The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)

Matti Friedman: Thank you so much for having me.

Matti Friedman: So, Hannah Senesh is one of four main characters in this book. And, the operation that I’m describing, which is a very strange episode in which a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust to British Mandate Palestine volunteered to parachute back into the Holocaust.

The group is 32 parachutists. I’ve chosen a core group of characters who are participants in the most dramatic part of that operation. And, of those four, the best known is Hannah.

So while some of these characters have a kibbutz named after them or a street named after them, Hannah Senesh has 32 streets named after her. She has a kibbutz named after her. She has a forest named after her. She is one of the most famous national characters in Israel. She’s probably as famous as someone like Judah Maccabee, just in terms of name recognition to an Israeli.

One of my kids brought home–I mention this in the book–a couple years ago, a deck of patriotic playing cards. And, there was a set of four cards that had a kind of pantheon of the nation’s greatest characters. So, one of them was Theodor Herzl, who is, of course, the founder of Modern Zionism. One of them was Golda Meir, who is the only woman to ever become Prime Minister in Israel. One was Moshe Dayan, the famous one-eyed general. And, the fourth was Hannah Senesh, who was a 23-year-old woman who had come to Israel from Hungary and was here for a few years and wrote some poems that have become among the most famous texts in Hebrew.

So, Hannah Senesh is a legend, but it’s not 100% clear, or at least it wasn’t to me before I wrote the book, why she was a legend. Because as you hinted in your question, she doesn’t seem to have succeeded at her mission. So, that mystery is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. How could you become a hero if you failed?

Matti Friedman: Unfortunately, all of the characters in the story are dead. Even the ones who survived to the end of 1944. And, I had no one to interview, and I wanted to bring the story to life.

So, there were two main ways to do that. One was the incredible amount of documentation that turned out to survive from the operation. Most of it kept in Tel Aviv, in the archive of the Haganah, which is the pre-state militia. It’s kind of the Jewish underground militia that becomes–it ultimately becomes the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. And, their archive is in Tel Aviv in this old mansion that used to belong to one of the militia commanders, Eliyahu Golomb. So, I spent a lot of time there going through thousands of documents that were kind of telling the story of this operation in real time. The operation stretches basically from the beginning of 1944 to the end of 1944. That’s more or less the time span.

So, that’s one way that I recreated the action.

But, another way to do it is to go to the places that I’m writing about and see if I can breathe the smell that these characters would have smelled and walked, to the extent that it’s possible, on the streets that they walked.

So, I tried to do that by going to Rome, which is where one of the main characters is from, a character named Enzo Sereni, who was one of the commanders of the mission–very literate, a kind of aristocratic Roman Jew. And, I went to Budapest, which is where Hannah Senesh is from. I went to Dachau, as you mentioned, because one of the characters ends up there.

And, maybe the funnest thing I did was to take an incredible train journey from Rome over the Alps to Munich, and to Dachau–which must be one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world. Although I was retracing a train journey that one of my characters took in much darker circumstances. But it was certainly something that helped me recreate for myself the world that these characters inhabited, and then I hope to recreate it in an accurate fashion for the readers.

Matti Friedman: I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to the Holocaust, you know, recognizing, of course, that it is one of the most important events in Jewish history and certainly one of the most important events of the 20th century. But I never wanted to let it define my own Jewish story. I don’t see my own story as being one of victimhood. And, I think that in the time that we’re in now, victimhood is really the currency that is exchanged in cultural discourse, and everyone wants to be a victim, and I’m not interested in that. And, I think that the Zionist movement was not interested in that.

And, that’s another reason, I think, or that’s one reason, that the Zionist movement always had an ambivalent relationship with the Holocaust and never quite wanted to remember it quite in the way that it happened. They wanted to remember it in a slightly different way.

Holocaust Remembrance Day here is called, officially, the Remembrance Day for Holocaust and Heroism. And, there was always an emphasis on heroic events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

So, the Zionist movement never accepted that Jews were victims because the whole idea of Zionism is that Jews are actors in history: that we’re agents of our own fate and not victims. And, I think that that very much was my own mindset. So, I’ve never been drawn to visit Auschwitz or any of these places. In fact, I once went to Krakow, which is right next to Auschwitz. And, I considered going to the camp because I was already in Krakow, and there are signs up all over Krakow advertising tours to Auschwitz. And, I was really turned off by the whole thing–the idea of going to a camp that’s also a tourist site.

