The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)

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Today's January 18th, 2026 I'm a guest as journalist and author, Marty Friedman. This is Marty'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." Here was him and rebirth in Nazi Europe, which is the strange tale of a group

“who Jews living in Palestine under the British mandate”

during the Second World War,

who perished you to back into Nazi occupied Europe. And the most famous member of this group was a woman Hannah or Hannah Senish, a name some of you may know. Matthew, welcome back to econtalk.

Thank you so much for having me. Now, Hannah's famous in Israel. And I want, and I knew of her before I moved here as 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 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's so Hannah Senish is one of four main characters in this book and the operation that I'm describing, which is a very strange episode in which a group of young Jews

who escaped the Holocaust to British mandate Palestine volunteer to parachute back into the Holocaust. The group 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 Hannah. So while some of these characters have, a keyboard's named after them or a straight named after them, Hannah Senish has 32 streets named after her. She has a keyboard's 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. Like 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 had a kind of pantheon of the nation's greatest character. So one of them was theater or heard. So it was of course the founder of modern Zionism.

One of them was gold a mayor. He was the only woman to ever become a prime minister in Israel. One was Moshe de Yan. The famous one I general on the fourth was Hannah Senish. He was a 23 year old woman who had come to Israel from Hungary.

And was here for a few years and wrote some poems that had become among the most famous texts in Hebrew. So Hannah Senish is a legend, but it's not 100% clear. At least it wasn't to me before I wrote the book. Why she was a legend, because as you hinted in your question,

she doesn't seem to have succeeded at her mission. So 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, because I was looking forward to our interview. And I know you spend some time in an archive in Tel Aviv.

“And I was having coffee, and I think it's no memo, no memo, no memo.”

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 Dakau. You went to Budapest. What are some of the things you did?

And why did you do them? And the search for what had happened to these poor 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 Haga now, which is the pre-state militia. It's kind of a Jewish underground militia that becomes, it also becomes the idea of.

commanders, Elia Ogolom. So I spent a lot of time there going through thousands of documents that were telling the story of this operation 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 recreated the action.

But another way to do it is to go to the places that I'm writing about and see if I can breathe the smell that these characters would have smelled and walk to the extent that it's possible on the streets that they walk. So I tried to do that by going to Rome, which is where one of one of the main characters is from a character named Enzo Serene, who was one of the commanders of the mission, very literate,

kind of a aristocratic Roman Jew. And I went to Budapest, which is where Hanus enches from. I went to Dakau as you mentioned, because one of the characters ends up there and maybe the funnest thing I did was to take an incredible train journey from Rome over the Alps to Munich and to Dakau, which must be one of those 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 death camp until”

you went to Dakau. Why not?

I've always had an ambivalence relationship 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 the time that we're now victimhood is really the currency that is exchanged in cultural discourse and everyone wants to be victim and I'm not interested in that, and I think that the design movement was not interested in that,

and that's another reason I think, or that's one reason that the designist 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 was always an emphasis on heroic events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

So the designist 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 I don't never been drawn to visit Auschwitz,”

or any of these places in fact that once went to Krakow, which is right next to Auschwitz, and I consider going to the camp because I was already in Krakow, and there are signs up all over Krakow, advertising tours to Auschwitz, and I was really turned off by the whole thing, the idea of going to a camp that's also a tourist, so I ended up just hanging out in a bookstore in Krakow. I found a book by Primo-Levy and bought the book and I sat in the bookstore cafe,

reading Primo-Levy with a couple Polish Goths. That was my alternative to actually going to

announce the death camp I've always thought that 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 Dakot, because I was researching the fate of one of my characters of Enzo Sereni, and I wanted to see the camp, and I wanted to research in the archive that's at the camp, and I went to Dakot 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 place was, not exactly what I was expecting, but it was 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 chance, and I'm glad that I went when I did, and in my mid-40s, and not as an 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 they are,”

placing it in the right location in their own story about themselves, and about the Jewish people, but 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, discomfort or lack of interest that Zionism had with the traditional historical account. And it certainly is 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,

There was a certain dissentress might be a little strong, but discomfort would not be incorrect.

