Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: It wasn't just their heroism. It was their humanity. There was so much inhumanity on October 7, so much evil, so much darkness. And you wonder, like, where's the what happened? What happened on this day? It wasn't just their heroism. It was their humanity. There was so much inhumanity on October 7, so much evil, so much darkness. And you wonder, like, where's the what happened? What happened on this day?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Welcome back to the current podcast. And it's hard to believe, but on today's episode, we're marking one year since the terrible events of Simchat Torah of October 7, 2023, by reflecting on one of the central parts of our work here at Corhen over the past year, which is the development and publication of the book Yomichad Boktober. One day in October, which has just come out in English. And we're taking this opportunity of this episode to reflect a little on the process by being joined by the creator initiative of the project, Rabbi Ruven Ziegler, editorial director at Magid and the managing editor of Maggid books in Hebrew, Aryama Varach, who's also the co author of the book, who are joining us, taking a step away from our regular hut format to explore a little bit about the book.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: Yes, quite aside from just living through last year, Iwana Corrin has been working very, very closely on this book. One day in October, which has been so amazingly received by the public here in Israel and abroad. And the English edition is flying off shelves, and we're receiving amazing feedback from people all over the world about this kind of project.
And we'll talk to Aria and Ronnie about what makes this book in particular so special, not just political publishing rn.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Not just for the book that we've.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: All worked on, but it is something quite different else, and you read or consume about the event.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: So here's our conversation with Rabbi Ruin Ziegler and Ariana Gorakh, talking about one day in October.
[00:02:16] Speaker C: Welcome back to the current podcast for a special episode, reflections after a year from October 7. We're joined today by Oriama Varach, one of the authors of Yomer Chadbah October or the english edition. One day in October, 40 heroes, 40 stories, and Rabbi Ronny Ziegler, who is the editorial director at current publishers, and Margaret Books, who has been intimately involved in bringing both of these volumes out to you, the public. So thank you, first of all, to Auria and Tarani for joining us.
[00:02:48] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having us.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Glad to be here.
[00:02:52] Speaker C: I suppose let's just start by framing what we're talking about. We can look back just in the Corinne podcast world. It was almost a year ago. Aria and I recorded an episode of the podcast, sitting in my car, trying to process what had happened and what's going on. We're now sitting a year later. What has the last year been for you? Whether it's the book or personally, how has the last year looked, if you're able to put that into words? So we'll start with you, Ronnie.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Well, it's definitely been a challenging year, very different than. Than anything I've experienced in the past. I think that is probably true of every person in Israel and probably every jew around the world, as opposed to the three of you. You all have young kids. So I had four boys called up on the first day, and that was a very harrowing experience, actually, to give them credit where credit is due. Two were called up, and two volunteered on the first day.
And one of those who was called up got a medical dismissal a month later, but came back even though he needed surgery. But he came back a week after the surgery, and all four are combat soldiers.
So it's been a challenging year on a personal level and on a national level. I mean, things that we thought we would never see again happened both in Israel and around the world.
And, you know, we went to way too many funerals and way too many shivas.
And I think that this book has been one of the things. I mean, certainly for anyone who worked on it, this book has been one of the things that helped us get through the year.
[00:04:44] Speaker D: Yeah.
So I think this past year changed many things. For me, it was the year in which I encountered both the deepest darkness and the brightest light.
The deepest darkness, of course, was the great tragedy that we all had to go through here in Israel. And the brightest light is the light of the people of Israel and the israeli society.
The book was. I think the book was my cure, because for a lot of things. For a lot of things that I feel I was lacking before, even before October 7. So usually I say that this book gave me, like, hope and strength and resilience. But to you, I can also add that this book gave me.
I think it improved a lot. My ahavat, Israel.
