Nicole Krauss: “He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, fought bloody battles for Israel’s independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew.”