“And I think for people who don't live here, the self-image that Israelis want,”

the identity that people here want to embrace is very different. The role of the Holocaust plays it as very different than, as you say, in America, where the currency of victimization is often exchanged. Explain what you mean by that, and try to give listeners a feel for 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 thinking about it in the early days of Israel.

They were uncomfortable with the fact that the Jews hadn't rebelled, or that the line was that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter, and that was an aftermath.

“Design is something that Zionism was all about Jewish power, and Jewish military bravery, and the”

Zionists were very much concerned, even before the founding of the state, with inculcating an ethosove of military prowess, and Zionism abandons the original Jewish heroes who were these, rabbis and scholars and timid intellectuals, and replaces them with military heroes, people like Barcochba, who was the leader of a disastrous revolt against Rome in the second century

sea, and he'd always actually been hated by the rabbis, because he very unwasely 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 Mackeby, who'd been a relatively minor character, who led a successful rebellion against the Soziut 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 trans, and being shipped to their deaths, and 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 vibe in Israel, and in the early years, and eventually the Holocaust is commemorated in a very Zionist way, as I mentioned, they call the remembrance day, for the Holocaust, and remember and save 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, 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 the psyche, of course, it makes perfect sense. I mean, some things can't be understood right away, and the Holocaust is certainly an example of something that maybe can't be understood at all, certainly not within a decade or two of it happening. In the past when you're 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 the discourse in the West, where it's all about victimhood, the questions, who is the bigger victim, and the greater your victimhood, the more cultural power you have, and increasingly political power, you have, so everyone wants to be

victim, 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 if you're victimized, then you go and you kick ass, you know, wine about being victimized. So there is a tension that exists to this day, which is still the one that the Zionist movement

felt in the days of the Holocaust, in fact, this operation, the parachute, this operation, of 1944, is essentially a product of that tension. So you have the Zionist movement in what was the British mandate Palestine watching this catastrophe unfold in Europe, they're unable to stop it, despite their ethos of heroism and prowess that you don't have an army. They need to get people into Europe, they 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 Holocaust back into the Holocaust. And to set the stage a little bit for

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, into the point where”

you know, you talk about one town where 18,000 people get put on transit 18 come home.

But Hungary had this privilege, 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, 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 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 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, 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, were there with 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 conqueror in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks and are given the mandate by the League of Nations to create a Jewish

national home, and they've been running it essentially since the end of the first World War,

and they're about to leave in 1948. So the whole thing lasts about 30 years, and this is the waning years 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 Jews are trying to form a state in Palestine, but the ruling authority is British, and the Jews do not have a military or a government devil quasi governing authority that they recognize called the Jewish agency, but 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 their British to allow them to form Jewish fighting units and go to Europe to fight the Nazis, and the Jews, of course, are a good reason to want to fight the Nazis. However, they're also at odds with British authorities. So the Jews also hate the British. 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 slam the door on that in order to play Kate 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 to British to give voice to, and I'm sure they'll be so well for them. The British are currently in a rock at a hard place. Right, exactly. There are two competing national movements that are, you know, a kind of a live end, and that odds in this place. So the British are in a bit of a pickle, what they do is they stop Jewish immigration with with few

exceptions precisely at the time when it's a matter of life and death for millions of Jews and people have nowhere to go and they can't come here. So the Jews of course are furious at the British about that, but 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 I think that concern was quite well placed in indeed.”

Yeah. I'm proof to be completely justified. So we can understand where the British are coming from. This is intensely frustrating for the Jews. So what remains of these grandiose plans to form specifically a plan to drop 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

and not together, they'll be dropped in 23, so they'll be dropped mainly by an outfit called

“M.I.9, which is now largely forgotten, but it's the British military intelligence that deals with”

escape innovations, so their job is to pick up down allied pilots or escape POWs, people who are behind enemy lines and get them back to allied lines, so they can be put on new airplanes and send back into the war. So that's at my nine and it's being run out of Cairo 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 knew the Jews trust. So because of this relationship that Simmons has with designist 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, but we give them 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 my book in English, I

called them the Mossad because they're actually part of a small office that's called the Mossad Lia, Lia bit, which means the basically the illegal immigration bureau. But it will eventually morph into what we now call the Mossad. So I refer to the Mossad. These are intelligence men, although of course there's no state and they don't actually belong to an official intelligence service, and they have a different plan. And their plan of course is to save Jews.

