Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother's Diary [Hardcover]

June Leavitt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2002

What would it be like to live with terrorism day in and day out? To bury loved ones week in and week out? What would it be like to be an ex-American, raising five children in Hebron, miles from the West Bank of Israel? Trying to keep herself sane in "a gyre of internal doubts and external turbulence," June Leavitt took to writing a diary, recording the appalling things that were happening around her. Storm of Terror begins with Rosh Hashanah in September 2000, the Jewish New Year, when Stage II of the Intifada broke out all over Israel. Ms. Leavitt writes firsthand of the tragic events of the ensuing eighteen months, when the Palestinians opened up the arsenals of weapons that had been given them as part of the American-sponsored peace process, and began to use them against Israelis. Hundreds of Israeli mothers, fathers, and children were gunned down on the roads of Israel. Israeli soldiers, waiting for rides, were blown up by suicide bombers; buses filled with civilians went up in rockets of fire, leaving chars and cinders of tragedy. Ms. Leavitt and her family knew many of the victims. Her daughter was drafted into the army as a combat soldier in Hebron just as the Arab uprising began. With a keen sense of the political blunders that, parading under the banner of "Peace Accords," caused the escalation of Arab terrorism and national trauma; with stirring references to biblical stories where the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict may lie, Ms. Leavitt has written a poignant and powerful narrative.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Leavitt, who grew up in a wealthy Jewish family on Long Island, emigrated to Israel in 1979, where she lives with her husband, three sons, and two daughters. Her deeply moving diary begins on September 30, 2000, and ends on February 15, 2002. The author, a teacher, worries about her children: one daughter takes part in riots in which her sister, a soldier, has to help quell. She fears that the family could be injured or killed while riding in a bus or a car, or even in their home. She recalls going to the funerals of friends and neighbors who were killed by terrorists and not being able to sleep because of the noise of gun battles. After one night of fighting between Israelis and Arabs, she observes: "I am no longer in a clear frame of mind. I am mindful only of bullets, hatred, fear, and not knowing." Leavitt, who has written previous books in four languages, presents a searing account of living in a land without peace. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

She chronicles the events of the two and a half years with faultless accuracy, her keen writer's ear and eye recording each horrendous detail. (Jewish News of Greater Phoenix )

Because of the times in which we live, it is a terrifying book to read. This is June Leavitt's diary of her life and family in Israel. (Lee D. Fitzgerald Roanoke Times )

A deeply moving diary.... A searing account of living in a land without peace. (Booklist )

The real power of the narrative is its honesty. (Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles )

Dynamite. I was hoping something like this would come out of all that madness. (John Underwood )

This book achieves its most intense and revealing moments because Leavitt resolutely stays with the daily details. (Moment )

Extremely readable, even magnetic...a truly powerful work, beautifully constructed and written...her writing borders on the poetic. (Jerusalem Post )

The surprise and value of Leavitt's book lie in its ability to complicate all the conventional images of settlers. (Chicago Tribune )

A moving and beautifully written family portrait of the complexity, the humanity, the danger of everyday settler life on the West Bank. (Robert Lipsyte New York Times Columnist )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee; First edition (August 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566634679
• ISBN-13: 978-1566634670
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,923,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

June Leavitt is a freelance writer, lecturer and researcher born and raised on Long Island, New York, She received her BA degree from the University of Wisconsin and her Master's degree and Doctorate from Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel Attracting international acclaim for her diaries and essays about life in Israel, Dr. Leavitt has also published fiction, articles that have appeared in major newspapers and magazines, chapters in anthologies and essays for scholarly journals. With books that have been translated into French, German and Hebrew, she lectures widely and teaches college courses on mystical traditions and spirituality in literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling snapshot, February 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother's Diary (Hardcover)

Reviewed by Samuel G. Freedman in Moment Magazine

The settlement of Israelis on the West Bank, with all of its idealism and bloodshed, all of its messianism and domination, is in many ways the story of Hebron. It was there that an Arab pogrom in 1929 ended centuries of Jewish presence. It was there, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, that the celebrants of a Passover seder declared their return. It was there, and in neighboring Kiryat Arba, that the most controversial figures made their homesRabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the founders of Gush Emunim; Meir Kahane, exponent of Arab expulsion; Baruch Goldstein, the beloved doctor turned mass murderer at the Machpelah.

Against such a backdrop, one reads June Leavitts Storm of Terror not simply as a first-person account of death, fear, and resilience amid the Al-Aqsa Intifada, but more broadly as an intimate portrait of daily life among the believers. Although she is a professional journalist, Leavitt consciously identifies herself in the books subtitle as a mother. Indeed, this book achieves its most intense and revealing moments because she resolutely stays with the daily details. At the same time, however, this slender volume comes with the shortcomings endemic to publishing a diary.

In much of Israel, to say nothing of an often-hateful outside world, the settlers of Hebron and Kiryat Arba stand as pariahs, fanatics who obstructed peace when it seemed imminent and who stretch the army dangerously thin to defend them in wartime. The greatest accomplishment of Storm of Terror, then, comes in Leavitts ability to defy or at least muddy the harsh clarity of such stereotyping. She herself is as much a creation of 60s counterculture as of Greater Israel ideology, a woman who reads tarot cards, does yoga, met her future husband on a hiking trail in Vermont, and, yes, considers Judea and Samaria to be Jewish property by divine covenant.

Fascinating fault lines run through her household, as well. Two of Leavitts sons help build an illegal settlement to mark the spot where a friend was ambushed and slain by Palestinians. One of her daughters, Miriam, is ultraorthodox and fanatically right wing, while another, Estie, is a land-for-peace liberal with a pierced navel. At several searing moments in the book, the two daughters find themselves on opposite sides of violent confrontationsEstie with her army unit, Miriam with protesting settlers. Leavitts husband has veered over the years from deep involvement with the Moledet Party, which favored ousting Arabs from the West Bank, to meeting with Palestinian Authority leaders to plan for Hebron and Kiryat Arba to remain Jewish communities within an independent Palestine. How unexpectedly poignant is that moment of long-lost possibility.

In ways Leavitt probably never intended, though, her book displays the settler psyche. By her telling, for instance, the Oslo accords ruined the companionable relations between the Hebron areas Arabs and Jews, as if Palestinian nationalism had not been a roiling force for decades by then. She approvingly quotes an Arab telling a Jewish settler, We would have been your serfs  but what did you do? You said this land was ours  Why couldnt you understand the Arab mentality? We admire fierceness and strength! We see goodwill as weakness.

By its very nature, a diary freezes each such encounter in its moment. This immediacy brings Storm of Terror the documentary impact of a snapshot; the book recounts events as recent as the suicide bombing in Netanya last Passover. But a published diaryanyonesby definition deprives the author and the reader of a more considered, more self-consciously crafted, version of reality. And, precisely because Storm of Terror affords such an unanticipated window into the settler experience by such an idiosyncratic narrator, one hopes that next time June Leavitt will use her diary as the raw material, not the finished product.

Samuel G. Freedman, associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of Jew vs. JewThe Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.