In Israel, 'fine' means something different.
Where children grow up with sirens and families learn to carry on, “fine” becomes a language of resilience.
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This is a guest essay by Ido Singer, the child of a Holocaust survivor who writes the newsletter “When I Should Have Died.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
My parents didn’t want to leave me alone.
They were headed north to visit my mother’s family. I was 12. Ten straight days of missile attacks. Most kids at my school had stopped showing up. I was among the few still going, sitting in a classroom that wasn’t mine with kids I didn’t know, all of us comparing gas mask boxes and talking about safe rooms like that was a normal thing to discuss between periods.
I wanted to stay behind and practice. The basketball court was a stone’s throw from our house. I knew the sirens gave about two minutes’ warning — plenty of time. I could walk backwards and still make it with time to spare.
My dad said I’d be fine. My mom said don’t stay out too late, as if missiles hit harder after dark. They left. I called my friend. He came over with his gas mask. We had the best PC on the block, soda, and my mother’s schnitzel warming in the microwave.
I remember thinking: Maybe this is what normal feels like.
Just two kids. Soda. Schnitzel. Gaming.
Then the sirens started.
We ran to my room and hunkered down. My friend had his mask. I had mine. The cardboard box was worn from frequent use. We waited.
Between siren bursts I heard the microwave beeping.
I wasn’t scared exactly. I was hungry, and done — done hiding from something I couldn’t see. Done sitting still in a room that wouldn’t have saved us anyway if it hit directly. I stood up.
“I want to see it,” I said.
My friend said I was insane. He was right. I went anyway.
I walked through the hallway and into my sister’s room to get to the balcony. It wasn’t a big balcony. Barely big enough for two adults to stand on it, but it was the coveted room between the two of us. She got it. I got a room built for me. Not a complaint, but in that moment, I was a bit annoyed by it.
She was up north with my parents. Her room was empty. Lucky, I thought. She gets the cool room with the balcony. Then for no reason I could name, I missed her. Just for a second. Just a flash of it.
I slid the balcony door open.
Nothing at first. Then the ground started shaking. Then something appeared in the sky that had no business being there. Massive. The length of a football field, or at least it felt that way. As it came closer the hum deepened and the ground trembled and my friend and I looked at each other without speaking.
I think we said goodbye, not out loud, just in the way kids do when they think it might be the end.
The missile glided above us, slow in appearance but lightning fast in reality. Its shadow passed over our house, cold and heavy, like a curtain dropping over the world. Then it was gone. Then the blast. Close enough to know we almost weren’t standing anymore.
We ran inside. We didn’t speak about it. My parents called shortly after the military gave the all-clear order. They knew a missile had landed within a few miles of our house. I eased their minds. They were two hours away. There was nothing they could have done in that moment, so why worry them?
I never told them what I’d seen. My friend never did either. My sister didn’t know. It never came up.
That was Israel 1991.
My sister still lives in Israel. She’s in Pardes Hana now, about an hour north of Tel Aviv, with her husband and their twin daughters. Iranian missiles have been landing across the country for weeks. We talk constantly. She says everything is fine. I believe her and I don’t believe her at the same time, the way you do when you know what fine means in that country and what it costs to maintain it.
She has two teenagers. They are doing what Israeli kids do, which is go to school and come home and do homework and eat dinner and not be allowed to fully process what is happening outside because processing it takes something from you that you don’t get back. I know because I did the same thing at their age. You just absorb it. It becomes the frequency you live on.
I left Israel in 2003. I needed to walk into a room without scanning it first. I needed to stop doing the math. I have written about that before, about what it means to carry that inheritance into American life, about the permanent low-level calculation that never fully switches off. What I haven’t written about is this: the specific helplessness of watching from the wrong side of an ocean.
It is not the same as fear. Fear has an object. Fear points at something. What I feel when I get app notifications about missile alerts in Israel, or when I check the news and see the aftermath of last night’s attacks is something without a clean name. It is the shadow passing over a house I am not standing in. It is the feeling of walking through an empty room and missing someone for no reason you can name.
My sister doesn’t need me there. She has her husband. She has her community. She has 40 years of knowing exactly where to go when the sirens start and exactly how long she has to get there. She is more prepared for this than I ever was.
That doesn’t touch the feeling.
The feeling is not about her capability; it is about mine, about what it means to have left. To have made the decision that I needed to live somewhere the math was quieter and to have built a life there and to now sit in that life watching a war unfold in the country I grew up in, in the city where I learned to read a room, in the neighborhood where I stood on a balcony at 12 years old and watched a missile pass over my house and said nothing to anyone.
In IDF basic training, you have to complete a trek. It’s long, exhausting, and takes three days. At the end of it, you take turns being carried on a stretcher by your fellow trainees. The terrain is traitorous. The sun is hot. You’re exhausted from a culmination of three physically and mentally grueling days.
Each stretcher can be carried by up to four people. Since you are not only fighting the elements, you are also fighting time, alternating between being carried and carrying the stretcher becomes a fast maneuver of someone stepping out of one of the corners while another person swoops in underneath to carry the now uneven load.
I chose to step out of formation and from underneath that stretcher in 2003. My sister is still carrying an uneven load. But the distance has a weight I didn’t fully anticipate, and in moments like this I feel it the most. She’s the one under the shadow now, and I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s happening in her house.
There is a specific texture to this kind of helplessness that I want to name because I don’t think it gets named enough. It is not guilt. I do not regret leaving. Israel was my home and America is my home and both things are true and I have made my peace with that.
It is also not panic. My sister is safe. She is capable. She is surrounded by people who love her.
It is something closer to a permanent low hum: the awareness, never quite switched off, that the place you came from is still there and still dangerous and still producing the particular kind of fear that gets passed down in families like mine as a biological inheritance. The gas mask in the cardboard box. The shoes left near the bed just in case. The shadow that passes overhead and doesn’t announce itself and doesn’t explain itself and leaves you standing on a balcony at 12 years old not knowing whether you’re about to die or whether you’re going to be standing there in 30 years trying to write about it.
I’m standing here in America trying to write about it. My sister is standing in Pardes Hana with her twin daughters and her husband and her red alert app and her perfectly maintained ability to tell me everything is fine.
The shadow passed over my house in 1991 and kept going. It is still going. I just don’t know where it lands anymore.
Great piece, Ido.
I have a very similar feeling every time my phone beeps with the red alert button in Tel Aviv, where two of my sister’s married kids live, with their kids.
Every time I get the Tzeva Adom from Ra’anana, where my sister & her husband live.
And although I’ve never lived through those threats, my heart jumps into my throat. Every single time.
As it did in 90/91, when Iraqi scuds were flying overhead in those same places, and 3 of her 4 kids lived there. And I was here.
But my heart still jumped.
Almost physically.
With extreme terror.
As I feel now.
And they all say, HAKOL B’SEDER!
Thank you for describing your fears.
There are some who also have fears in other countries.