That the allied mission is secondary to them. Their ideas to get Zionist agents back into Europe to fight the Nazis 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 a complicated fair, 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 want to get people into Europe, but they don't have their own Air Force. The British need agents who can fit in behind Edmeline and they have almost no one 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 can pass in Nazi occupied France, no problem, you know, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Jews have whatever you need. So those are the conditions that create this strange operation in 1944, which was at least officially a British operation run by MI9 out of Cairo. And how do we know anything about it? It's not on the surface, which is a variety of them. I'm going to 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 parachuted 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 them are killed in the process. And how do we know anything about them? In a way, they're lost to history. One of the beautiful things about your book is you've brought them alive, which is wonderful. And then men will talk about why my care under the circumstances of a footnote

to a footnote, but how do we know anything about this experience? Well, the operation is documented in a very thorough fashion. And I was surprised when I went to the Haga-na archive until I've just seen what I could rustle up. I had no idea that there would be so much. So the Jewish intelligence men who leave these documents are very organized and everything is documented, catalogued, and it eventually saved in the Haga-na archive. So there's actually

a lot of material that allows us to recreate the mission, not from a distance, but from, you know,

my characters sent to headquarters. We have radio transmissions. We have telegrams.

We have personal archives of some of these people, Hannah Senesh, for example, because she became a legend afterward. Her diaries and letters have been published. Another one of my characters have even a rike was very interesting. Well, then it was probably the most efficient of the parachutists, but she's not the most remembered of them. She left, she hasn't an archive. She left an archive of fascinating letters on her keyboards, which is a keyboard called

a neat one of the characters who's the only one of my characters to walk out of this mission, a live, he wrote, 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 there. And, you know, all I

lacked was an opportunity to actually speak to the people 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 a very rich in texture. This is not a bird's eye view of the story. This is a very kind of high resolution take 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 of legends and the subject of myth to such an extent that, again, you can say Hannah

Sennish to an Israeli kid, and they'll know exactly who we're talking about. Yeah, we're going to get sent to why that is, but I just want to 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've finished the book an hour or so before a conversation, and I put me in a very reflective and contemplated mood, which I thank you for.

Let's talk, you don't quite make this comparison, but it's hanging in the air around the book. Two young women had diaries and writings, had aspirations to be writers. That's Anne Frank, and Hannah Sennish both died during the war, and Anne Frank becomes

“a lot more famous than Hannah Sennish. 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 Sennish is not a universalist, and reading her writings in your book, which is which is scattered through the whole book, is especially moving to a Jew, but it reminds you of the contrast with Anne Frank. So talk a little bit about Hannah's aspirations as a writer,

and what we have of her writing, and why it's important. As you'd say, Hannah Sennish was a universalist to his mugged-by-reality. I think at a heart, that's the world that she wanted, and she came out of this very liberal environment, and 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 like many Jews,

she is disposed of that notion in the late 1930s, and she realized it's just, it's not going to 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 a very rare immigration certificate to British Palestine, and she leaves, and her mother remains behind in Budapest, and she makes it out just as the door is closing, so her lesson from this is not a universal lesson.

“I think she would like to see the kind of world where all people are siblings, but I think she's”

lived long enough and seen enough to know 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 going to have to defend themselves, because no one else is going to do it, and she's not the only one to reach that conclusion in those years, and it's interesting to make a comparison between these two young women, because they literally have the same name, and Hannah, Hannah is the same name,

her name in Hungary was actually Anna Senesh, that's her Hungarian name, and when she becomes

“Zionist pioneer, she embraces the name and becomes Hannah, so she has consciously made a decision”

not to be in, but to be Hannah, who is a different person, and 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, the young women, Hannah Senesh, is a bit older than Anne Frank, and Frank is a teenager, Hannah Senesh is a young woman, but they both, right, I think they they would recognize each other as kindred spirits, in many ways, they're both very literary,

they both read, I'm sure they read some of the same books, and they have the idea that they can write, so Anne of course has her famous diary which becomes one of the bestselling books in the world, after the war, and it's you know it's a bestseller in Japan, and Frank really becomes a global icon, Hannah Senesh writes, initially in Hungarian, and then after she moved to Israel to begin writing, and he ruined she's incredibly adept at languages, and she manages to write some

the 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 have been probably an important writer, I think that's”

clear she had incredible powers of observation, she was really skillful with language, even in

a language that Hebrew would she only spoke for four or five years, she was already writing things of worth in that language, so I think we could have seen some important literature come from Hannah Senesh's pen, had she patchy lived, and her observations about the world are cut off of course by her death, so she's remembered for universal pronouncements like her famous sentence, where she says I'm not quoting this verbata, but she says deep in my heart,

