From Macabre Reality, an Impossible Hope
In a waiting room in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital are a group of people who do not know each other, but are united by the macabre reality of a suicide bombing, and the impossible hope that emerges from it.
These are the characters driving Rebecca Wolf’s debut novel, Alive and Beating (Arbitrary Press, March 2025, $29.95). Within its pages, Wolf applies the writing imagination to the reactivation of history, namely the death of her classmate, Alisa Flatow. Flatow was 20 years old when she was murdered in the Kfar Darom bus attack in 1995; her family then donated her organs, heart, pancreas, liver, lungs and two kidneys, to six people. In Alive and Beating, we meet the six recipients of these organs from the fictional character Hannah, killed in a suicide bombing that mirrors the occurence at Kfar Darom.
For each of the organ recipients, the availability of a pancreas, or a heart, or a liver isn’t the end of the story, but rather an avalanche of new concerns about identity, beyond the cliché sense of necessarily being “a new lease on life.” Yael, the single mother and daughter of Holocaust survivors, wonders if it’s fair to receive a second lung transplant after her first has run its course, reminded by her surgeon of the “emotional minefield” that is survivor guilt. Hoda, a Muslim widow in East Jerusalem living with kidney disease, navigates the demands of a business, motherhood, and the spectre of her demanding mother-in-law, as well as the anxiety provoked by the possibility of her teenage son becoming radicalized.
It’s Hoda who breaks open for the reader another emotional minefield—the realization that all the tragedies and victories in these stories are connected, and not only the tragedy of physical loss, the profound suspicion and distrust on the part of some Jews and Arabs of one another, the wish to deeply avoid each other so much that they cannot stand the thought of a desperately needed organ from one being transplanted into the other. In the hospital, however, Hoda learns that things can be different: “Arab doctors treat Jewish patients, and vice versa. The focus on the universal human body helps to erase ethnic lines.”
Wolf ’s prose is assured, and unadorned, but these stories are rife with small revelations that build textures and layers into her characters. Iraqi-born Jerusalemite David Sasson awaits a liver transplant, while his wife Rachel and son Ezra deal with their own burdens, co-existing with David’s advancing illness, the childhood memories that he can’t outrun, his unadressed trauma resulting from the Yom Kippur War, the anger that culminated in a road rage incident that almost ended his marriage. Living with these memories complicates the already foreboding day-to-day. “For as hard as the past was, the present is far more painful,” he muses. And it is; as David’s story connects with the others and another catastrophic event takes place, the reader comes to the brutal realization that violence can precipitate more violence, and its feelers extend into everyone impacted by the explosion on the bus that day, whether or not they need an organ transplant.
“The weapon may have a safe mode, but it doesn’t have a brain… it relies on you.” Ezra’s girlfriend, Leeron, a shooting instructor in the IDF, declares to the infantry unit in her charge. Guns don’t know who they’re aimed at, she continues, so it’s up to the one holding them to make the best decision. Ultimately, what comes after the disaster, the second chance, the responsibility, the emotional encounter, is up to us. We move forward with the information, the power, the tools we have, even if we’re broken and feeling as though it’s impossible to do so. Alive and Beating is a searing work of connection, one that enfolds the reader in a sense of trauma, fear, and grief, as well with who we might become when the dust seems to settle.
Chanel Dubofsky is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.
