The Adventures of Gidon Lev: A post-Holocaust mosaic of life

• Date: 07 January 2021
• Author: ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The True Adventures of Gidon Lev, named one of the books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, is singularly compelling for the way the story is told from the viewpoints of the survivor and his late-life love; for its encompassing sweep that manages in just 300-odd pages to convey the story of a man within the vast context of Jewish and Israeli history; and for its gentle insights into all of the above.

Gidon Lev (born Peter Löw) was an only child born in Czechoslovakia in 1935. At the age of six, he and his parents were imprisoned in the Térézin (Theresienstadt) Nazi concentration camp. He was 10 when he and his mother were liberated; he was one of just 92 of approximately 15,000 children who passed through Térézin and survived. His father was killed in Auschwitz.

Formative as that indescribably traumatic experience was, it is just one large piece in the mosaic of Gidon Lev.

"The Holocaust has not defined Gidon's life – he has not allowed it to – yet he found himself feeling responsible for conveying his experiences at the hands of the Nazis. Even so, he didn't want that terrible experience to be the focal point of his life story. For me, this was sometimes tricky to navigate," relates editor Julie Gray.

She is a Los Angeles expat who came to Israel in 2012 intending to write her own life story but ended up writing Lev's instead, after unexpectedly falling in love with this "complex, flawed, sometimes hilarious, opinionated" man 29 years her senior.

Actually, she agreed to edit the autobiographical manuscript he'd already penned. But the finished product turned out to be an amalgam of his and her writing, guided thoughtfully by Gray and the fresh eyes she brought to his story. He allowed her "to root around in and interrogate his memories."

"Gidon Lev did something extraordinarily courageous; he allowed his most deeply held narratives and beliefs to be challenged by viewing his life events with the benefit of time and a different perspective. All of us should be so brave," Gray writes.

BRAVERY IS not a quality Lev lacks. After an 11-year detour in the United States and Canada after the war, he arrived in Israel in 1959 as an impassioned Zionist socialist kibbutznik. He fought in the Six Day War (one "true adventure" was losing his pants as he crossed the Jordan River with his rifle held above the water).

He later fought difficult battles over child custody – his first wife absconded to California with their two-...