I believe that deep inside, I believe that people are good at heart, that she has that famous sentence, that's Anne Frank, right, so that is her most famous sentence, and as my friend and colleague Darrell Horn pointed out in a great book called People Love Dead Juice, she pointed out that Anne wrote that, of course, before she was arrested by murderers and killed an account, so had we been able to speak to her a few years after that,

it's possible that her conclusions about human nature would have been different and it's possible that her worldview would have been closer to that of Hannah Senesh, 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 humanity, they want someone who doesn't really do anything threatening and Frank just dies and doesn't live after the war to disturb the peace of Christians or Muslims, but trying to set up a state where Jews can be at home, so Hannah Senesh, who is the more heroic character, it's no fault of Anne Franks, that she wasn't a hero, but Hannah Senesh lived long enough to be able to make a decision about whether or not to take action and she decides to

take action, Hannah Senesh is known and venerated mostly among Israelis and Jews who value what she did and outside that group, she's barely known, so it would be interesting to see what happens with this book once it comes out. If people can kind of maybe better understand her character, if we understand what made her take in the way that she saw the world, it's not giving anything

“away to say that, I think that Hannah's analysis of the world in human nature was closer to”

closer to the accurate one, unfortunately. So I promised you before to record it this, that I have a Hannah Senesh story, I'll try to make brief, it'll be a nice lead into our

the next thing I want to 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 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 going to rent skates, she's going to rent skates and they ask for a deposit in euros, and I realize we have no euros, they don't take credit card for the deposit, you've got to have

cash. So I pull out of my wallet, a set of Israeli currency, I said, we'd to take this, which of course

akin to the amount that was they round of deposits, and to be honest, this was shortly after

October 7th, and it was a particularly interested in advertising and I was traveling from Israel, as many Israelis have discovered since October 7th sometimes I'm open about it, sometimes less, so I'm talking to this very nice 20-year-old girl who is asking for currency and I take this out. 100 check-all or whatever it was note and I had a couple and I showed him to her and she says, set it going like, why would we take this or what's this worth? She says, these are so beautiful

because Israeli currency, they've got this lovely portrait of various people embedded in the paper currency and she proceeds to call the entire staff, tender people or so, to admire Israeli currency,

it's like sort of funny moment and I had like a weird brand freeze and I didn't know who was

“on the 100 or 200 check-all note or 50 that I was showing her, but it was a woman and I think”

it's a layer or a shell is really poets, but for some reason it just crossed one and I said, you know, I think maybe it's honest that is, and of course this 20-year-old Budapest woman and I was thinking of honor because I toured the Jewish synagogue two days before and it heard about Khanasana and she of course looks at me and says, who's Khanasana? 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 Khanasana and I'm kind of like have this moment of pride and I say, well, she was a hero, she parachuted back into Nazi or into Nazi-controlled Hungary and she looked at me and said, puzzle, deeply puzzle, and troubled, or why would she do that? A fair question, so that's

“my question, Maddie. What was she thinking? Right, I guess that's a good question asked by the woman”

at the skating rink is essentially the question I'm asking in this book, what motivated these characters to embark on a quest that seems quite hopeless and the chances of success were very small if they existed at all, certainly the idea that they were going to go save, Jews are fight or fight the Nazis, I mean it seems quite unrealistic, is actually, I mentioned this in the book, a very funny skit, funny in a painful way, done by an Israeli satire program called, the Jews are coming,

he who deem by, it's a famous satire program, and they riff on biblical stories and they kind of make fun of Israeli national myths and they have this skit where you see, it's in the 40s and you see this Jewish militia command, there's really tough guys standing in front of a map of Europe with