So, I ended up just hanging out in a bookstore in Krakow. I found a book by Primo Levi and bought the book; and I sat in the bookstore cafe reading Primo Levi with a couple of Polish goths. That was my alternative to actually going to a Nazi death camp.

I’ve always thought that the history of those places and the history of the Holocaust is something best pondered by the societies that perpetrated it. And, I’d like to tell a different story about myself.

So, it turned out that when I went to Dachau, because I was researching the fate of one of my characters–of Enzo Sereni–and I wanted to see the camp, and I wanted to research in the archive that’s at the camp. And, I went to Dachau really unprepared for it, because I was just going for technical reasons. And I was quite bowled over, as I recount in the book, just by how evil the place was.

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it was probably the most evil place I’ve ever been. You could just feel it. It was in the air. It kind of seeped from the ground. And, I’m glad I had that chance, and I’m glad that I went when I did, in my mid-40s, and not as an impressionable 16- or 17-year old. Many Jewish teenagers get taken to these places, I think, at a time when they’re not really capable of understanding what they are, placing it in the right location in their own story about themselves and about the Jewish people. But, it was one of the most powerful experiences that I had writing this book.

Matti Friedman: So, the way the Holocaust is seen in Israel has really changed in the past 20 or 30 years, but traditionally, Zionism was uncomfortable with it. And, they were uncomfortable with the fact–I mean, it seems ludicrous to even say this now, but this was really a prevalent way of thinking about it: In the early days of Israel, they were uncomfortable with the fact that the Jews hadn’t rebelled or that the line was that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter. And, that was anathema to Zionism. I mean, Zionism was all about Jewish power and Jewish military bravery, and the Zionists were very much concerned, but even before the founding of the state, with inculcating an ethos of military prowess.

And, Zionism abandons the original Jewish heroes, who are these rabbis, and scholars, and timid intellectuals, and replaces them with military heroes–people like Bar Kokhba, who was the leader of a disastrous revolt against Rome in the second century CE [Christian Era]. And, he’d always actually been hated by the rabbis because he very unwisely rebelled against the superpower and brought an absolute disaster on the Jewish people. But, he gets reborn as an example of Jewish prowess. Or Judah Maccabee, who had been a relatively minor character who led a successful rebellion against the Seleucid Greeks a couple centuries earlier.

So, Zionism is very much interested in that kind of Jew.

And then, there’s this terrible thing in Europe, which seems to be about passive Jews just getting on trains and being shipped to their deaths, and that’s not true. That’s not accurate representation of what happened. And, it’s actually a terrible insult, I think, to the people who went through it. But, that was very much the vibe in Israel in the early years. And, eventually the Holocaust is commemorated in a very Zionist way. As I mentioned, they call the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust, Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism.

And, there was really an emphasis on people who had resisted the Nazis, and there was a lot of discomfort with those who didn’t. And, many Holocaust survivors who came to Israel were misunderstood at best, sometimes treated with disrespect. There was an assumption among some people that if you survived the Holocaust, you must have done something shady. So, you must be crooked in some way, or you must have collaborated in some way, or you must have done something untoward in order to survive when so many other people were killed.

So, it takes decades for that event just to be digested by the psyche. Of course, it makes perfect sense. I mean, some things can’t be understood right away. And, the Holocaust is certainly an example of something that maybe can’t be understood at all, certainly not within a decade or two of it happening.

In the past 20 or 30 years, I think things have become much more sane, and Israelis have learned to think about it, think about it differently; but there’s still an unwillingness to see ourselves as victims.

We’ve seen it over the past two years or so since October 7th, where we’ve had to participate in a discourse in the West where it’s all about victimhood. The question is, who is the bigger victim? And, the greater your victimhood, the more cultural power you have, and increasingly political power you have.