I really. I fell in love with the israeli society, and I just. I can remind you what we had, like, the 6th. In October. Yeah, in October 6, we had such a terrible conflict between the different parts of the israeli society, and I was really depressed by that, and I felt a lot of hatred, which was new to me. To many people and many ideas and for many parts of the israel society. And I mean, to my surprise, this book really helped me love again and to connect again to the different, like to the variety that complex the israeli society.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: So I think that this is something that we felt at the very beginning, like that, that this is something that we needed and something not just we personally israeli society needed.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: So I think that, I think if we reflect, I think if a lot of people reflect back onto kind of the early weeks of the war, I think a lot of us would think of kind of the feeling of paralysis that we sort of had, that we didn't really know how to understand what was happening. No one knew what was going, what to expect, what was going to come next.
To have such, this kind of huge, unprecedented event occur in our lifetime, I think shocked a lot of people, and people sort of froze. And yet I think the two of you pretty much jumped into action fairly quickly. I'm trying to just while we're doing this, I'm scrolling through my WhatsApps and my emails to see when were the first emails and WhatsApps about this project. And it's definitely somewhere still within the kind of middle of October, late October, already talking about it. So tell us a little bit about how this came about, especially so early on.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Well, actually, I looked up before our first book launch. I looked up exactly when this book was born. And I saw that I wrote to myself an email on mozze Shabis October 14. So one week into the war with the basic idea of the book and, you know, made a note to myself to discuss it with Oria, who's the editor in chief of our hebrew division, to discuss with her the next morning. So we already discussed it the next morning, October 15, and by October 16, aurial already drew up a project proposal, which she emailed me. And it's basically exactly the way the book turned out, except we thought that there would be more stories in the book. That's the only thing that wasn't true, because we realized that we had to give each story its space and not to have 1500 words, but to have much more to develop the person and whatever. But basically it was soft ma seven machava trila. And the impetus for it was very clear. And this isn't just in hindsight, this is what we were writing at the time. As you said, everyone was basically shocked, paralyzed, trying to help out in whatever way they could by getting socks to the soldiers and getting them food and doing whatever you could help for the mifuneem but I thought, well, what can we do? Okay, so all those are nice, but what can we do as a publishing house? Like, we have half the publishing house, I would think a third of men were drafted. Everyone else in the company either had spouses or children who were drafted. So we were really working with a very small staff, much smaller than usual under very difficult circumstances. But I thought within all the darkness that came out of that day, there were these real points of light that these people who just had this moment of self transcendence, where they just regular people, did extraordinary things out of a deep sense of mutual responsibility, of fraternity, of Avat Israel, just of commitment to. Commitment to strangers, you know, and that's a crazy thing.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: If I can interrupt, that's something that I think we've never actually discussed, or you and I certainly haven't discussed in the office, but, you know, the idea for the book came a week in, maybe even came before then. But you send the email to yourself a week in, and still in that week, a lot of us were feeling, as Arya says, that feeling of paralysis. When at what point was the decision made to focus on heroism?
A lot of the other things have been one day I was hoping it's not the only book that's been written in the last year, but a lot of them are focusing on the failings of the government or the failings of the intelligence apparatus, or it's focusing on the tragedy. At what point was the decision made to focus on the heroism?
[00:10:43] Speaker A: It's not. It's more than heroism. And I want to hear Aurial's perspective on this in a moment. But I I think that we felt these stories of people, it wasn't just their heroism. It was their humanity. There was so much inhumanity on October 7, so much evil, so much darkness. And you wonder, where's the telemelokim? What happened? What happened on this day? And then you see these people who were really Selim eloquem, these people who really represented the best of humanity, the best of human values, the best of jewish values, people who are willing to risk everything to help other people. And that really gave us a lot of, as Arya said, hope and strength and resilience, but even more that it gave us a sense of healing from the rupture that had been created in our lives. And we decided on that day that we don't want to tell. We're not going to whitewash the tragic aspects of the story. We're not going to focus on the horrors, but we're not going to whitewash the tragic aspects. But we want to focus on these people because they can not just give us healing now, but they can light our way to a better future. We thought, even though now we're in the middle of a fight, we don't know how long it's going to last, but we have to think now about the day after. Whenever this is over, israeli society is going to have to rebuild itself. As Auria said on October 6, israeli society was fractured, was in a real nadir of probably one of the most divided times since I don't know the al Talena, since I don't know when.