“the big swastika on it and he's saying, we're going to go, we're going to fight the Nazis, we're”

going to 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 Hanush and she raises her hand and she says, I'm sorry, who's we, you know, and the commander is forced to admit that actually it's not we, it's just you and what was Hanush supposed to do 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 recently expected to do, again, this is 32 people dropped in two and three and about a half dozen access countries, the middle of the war, so I tried to unravel it and in the book and my conclusion is that it's related to storytelling and it was interesting, you know, it's right 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 feared or hurtful who was playwright and a 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 it assimilation and liberalism and acceptance and a Christian society, he realizes that

this story is not true and he understands that the Jews are going to need to tell themselves a different story and mobilize themselves for a different purpose and his idea is that seems insane at the time is that there's going to be a Jewish state and the Jews are going to emigrate from your

but ultimately it becomes the Israeli National Anthem so he's a writer, jabitinsky's a writer, bacon's a journalist and these people are writers so the the Zionist movement is essentially a storytelling movement and it tells people that they're not refugees, they're pioneers, just a very effective form of storytelling because it takes people who are victims and turns them into agents of their own fate and they're not running away from their home in Poland because that was

never their home 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 new ability to tell, to tell a story and here to in 1944 we have

“an example to mission that I think was mainly about a story, it was the Zionist movement using”

the story what then, 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 think that if you understand 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 on a sandwich is a good example but and so surrounding was also a writer he wrote a history of Italian fascism he wrote a treat as or he edited and wrote a treat as 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 are people who wrote he dreamed of writing a great novel so these people these people understood storytelling and they understood themselves as characters in a story and no one understood that better than Hannah Sennish who was the daughter of a playwright and the daughter of a novelist and a bookworm and a theater kid she literally grows up in an Amelia of theater people in

in Budapest she knows exactly what a heroic quest is she knows what the role of the heroine is she knows who Joan of Arc was she knows what's expected of her she is not remembered because

“she's the best pameando she's remembered because she's the best writer and I think that she instinctively”

gets this and when we understand that this enterprise is not a military enterprise is at its root a literary enterprise the thing begins to make more sense so when the cashier at the skating ring 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 say for 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 um she didn't say for people she couldn't say for 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 country and in parts of the book we see found a in a firm her diary talking about working on farm in pre-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 after 1948 and struggle with it because 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

“yeah do you have it handy in I'd love for you to read it and I think she wrote it in Hebrew so you”

could read it in Hebrew and then you translated it and you you point out it's sometimes mis-translated but it's um it's an anthemic it's a very brief it's so the poem that I refer to as kind of second most famous poem is is called an Hebrew it's called Ashreha Gafou and there's there's a debate about how to translate that name most of the translations will translate that as they up mostly translations you'll see in English translated as blessed is the match that's the most

common translation of it which in my opinion is a mis-translation of it it's much closer to happy is the match the word Ashreha and Hebrew comes from the prayer book which is from prayer that we say

so kind of is playing on the words of a prayer and and I'll read it in Hebrew and then I'll read my own translation into English so that in Hebrew it reads like this "A Shreha Gafou shenisraf le cit la vort Ashreha le vah shiba arra besitre le vavort" Ashreha le vavort shiat u lach dolbe kavod" Ashreha Gafou shenisraf le cit le vavort so that's that's the poem in my translation which differs bit from the most common one in English it means something like this "Happy is the match that flared and lit of flames

“happy is the flame that burns secret and the deepest hearts happy is the heart that new”

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 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 she's about to cross intonazi occupied hungry 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 crossing the border she needs to get into

hungry she needs to complete her mission and her mother is trapped in Budapest literally a few streets away from the villa where Adolf Aichmann is planning the liquidation of the Jews of Hungary so she needs to get into uh into Hungary and she insists on going and as she parts from a comrade named Ruben 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 Hanna's last will and testament she will write a few other documents in prison after she's after she's captured but um but this is something that she's writing with the knowledge that it might be her last communication with with home so um Daphne uh says in his account of these events that he was so annoyed that uh

at this theatrical gesture that he throws the palm away throws it into the bushes and kind of stomps off uh 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 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 out of keyboards and other in Israel so that's how this poem makes it”