So, everyone wants to be a victim, and we have to play that game. So, we have to play up the way we were victimized on October 7th. But, you can see that for a lot of Israelis, that doesn’t come naturally because the Zionist story is not about playing up your victimization: it’s about being strong. And, if you’re victimized, then you go and you kick ass, you don’t whine about being victimized.

So, there is a tension that exists to this day, which is still the one that the Zionist movement felt in the days of the Holocaust.

In fact, this operation–the parachutists’ operation of 1944–is essentially a product of that tension. So, you have the Zionist movement in what was then British Mandate Palestine watching this catastrophe unfold in Europe. They’re unable to stop it despite their ethos of heroism and prowess. The Jews don’t have an army. They need to get people into Europe. The Jews don’t have an Air Force. They have no way of doing anything. They’re completely helpless. So, they come up with what seems like the only plan at their disposal and send these people who had escaped the Holocaust back into the Holocaust.

Matti Friedman: Well, at the time–I guess we should say for listeners who may not be familiar with the history–this country is a British Mandate territory called Palestine. The British conquered it in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks and are given the mandate by the League of Nations to create a Jewish national home. And, they’ve been running it essentially since the end of the First World War, and they’re about to leave in 1948.

So, the whole thing lasts about 30 years, and this is the waning years of the Mandate, although that’s not at all clear at the time that we’re talking about. This is the middle of the Second World War. So, the Jews are trying to form a state in Palestine, but the ruling authority is British, and the Jews do not have a military or a government. They have a quasi-governing authority that they recognize called the Jewish Agency, but it’s not a real government, and they don’t have any military force.

And, at the beginning of the war, the Jews are begging the British to allow them to form Jewish fighting units and go to Europe to fight the Nazis. And, the Jews, of course, they have good reason to want to fight the Nazis.

However, they’re also at odds with British authorities. So, the Jews also hate the British. They hate the British, but they hate them less than they hate the Germans. Why do they hate the British? Because the British, having promised to create a Jewish national home that will be a refuge for the Jewish people in the 1930s, they basically slam the door on that in order to placate Arab public opinion, which is very much opposed to Jewish immigration and opposed to the British Empire in general.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely.

Matti Friedman: Right. Exactly.

So, there are two competing national movements that are kind of alive and at odds in this place. So, the British are in a bit of a pickle. What they do is they stop Jewish immigration, with few exceptions, precisely at the time when it’s a matter of life and death for millions of Jews, and people have nowhere to go, and they can’t come here. So, the Jews, of course, are furious at the British about that; but they have no choice but to be on the Allied side in the war, so they’re trying to get the British to allow them to form fighting battalions. And, the British won’t do it because they’re worried about forming military units of Jews that could, after the war, boomerang against the British. And, I think that concern was quite well-placed, and indeed would prove to be completely justified.

So, we can understand where the British are coming from, but this is intensely frustrating for the Jews. So, what remains of these grandiose plans to form–specifically a plan to drop a battalion of paratroopers, Jewish paratroopers, into Europe in order to lead a Jewish uprising? That was the original plan.

This is whittled down by British colonial officials into a plan that will see just over 30 Jewish parachutists dropped–not as a fighting unit and not together. They’ll be dropped in twos and threes, and they’ll be dropped mainly by an outfit called MI9 [Military Intelligence 9], which is now largely forgotten, but it’s the arm of British Military Intelligence that deals with escape and evasion. So, their job is to pick up downed Allied pilots or escaped POWs [prisoners of war]–people who are behind enemy lines–and get them back to Allied lines so they can be put on new airplanes and sent back into the war.

So, that’s MI9, and it’s being run out of Cairo in this part of the world by an officer named Tony Simmons, who is a very pro-Zionist officer. He has been in Palestine for a while, and who the Jews trust. So, because of this relationship that Simmons has with the Zionist leadership, they create this plan to recruit newly-arrived Jews, mainly from Central Europe. People who speak the local languages, know the territory. And, these people will be recruited into the British Army. They’ll be given British uniforms. They’ll be given radio training and parachute training, and then they will be dropped via an Allied airbase in Italy back into Central Europe. That’s what the British think they’re doing. These people are meant to maintain radio contact between British military headquarters and partisan forces–resistance forces–behind enemy lines, and they’re supposed to help locate and rescue Allied personnel behind enemy lines. That’s the British mission.