And these heroes, by their acts of just commitment to helping people who weren't necessarily from the same group, weren't necessarily people they knew. They just felt, we are all in this together. We're all Amisrael. And not just Amisrael. We're all Israelis. There are a lot of non jewish heroes in the book. And so we made a decision on that very first day. I can email you the project proposal from the 15 October. It's crazy. It's exactly the way the book turned out. We said we need to have stories of very diverse heroes, of people who showed the best in humanity, who just dug deep down and found that strength and those values within them. And this is what we need, not just for now and to heal ourselves, but this is what we're going to need to light our path in the future.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: Sorry, Akim. Tell us more about that process of writing the project proposal.
We can have a whole other episode of behind the scenes at Corin and how books get made. You know, the ideas from, you know, the first word on the first letter on the page to being actually printed. But this is something that runs a couple of times that, like, the project proposal is what you can hold in your hands today and read. Read the book. So, I mean, can you talk to us about that process or. Yeah, like, what was that decision making process of showing people as people and not just as one of however many hundreds or thousands of victims?
How did that process.
[00:14:04] Speaker D: Yeah, okay, so, first of all, I must say that like many others, I was utterly broken after October 7. And Ronnie's call came while I was lying in bed surrounded by used tissues, crying like a lot of, a lot of Israelis in those days. And Ronnie's ideal finally made me feel like I could get out of bed and breathe and do something.
But then I told him. I told him two things. First, this book must be written by air. Raghmon can do like the best, the best way he can write true stories in a really touching and moving way, and he really can capture the significant moments of life and give words to it.
And second of all, I told Ubuntu, I don't know Ubuntu, if you remember, but I told you, I don't want to have, I don't want to be part of this book. I just want to manage it from far. I don't want to write it, I don't want to be involved in it, because emotionally I won't be able to handle it. But then when Yai started working on the book, and he worked for, like, a month, I think, by himself, I was already involved. And I saw that these stories really, really gave me hope, and I, like, opened my heart and soul. And then he offered me to join him. And that's how I became, like, the writer of this book, which I never wrote stories before. It's my first time dealing with literature.
I'll tell you a little bit about Yair's vision, because this whole book is really Yair Raghman's vision that came to life.
You know what? I'll give you an example from an early conversation we had. A, at one point, me and I were debating which interviewers to approach, and I reached out to people who I knew who were sensitive and kind hearted. Also, by the way, I think Ruben gave me the names because we both knew the interviewers, and we really thought that they're the right people for the job.
And then I told ye, listen, does it really matter who the interviewers, I mean, they just need to be a human recording device, okay? All they need is to ask the hero to speak and just put the play button and then stop it. Okay? And then here it was like, what? Are you serious? No, no, no. Okay, you didn't get it. We really need to meet together, like, to stick with all the interviewers, and I want to explain to you something. And then we gathered, and he tells us this. He tells us, he says, okay, if it were a journalistic book or a historical investigation, maybe that approach would work. Maybe you only just have to press the button and that's it. But since we're dealing with literature, by the way, he calls it documentary prose, that's his journal of writing. So since they're all true stories, we need the interviewers to reach an impossible level of honesty and comfort with their interviewees.
And then he told us that we really need to be careful, that the heroism will not, shouldn't overshadow the person. And if he really, and he wants the readers to love the subject, like, to love the person that they are reading about, not just to, like, adore him, not just to be thankful for him. He want the reader to feel love for someone. And how do we do that? Okay, so first of all, he said, okay, you're gonna sit with a father who just lost his, his son, and you're going to have to ask him many questions about his son. And the father will probably say something like, oh, my son. He was such an amazing kid. He was so smart. He was so friendly. And this is, of course, not helpful for us. This is not personal enough. We don't feel like we know we know the kid, we know the person by just using this, like, words, smarteen friendship, friendly and everything. So what we have to do, we have to ask him. We have to ask from the father to tell us small stories and anecdotes and memories that we can, like, recall from his childhood and just give us a lot of very, very, very specific dots or spotlights on his child.