makes it home and it it's a very famous poem at the time it's printed almost immediately it's put to music it becomes kind of a staple of youth movement meetings and and rallies and um and what Hanna saying here is something I thought I think is very important that the ideological style of the poem I think has an age dwell so and we kind of have to reenhabit 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 usually

translated and what I went to the Hebrew 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 Hanna thinks that she's doing and it kind of explains her transformation from a young woman living in bohemian butapest into a Zionist pioneer because what differentiates Anna Sennish from Hanna Sennish is 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 than then Hanna's most famous poem which we could talk about if you want but we still will it's still quite a famous poem and 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 eventually of course there's a discomfort with martyrdom and there's a discomfort with this whole story and what it seems to

the summer of 1944 I think we can understand what she's saying 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 I think this poem speaks to that what's her most famous poem and why is”

it famous Hannah's most famous poem which is probably one of the most famous Hebrew texts in our times is a song that is now called "Eli Ali" that's the song "Tidal" as it eventually becomes famous Hannah actually gave that poem a different name I she called it the walk to "Siezeria" Alihaliki Salia. "Siezeria" is a Roman ruin that was not far from the keyboards where Hannah lived which is called "Stote Am" 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 no ideology and 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 it's given this absolutely beautiful tune and it's kind of a perfect marriage of melody and words the composer adds a word to the text to make it match the melody

so he repeats the first word of the poem which is "Eli" which in Hebrew means "my Lord" so

Hannah writes that once in her poem and he adds another one so it becomes "Eli" "Eli" in order to make it fit the scheme of the song and that song becomes what Hannah sent us is known for and it's been covered hundreds and hundreds of times as I was writing this book during the Russian invasion of Ukraine so a couple years ago I happened upon video on YouTube of it's very burly slavic guys in camouflage uniforms singing "Eli" 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 something like that probably encountered in "Eli" they might not know the story behind it or the woman 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 his early listeners

absolutely the original Hebrew song which is slightly different in one word from the poem that that Hannah wrote because like this "Eli" "Eli" "Sheloy" "Gomer" "Lolam" "Achol" "Vehyam" "Rishosh" "Shelamim" "Brak" "Hashamim" "Tfilat" "Hadam"

that's the whole poem and in English it means my Lord made 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 more 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 poem and there's a spelling mistake in it she writes the

"Li-olam" which means in this case never made these things never end she writes it with she has one of the letters wrong instead of the word the letter "I" and she writes the letter "Alef" and it's a reminder it's kind of like finding a typo in Yeats or something it's because it's such a famous poem or you know finding out that Shakespeare didn't know how to spell fish or something like that but 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

“that I think an important insight into her character afterwards she becomes kind of a legendary”

Israeli pioneer hero so she gets turned into almost the ultimate pioneer so she loves

me a neighbor and she's always ready and she hated and as she and she you know is ready for

Israeli even though she never lived in a country called Israel and when you read this poem you

“remember that she was a very young woman who came from somewhere else and the the character”

of Hannah Sennish the pioneer was to a very large extent the character that she created and again this is a very theatrical literary young woman she understood character and she made a contrast decision to stop being the character that she had inhabited until she finished high school which was a Hungarian bourgeois girl named Anna Sennish and she becomes something else she becomes a pioneer and Hannah Sennish and then she becomes heroic parishhoodist and these are all very conscious

decisions and she documented and 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 a socialist pioneer and the the sobress in those days did not respect poets you weren't supposed to be an intellectual that you had enough intellectuals what they needed was you know dairy farmers and and people who are happy to you know I guess scrub the pots and

in the kitchen and and she had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with her own poetry which she hides and in a suitcase and then it is this notebook is found after her death and people realize that she'd been writing she's actually been writing quite striking poetry and again it's

not I don't want to oversell it it's not 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 Lili is a it's a wonderful”

poem particularly when 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 Hannah Sennish's stories and letters and poems and she left a lot you see that it's potential it's something that should have been allowed to grow into something amazing and wasn't in that's part of the tragedy of this of this story I should just mention by the way I should have said it earlier when we're

talking about Anne Frank and Frank's view of the world was very much crafted by people others and herself the play about her and the historical image of her was like all famous people 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 just I just wanted to be fair to her she's were complicated then a naive 15 year old who said you know deep down

