cover image LET ME CREATE A PARADISE, GOD SAID TO HIMSELF: A Childhood Spent in South Africa and a Life in Israel

LET ME CREATE A PARADISE, GOD SAID TO HIMSELF: A Childhood Spent in South Africa and a Life in Israel

Hirsh Goodman, . . Public Affairs, $26 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-58648-243-5

This memoir by veteran journalist Goodman has a split personality. The first part is personal, a chronicle of his childhood in apartheid South Africa and his decision to move to Israel in 1965, when he was 20. Goodman conveys the ironies of growing up white and Jewish in Johannesburg, where the family servant was his "executive mother" and he imbibed an ideology of social justice in his Zionist-socialist youth group. With his Zionist passion and growing awareness of South Africa's injustices, Goodman went to Israel wide-eyed and eager, joining the paratroopers in his quest to become a real Israeli. But after serving in the 1967 war, Goodman became a reporter, and slowly this memoir shifts into its second gear, as reportage. He describes his growing awareness of "the big lie" behind the 1982 war in Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila. He highlights his view of a changing Israel through generational contrast: his own eager military service and the elation of the Six-Day War victory versus his son's escape from Israel in disgust after military service in the occupied territories. Goodman's writing is appropriately sober, almost hard-boiled, offering unsentimental insight into the trajectory many have made from Zionist passion to pain, from naïvete to realism. Agent, Michael Levine. (Mar. 15)