And we, and Yale said, and we will know what to do with it, because when we decide the narrative that should be, like, the story should revolve around, then we'll choose the right anecdotes and the right stories. And that was, of course, acceptable and reasonable. But then yaid said something that, it really shocked me when I heard it, but only after, like a week or two or three when I was working and interviewing and also editing. Only then I realized how genius is it and how important it is.
So what he told us, he said, you are going to have to reach a level, such a high level of honesty with the interviewee that you're going to have to be able to ask him about his stunned weaknesses, his son's conflicts and challenges that he had to deal with when he was alive. And when I heard it, I said, oh, my God, you're like, so it's crazy. I'm not going to ask a father who just lost his child about his child's weaknesses. They told us that when we ask parents to talk about their children's weaknesses, what we get is compassion.
It's not something that diminishes the person that we're talking about. It's the opposite. We feel like we love him more and we feel compassionate to him. So thanks to yair, we really did that. Like, when we interviewed the parents, we really got them to talk about their children in the most open and amazing and loving way.
And also, it made the book be, it helped the book bring the characters in a very honest way and even sometimes complex way, but it always honors them.
It always makes us feel that they're such an amazing people that we really would love to sit with them and have a chat with them.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: So Oria mentioned that the genre of the book is documentary prose. What that means is that, first of all, as we said, we didn't want just a journalistic account.
As you said, I woke up at 630 in the morning. I heard the sirens, blah, blah, blah. But we want to know the person. So in order to do that, we had very in depth interviews either with the hero himself or herself, if they were alive, and if not, with someone very close to them. And the interviews were 2 hours, even longer. I mean, and then when they were transcribed, they were 10,000, 15,000 words. And then from that, we tried to craft a narrative using the person's words, but getting to the essence of the story, because people have a very hard time creating something linear. And we wanted to give a sense of the person and to have just the core of who the person is. What happened? And so those 15,000 word transcripts became 3000 word chapters. And that is really art to distill that and yet to remain faithful to what the person said. And then, of course, we gave it back to the hero or to whoever the interviewee was, if the hero wasn't alive. And we said, look this over, you know, these are your words. We edited them, we crafted them. It's like, you know, it's like what Michelangelo said. You know, he would see a stone, he would see a slab of marble, and then he would get to the statue that was in it. So that's what this story was. It was chipping away till you get to the, you know, the David within the slab of marble.
So it was really. You did need an artist of the highest level to be able to reach this level. And yet for it to be, it's a true story and it's really the narrative, but it's the kernel. It's written. It reads almost like a short story, like a novel. I mean, all these are first person narratives.
And so that is why the second Oria came up with Yair's name. I said, okay, you're right. That's it. We don't have to look anymore.
He's the guy. He has that talent.
And we wouldn't have had the temerity to ask questions like, tell us about your son's weaknesses if not for his experience as a documentary filmmaker, as a writer, you know, he's been doing this for years. In fact, our interviewers, a lot of them were, we were actually looking for filmmakers because they know how to get the truth out of someone, you know, and how to pick that one line from a two hour interview, how to get the five minutes that are the most important.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: So just like an incredible amount of work then happens to take these 15,000 words to 3000 words and then 3000 word chapters into a book, and the book comes out in Hebrew. I actually remember what month it was in the end, when it came out.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: In Hebrew in March.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Tell us a little bit about what happens next.
[00:24:30] Speaker D: Yeah, okay. Like, okay, so two weeks before the book came out, I got a text message from yair saying, listen, it's such an amazing book. I can't believe we did it in such a short time. It's an amazing and important book. No one will read it.
And I asked him, why? Why are you saying this? And he said, I'm telling my friends about my work, what I've been doing for the last five months. And they all tell me the same thing. They all tell me, oh, well, it's so important. Like way, though. Thank you.