I think all people are good at art or whatever is the exact thing she said in her diary um absolutely these people are kind of faded to be remembered as cartoons yeah and then the fate of the hero is essentially to be venerated to the point where you're a two-dimensional cardboard cut out of a person 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 the 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 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 as there's something tragic about about Hana who she's venerated right she's not she's she becomes a national hero when and she's remember 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 that's like daily crocket I how serious they are going to be 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 Hana Sanesh 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 and her diary entries even from a very

young age you see that this is similar with very powerful powers of observation and very very skillful way of expressing herself and you know to turn her into kind of sabra sabra poster child actually does very in justice 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

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 what 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”

says a pointy same in the book I think you mentioned it explicitly it's might be in a couple sentences but it hovers over the book for me as somebody living in post-doctober 7th Israel and by post-doctober 7th Israel I mean a world where shoes are hunted down and killed like animals that are music festival here the Nova Festival on October 7th Jews lighting a Khanicum and aura in Australia are shot and killed and inexplicably in

minor times that we thought we'd never see again and what hangs over the book that is

poignant is that hertsels has a dream 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 programs of of his day where particularly in Russia and 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 if we only had her own state this would be solved so we do get her on state which is as you mentioned earlier

remarkably improbable it is an historical blip anomaly whatever you want to 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 as it was attacked immediately by its Arab neighbors it had no real army or air force somehow it manages to

“survive that attack attacks that continues 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 just like to close and I'd like to hear your reflections on that as you're writing this book here these characters on and others who are dreaming of a better world they have their own naive idealism it's not the same as end pranks 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 Deutsch pointed

out on our program in my conversation with them many many Jews lives were saved because the established one said of Israel but it has not solved the so-called Jewish problem has not ended hatred of Jews and you've been here awhile a lot longer than I have you know how to spell the olive and the iron 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 will leave

alone but as 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 idea of the Israeli army even door to a lot of things I haven't had to endure here but we both shared the last two years together what are your thoughts on what you're thinking when you're at this book and looking at that extraordinary idealism of being the match that lights a flame that they thought was going to

put it in to a bunch of overly horrible things but has 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 started the research more than a year before October 7 and when I did I thought I was writing a book about a very distant historical episode and suddenly the times that Hannah lived in really came to life for me and I'm not saying that you know this is the Holocaust and 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 1995 I really thought that I was moving from one Jewish solution to another Jewish solution I did not feel that the North American Judaism was precarious and I thought that actually the world western democracy had essentially solved the problem for people who wanted to partake in it and that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem for people who wanted to live in a Jewish state and this is the mid-90s which is pretty optimistic time and things that seem to be going

to doubt my certainty that everything was going in the right direction but certainly it all crashed

“down on October 7 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 in fact that we were to a very large extent deluded about where things stand in North America in one way in Israel 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 down touch 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 where all the doors are slammed shut and whether it is no clear that way to progress and you know if we feel that way now then I mean hot under comrades

you know felt that a million times over we have a state 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 is that seems possible 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 how to act in a time where the options are unclear so the

“designers path is is action and that's what I that's what I'm saying in that poem and the match doesn't”

match isn't consumed in the flame match lights the flame so it's all about action so in 1944 it seems that there's nothing you can do well Ben Gorion would say we need to build another farm into pay another road to build another school to teach some more kids to speak Hebrew 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 a part in saving the Jewish people and that seems like a grand claim to make for a mission that clearly 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 victim hood which many have including our most proximate neighbors the Palestinians who have a story

that is about victimhood and that is a trap because 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 their 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 alia which means a scent so there's a different way to see your situation and stories are powerful things and no one knows that better than the Jews of course who survived for 2,000 years thanks to stories that was

all that was all they had right that was their only superpower they'd 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 a 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 storytelling you know what we've seen over the past few years has been an object failure of this country 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 accrued to me thanks to that's weird we were putting it but accrued to me in

“the context of the post October 7 world which I think allowed me give me a different window into”

the time that I was writing about my guess today has been Matthew Friedman his book is out of the

sky a notty thanks for being part of eContalk it was a pleasure as always

this is eContalk part of the library of economics and liberty for more eContalk go to eContalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation the sound engineer for eContalk is rich quiet I'm your host Russ Roberts thanks for listening talk to you on Monday