To War in a Red Subaru: a Memoir--a Volunteer's Chronicle of the Yom Kippur War Between Stories and Dreams

Plot

A MEMOIR by Adolfo Neufeld It's Yom Kippur 1973-the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. A massive attack of Arab armies threatens Israel's survival. Three-and-a-half decades later a compulsive volunteer writes his chronicle of The Yom Kippur War. "Another Holocaust? Never again! I'm going." In 1973, Adolfo boards a plane to Israel. Driving a red Subaru at the front line of the war, he emerges unharmed from the shrapnel rain of a dismembered tank. A shot blinds his headlights. He is wounded, rolling down a hill into a God-sent bunker. In danger, his imagination carries him to his personal bunker, his past. He re-lives his earlier visit to Israel: an adolescent stowaway under a bunk in the female dormitory of a Jewish ship-which lands him in a Jewish jail. Ducking death, his mind jumps to his escape from the Las Vegas mafia. Crossing devastated Syrian towns, he recalls his search for handicrafts in the mountain villages between Bolivia and Peru. While Israel is running out of ammunition, he sings his song to a Syrian hero. But he lands over and over on a reality of senseless mutilation and death; of young men killing young men they never met; of patriotic Jewish and Arab mothers sending their children to kill for "The Cause," getting back a hero inside a wooden box. This book is about Adolfo's chase of a chimera that may still be going on.