Good for you. But we're not going to read it. I'm not going to read it. It's too hard. I'm not going to do it to myself.
So Yair told me that he thinks that I must sit with our team, with our publishing house team, and I must prepare them that this book will never sell more than one edition.
And this book will probably lie on shelves of people who would may not even open it ever because it's hard.
So that's what I did. I told it to Reuben. I told it to, like, a lot of, like, all of our staff heard my lecture about it, and I really prepared them, but this book is not going to be a success.
And that's when the book was on presale. And then we put it on pre sale, and it sold the first edition before it even came to the bookstores.
And then it's just, it went crazy. And after three months, it became gold edition, which means in Israel it means 20,000 copies of. And then after six months, now it became platinum edition, which means 40,000 copies and even more, like, we're, like hitting 50 soon.
And that was a total surprise for us. And me. And I kept getting messages and responded from readers that told us that this book, like, first of all, they said that a lot of them use the word healing. It's a healing book. I'm so glad I read this book, because it gives me, like, it heals my pain.
And also what really, like, surprised me a lot. People are using the word. It's the best book I've ever read in my life, which I don't know me. And I like. No, really. I mean, we didn't even mean this book to be so good. Literature, literature wide. But I think we, like, we did it with. With the help of everyone around us. And that's, like, I really think to hashem every day. Every day.
Because I was really not supposed to write this book. By the way, it says the same thing, except from the Hashem part, because he's an atheist. So it's not really about Hashem. Hash Gachand. But he keeps saying, like, me and Yaela's giving a lot of lectures together, and he keeps saying that this is the most, like, incredible gift that Corinne Publishing gave him. And it's like. So it really cured him. We didn't even speak about his experience, but he was. He experienced trauma that day because he. He was connected to Hamas Telegram.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Channel.
[00:28:05] Speaker D: Channel.
Yeah, he was. He was.
October 7. He was connected to Hamas Telegram channel, and we saw everything without any buffer. I don't know.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Not because he's a member of Hamas, but because he was making a documentary. And in order to make his documentary, they told him, okay, to get background, you have to join the Hamas Telegram channel.
[00:28:32] Speaker D: Yeah. And this documentary, by the way, is not going to ever be published, because it was about the israeli palestinian conflict. And now it's, like, irrelevant to speak, like, in the terms of the 6 October. So that's why he was connected to the telegram of Hamas, and he just collapsed.
And when I turned to him first, by the way, he refused. He took me, like, a few phone calls to convince him to try the thing.
[00:28:59] Speaker C: That's amazing isn't saying that people were saying to yair and saying to you that it's wonderful. You've done the book. Good for you. I'm never gonna read it.
[00:29:07] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:29:09] Speaker C: So I. Like. We found that as well as in, you know, I.
In. In my professional life. Aria and I have other jobs at Corrine, as well as hosting the Corinne podcast and, like, reaching out to different people about the english edition of the book. And, I mean, the hebrew edition is a work of art, just the way it flows and the stories that have been crafted. And then the team of translators who were put to work to take the.
Take the Hebrew and create something like a mirror image in English. I know that Ronnie you sort of locked yourself in a room for weeks to sort of give it that final, that final polish, but reaching out to people to sort of, you know, promote the book and, you know, make sure that people hear about it. And I to make sure that word gets out there.
The number of people who have turned around and said, like, what? I'm not. I don't read anything about the. I don't read anything about October 7. It's too traumatic. I'm not going to, and, like, we're not going to name names, but people who don't want to promote the book because whether they were here on October 7, whether they were in the diaspora on October 7, it doesn't matter. There's that trauma that exists. But having read different drafts of it as the english edition, especially different drafts as we were going along, I'm not sure I've used that word healing, but the moment you said it a second ago, like, there is a certain healing quality to the way the stories are told. And it's definitely about the way the stories are told because again, from the night of October 7, we started hearing these sorts of stories. Of course, we all remember Rachel from, you know, Rachel with the cookies and all these, like, crazy stories of how people survived and how people saved other people. But then, you know, we hear them and then we move on. And then reading the book, there is that quality of healing just by the way that the stories are crafted. And I know that Aurii, you've been in regular contact with, I don't know all, but certainly a lot of the people whose stories are contained within the book.
