP: I've identified, believe it or not,
almost 20 factors. But let me cite just two:
en brera, which means "no alternative" (if
Israel loses a war, it ceases to exist); and
balagan, which means "chaos" (Israeli
officers and even enlisted men are trained
to function in chaos; improvisation and
initiative are encouraged, to the point of
openly disobeying orders).
IN: Why do you call this book "hybrid
history"?
A: When I made the decision to write
The Lion's Gate in the first person, in the
voices of the individuals I interviewed,
I realized that I had to use some of the
techniques [of the New Journalism] that
Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and
Hunter S. Thompson used [in the 1960s
and '70s].
Moshe Dayan was the deciding factor. I
needed his voice. But Dayan had died in
JN: What has been the long-term impact
of the Six-Day War?
SP: By June 10, 1967, everything had
changed. Israel was here to stay. Israelis
believed it, and the world believed it, too.
That was one change.
The other was that, as of June 10, 1967,
more than 2 million Arabs (the occu-
pants of former Jordanian territory that
Israel had conquered) had now come
under Israeli administration. The Israeli-
Palestinian problem had been born.
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Walk stars Elizabeth Banks, 40, as
a reporter who finds herself stranded
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car, phone or money after a one-night
stand with a stranger, and she has only
eight hours until the most important
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Garson
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neighborhood and is moderately
famous as a very reclusive rock
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and Ian's lives change drastically when
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Check your local movie listings to
see if Walking with the Enemy, which
opened April 25, is still playing. This
drama is very true to the actual story
of Pinchas Rosenbaum, a Hungarian
Jew who pretended to be a Nazi officer
and managed in 1944-45 to save thou-
sands of Hungarian Jews. The movie
received mixed reviews.
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