Joe Zion was the person we all would have wanted to have our backs if we’d had the misfortune to be alive, young, and Jewish in Europe when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Joe was sixteen years old. Until the end of the war, he hid in forests and fought in the Resistance. Six million Polish citizens were murdered by the Germans during World War II. Joe survived. He immigrated to Israel.

Great timing.

Wham … Joe was being shot at again.

With Lebanon on the north, Syria on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee, and Jordan in the south, Degania B was literally the bull’s eye of a target. And there was my Uncle Joe, smack dab in the middle. Joe was a little gnome of a guy, with a big dent in a high, furrowed brow. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Joe was in a trench defending his kibbutz against a Syrian attack when a piece of shrapnel gouged a hole into his forehead. He lost an eye, too. Same battle. Same trench.

His wife, my Aunt Esther, had come to him from a tumultuous past. Born one of 13 children in Lachine, Canada, she survived her siblings (boot camp for adulthood), joined the military for a brief stint during the war, and then somehow landed up in California with three children, married to an abusive, alcoholic Anti-Semitic Mexican. With a lot of help (my parents, her parents, her brothers and sisters), funds were accumulated, and Esther sailed across the Atlantic with her offspring to become members of Degania B, a kibbutz near the Golan Heights.

I met Joe many years later. He was no longer a warrior then. He was a short, energetic, smart forty year-old who spoke and wrote seven languages. Joe knew everything about everything, reveled in philosophical discussions, and was happy with his small, tight family. He raised chickens.

“Chickens?” I asked. “You like chickens?”

“No.”

“Then why …”

So Joe told me a story. Sometime after he came from Poland to live in Degania B, he started to grow tomatoes. That was his job. To prepare the soil. To plant the seeds. To irrigate. To see that the plants got bigger, rosier, and redder. For years after the United Nations declared Israel a state, the kibbutz was under attack. Over and over, just as he was getting ready to harvest his crop, a bomb … from Syria. From Lebanon. From Jordan … would shatter the serene silence of the farm and explode in the middle of his field. Joe had loved his tomatoes. He protected them. Nurtured them. Watched them grow. Then in seconds. Destroyed. Gone.

“So why chickens?” I asked him.

He smiled impishly. “I hate chickens. When a bomb hits the chicken coops, I don’t care.”

I think that was when I fell in love with my Uncle Joe. Thirty years later, I saw him for the second and last time. Curious about his lifestyle, I asked him if he had any friends. Without answering, he leaped on his bicycle and motioned for me to follow. I did. Up and down narrow roads. Over a patch of sand. Up a rugged lane and onto a tree-shrouded path. Then, abruptly, he stopped his bicycle, hopped off, and let it drop to the ground. I did the same with mine.

He looked around.

I looked around. “This is a cemetery,” I said, astonished.

“You asked me where my friends are.”

His voice was low. Staccato. Heartbreakingly matter of fact.

“They’re here.”

Now, thirteen years after my brave, gruff, loving, gentle, ferocious, gnome-like and independent uncle joined his friends in that silent, secret cemetery, Israel is again under attack.

Uncle Joe’s granddaughter is a dog trainer and groomer. She lives with her family not far from Degania B. Like Joe, near the Sea of Galilee. Unlike her grandfather, who hated his chickens, this beautiful young woman loves her sheep, goats, horses, dogs, and cats. However, when I asked her what she was going to do about them once the bombs started falling, she said without hesitation, “Nothing. They’re animals. I am going to protect my family and my friends.”

Seventy-five years after a bomb deposited shrapnel into Uncle Joe’s forehead, his granddaughter is dodging bombs and bullets from Israel’s enemies on the Golan Heights.

It has all started again.

Ridiculous.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2023. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com