And how's it been for you to sort of see them processing?
[00:31:27] Speaker D: Wow.
I can't even describe when I talk about being thankful for the opportunity to work on this book, a huge part of it is being in touch with those amazing people. And I must say that the way we chose the people, the stories, which it was pretty, I think, arbitrary because we didn't, like, choose the stories that were most amazing. No, we wanted to keep the diversity and to, like, to be sure that every part of the israeli society get to be represented.
But we didn't. I mean, we just, like, it was like, we just chose, like, the stories, but we just picked them. And each and every person is such an amazing person.
I'm really, I mean, I think you can hear it in my voice. I'm just, I'm overwhelmed by these people and being in touch with them and some of them, like, became more close to me and we're like, in a.
We can. We can. We still are in touch, and it's. It's amazing. And a lot of them, by the way, a lot of them used also the word healing. They told us that this just like telling the story and then editing it with us, because they did. They rewrite it with us and they edited with us, gave them. It was like a healing process for.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: Them, I think, as well. The few heroes I've been fortunate enough to be in touch with, they all recoil at the word hero, right?
We all see them as heroes. We read the stories. We see, we hear, and we see, and we read the incredible things that they did.
And there isn't, unfortunately, like, English is limited. There's however many hundreds of thousands of words in English, but none of them accurately describe any of the people in the book. And so we're left with this word hero.
And each and every one of the heroes that I've been fortunate enough to speak to, and you know them far better than I do, they all sort of say, what else was I gonna do?
You know, like, the one that springs to mind most is Avi, who was on ambulance 54. The story is.
It's just. The story is incredible. And he's an incredible. He's 22, 23. He's a young guy, and his I going to do. I was just doing what I had to. And he lists how many other people said, well, that's a real hero. That's a real hero.
[00:34:13] Speaker D: Right, right.
[00:34:14] Speaker C: And like, to be able.
The fact that we were trusted, or you were trusted with their stories and the result of that trust is something that has rightly struck a chord with the jewish and the non jewish world. This isn't a book for Jews.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Right.
I'll just tell you the best. We get so many incredible responses from readers. People we know, people we don't know, total strangers. People walk up to me when I'm shopping, buying my milk, and then they tell me like this. So last night, moze Shabbos, I see someone sent me a four minute message. And I said, whoa, it must be really important if they're writing to me on. If they're sending me a message on moze Shabbos. And they just had to say, I spent all Shabbos reading the book. I couldn't put it down. I'm so proud to be part of Amisrael. I'm so proud of it. And this is a person who herself is a convert.
But we've heard this from so many people, like, people who are as distant from Judaism as you can imagine. And those are my favorite responses when they say, I never thought I'd hear myself saying these words, but I'm really, really proud to be part of am Yisrael because of these people. They don't think they're heroes. They did what had to be done. And it's, you know, it's not a big deal. They just. They did it. And just so it was so easy for us to find so many beautiful people, so many amazing people, such, such good value, such good character. And they're also regular people. That's what we tried to get across in the story. You know, there's one or two who are like, mister super soldier commando. Okay? So you expect them to be heroes, right? Like they were heroes from. From the minute they were born.
But most of these people are just regular people. You have someone who works in a delivery room, in the hospital, and suddenly she's saving lots of people's lives. And that's not what she's trained to do. And just one after another, and that's what's beautiful about it, because that's why these are people like you and me. You see their human side, you see even their weaknesses. You see there, it's the little things.
That's one of the things from our first meeting, actually, in our very first meeting on that first Sunday, the 15 October, I told aurian story about how I want the book to be. And she totally related to it. And it turned out even better than this. But I told this at the hebrew book launch, this story.
One of my sons, he got out of the army a year before, he finished the army a year before October 7. And he was in Golani in the 13th brigade or whatever it's called, Gdudlosh Esrei. Now, Gduzlosh Esrei was the unit that was on the border that day.
And Dudeslosh Esrei on October 7 lost 41 soldiers.
And my son was not there because he had finished the army.
But he knew a lot of those guys. Some of them were his soldiers who he had commanded. Some of them were his commanders, like Yochai Ducham was in the book. He knew him. He was his officer.
And my son couldn't go to the funerals because he was, you know, he was on our northern border waiting to go into Lebanon, assuming that we were about to be attacked.
So my wife and I went to some of the shivas instead of him. So on the way to one of the shivas, this was a guy who was his soldier, who he had commanded his name was Adir Bogala, ethiopian soldier. And so we were on our way there, and I asked my son, I whatsapped him on the way. Luckily, he still had a phone. The miloum Nikim had phones. The regular soldiers, they took away their phones.
So I said, tell me something about Adir before I get there. So he said, he was really nice. He was always helping the other soldiers. He was very quiet. I said, no, no, no. I said, that's great. I said, tell me something specific about him. Tell me. Like, I don't know. He loved Maccabi Haifa, he loved pizza. He used to go biking on sun. I don't know. That individuates him. That doesn't just make him. And by the way, Adir, speaking about heroes, I mean, he and two other soldiers just stayed at the, at the gate of Nacholoz against hundreds of invaders. And they just stayed there till their last bullet. They didn't retreat. They said, we have to stay here as long as possible so that other people can be saved, can get to shelter. And they just stayed there and fired and fired and fired and fired, then took guns off the bodies of the terrorists they killed and used them until they ran out of ammunition and all three of them died.
I said, but I don't want him to be just a representation of a hero soldier.
I want to know who he was. So he said, well, you know, every time he got leave, he would get a haircut. Every single time. He loved to have really neat, short hair.
And I said, oh, okay, that's good. Tell me more facts like that. So he told me little facts that individuated him as a human being. So then we go to the family, and we're sitting with the father, and the mother is sitting a little bit in a different part of the room, and we say, you know, we're Ariel's parents. He said, oh, I remember Ariel. He was his commander. He came to our house because in Israel, all commanders do home visits to make sure that's part of the job. Like my son, whenever he had time off, he would spend his Fridays doing home visits all around the country, because you have to make sure that each family has enough food in the fridge and that they have a washing machine and that the parents are okay, and if not, the army helps them.
So we've also had visits from our children's commanders, and luckily we have food in the fridge, so, you know, we don't get army help. But.
So he said, yeah, we remember our. And then the father, of course, asks me, and how's Ariel? Like you're sitting Shiva for your son, and you're asking me about my son.
What a person. So then we're talking, and I ask him, why did you call him a dear? And he tells me a story. And then he shows me a picture, and I said to him, you know, I see he has a really, really snazzy haircut. His hair is really short. He looks really good. Ariel told me he got a haircut every single time he went out. And the father started laughing and smiling, and he called his wife. He said, hey, listen to what they're telling me about Adir. Listen to this. He said, yeah, that was him. That was his mishegas. He didn't use the word mishegas. He said, that was his thing.
He always needed to have neat, short hair. And then we got into this whole conversation. So suddenly, the father came alive because he saw that I wasn't talking about soldier. I was talking about his son, Adir. And I said, that's what we need in this book. I told this story to Oriyah. I said, we need to know who got a haircut every Friday and the little things. And we should only start hearing about October 7, maybe on page two or three or four of the story. But first, let's get to know them just as a person. Not like he was a hero all the time. And in high school, he was a hero. No, he wasn't. In high school. He was a kid. He did silly things, whatever.
In fact, this is one of the questions that came up in translation. Two different people.
One was a fiance, and one was a mother, described the hero, who was no longer alive, as a stutnik.
So we had to decide, how do you translate Stutnik into Hebrew?
So we actually used two different words.
But we were thinking, like, this is the kind of question that we were thinking about in the translation. So, one was Irene when she was describing Neta Epstein.
So, actually, when I met Irene at the book launch, I said, irene, you really threw us for a loop. When you called him a stutnik, we really thought hard about how to translate it. She said, well, what did you do? I said, he was a goofball. She said, yes, he was a goofball. That's right. But then when Yonatan al Azhari's mother described her son as a stutnik, she didn't mean goofball.
She meant something else. She meant he was a kid. He did stupid stuff. He did dangerous stuff. But that's who he was.
So, you know, most books about heroes don't describe them as a stuttnik or a goofball or as doing stupid stuff, but that's the beauty of this book.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: So just before we wrap up, there's lots of other questions we could ask, and I'm sure by now our listeners probably are dying to hear some of the stories I've been talking about, but we're going to leave that for them to read in the book and to discover themselves.
But just before we wrap up, maybe you could each just tell us a little bit about the book is out in Hebrew. It's how in English.
What's next?
[00:43:46] Speaker A: It's out in Romanian also just saying.
[00:43:51] Speaker D: And it's also, I saw it for.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: Sale in Japan today in English. So that was nice.
[00:43:58] Speaker D: Wow. Wow. Also, there's a process of translating it into Yiddish. It's already.
Yeah, it's happening. I think we just need to, like, make it work. And I'm telling ruin for the first time because he didn't hear it yet. So I'll tell you, all of you that I just got today the first chapter that is translated into Korean.
Yeah. So it's not. We still have to find a publishing house in Korea, but in order to do that, we needed someone to theyd turn to us to suggest that they'll translate it into Korean.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: And also, this hasn't happened yet, but we'd like to have it. It is likely, hopefully, to be translated into Arabic as well, both for an israeli arab audience and for everyone around.
Any arabic speakers should be able to read the book and learn about, you know, israeli society.
[00:45:09] Speaker C: Amazing. I think that's a good place to wrap up. I mean, aside from the different editions and different languages, the, you know, almost 50,000 copies sold in Hebrew, the how many thousands of copies already sold in English and everything going on, there's, you know, dozens of events already taking place for the hebrew edition in Israel. There are more coming in English all over the country. There are a events happening across the US, in the UK, South Africa, Australia, Canada. If you want to be involved in one of those, keep your eyes peeled for something that is happening. If you want to organize something, you can definitely be in touch. But I think the only thing left to say to Reuven and to Auria addressing it to you, but it applies to every single person who is involved in bringing this book out. Just thank you for what you have done to give people something that, as we said before, it really is something that heals.
It helps process whatever it is, what you have done for the world. Not just the jewish world, but the world. The jewish world and far, far beyond, I don't think can be expressed in words just how amazing it is. So thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you.
[00:46:33] Speaker D: Thank you so much. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk about the book and to hear this amazing insight from you, Alex. It's really important for me. Thank you.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: And we do have an idea for the next book, but we are not ready to discuss it publicly, so we're just going to have to leave you with that intriguing, mysterious note.
[00:46:56] Speaker C: Watch this.
Thank you so much.
That's what we've got time for. Thank you so much again to Ronnie and Aria for joining us and for everything they have done to bring this book one day on October to the shelves. If you would like to order a copy of one day in October, you can do so from cryinpub.com or your local bookstore.
If you are ordering from cryinpub.com comma, you can get 10% off this book or the rest of your order with promo code. Podcast at checkout please do make sure to keep your eyes peeled for an event, a lecture, a book launch, a conversation, or a panel happening near you with Oria or Yair or Ronnie or any of the heroes from the book. Or if you'd like to organise one, you can reach out to us and we can try to make that happen. You can find us on email podcastaranpub.com on social media at Carenpublishers Oren Jerusalem and we will be back again in a couple of weeks with a new episode of the current podcast, Alregal Akhat. Until then, have a Shanatova Khatimatova. Goodbye.