As far as the Jewish leadership is concerned–and this is mainly a group of men who will ultimately be the creators of the Mossad–so, in my book in English, I call them the Mossad because they are actually part of a small office that is called the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, which means basically the Illegal Immigration Bureau. But it will eventually morph into what we now call the Mossad. So, I refer to the Mossad: These are intelligence men, although of course there’s no state and they don’t actually belong to an official intelligence service.

And they have a different plan.

And, their plan, of course, is to save Jews.

The Allied mission is secondary to them. Their idea is to get Zionist agents back into Europe to fight the Nazis and save Jews. And, eventually they also want people who will have gained enough military experience to be able to use it against the British after the war is over. So, this British operation is also an operation against the British.

So, it’s a complicated affair. But there’s a confluence of interests here for a while between the Zionist leadership and certain British military officers that allows this operation to take place. The Jews want to get people into Europe, but they don’t have their own Air Force. The British need agents who can fit in behind enemy lines, and they have almost no one who can do it. And, they realize that the Jews in Palestine have this incredible reservoir of agents, because the place is full of people who come from what are now occupied countries in Europe. So, if you need someone who can pass in Nazi-occupied France, no problem–Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary–the Jews have whatever you need. So, those are the conditions that create this strange operation in 1944, which was at least officially a British operation run by MI9 out of Cairo.

Matti Friedman: Well, the operation is documented in a very thorough fashion. And I was surprised: When I went to the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv to see what I could rustle up, I had no idea that there would be so much.

So, the Jewish intelligence men who leave these documents are very organized, and everything is documented, cataloged, and eventually saved in the Haganah Archive. So, there’s actually a lot of material that allows us to recreate the mission–not from a distance, but from the perspective of the people who are running it in real time. So, we have letters from my characters sent to headquarters. We have radio transmissions. We have telegrams. We have personal archives of some of these people. Hannah Senesh, for example, because she became a legend afterward, her diaries and letters have been published.

Another one of my characters, Havivah Reik–who is a very interesting woman who is probably the most efficient of the parachutists, but she’s not the most remembered of them–she has an archive. She left an archive of fascinating letters on her kibbutz, which is a kibbutz called Ma’anit. One of the characters who is the only one of my characters to walk out of this mission alive, he wrote a really superb memoir about it that has been forgotten and is out of print and was never translated. But, if you’re looking for material, it’s there. And, all I lacked was an opportunity to actually speak to the people who participated in the mission, but I had a lot of material to work with. And, that allowed me to create a story that I think, or I hope, is very rich in texture.

This is not a bird’s eye view of the story. This is a very kind of high-resolution take on the mission as viewed mainly through documents telling us what this felt like, day to day. And, I try to zoom out and give us some context and try to think a bit about what all of it means. But the narrative rests on a very granular portrait of four characters who are part of this pretty small and marginal mission that somehow becomes a legend and the subject of myth to such an extent that, again, you can say Hannah Senesh to an Israeli kid and they’ll know exactly who you’re talking about.

Matti Friedman: I guess you’d say that Hannah Senesh was a universalist who was mugged by reality. I think at heart, that’s the world that she wanted. And, she came out of this very liberal environment in Budapest: Her dad is a playwright and a novelist and a Bohemian, and she fully expects to have a liberal life as an equal citizen in a European state. And, like many Jews, she’s disabused of that notion in the late 1930s, and she realized it’s not going to happen. And, her solution is to become a Zionist. And, luckily for her, she gets a visa really on the eve of the war. It’s the fall of 1939. She gets a very rare immigration certificate to British Palestine, and she leaves, and her mother remains behind in Budapest. And she makes it out just as the door is closing. So, her lesson from this is not a universal lesson.

I think she would like to see a kind of world where all people are siblings, but I think she’s lived long enough and seen enough to know that that world does not yet exist. And if she wants to be able to exist in the world, it’s going to be as a Jew, and the Jews are going to have to defend themselves because no one else is going to do it. And, she’s not the only one to reach that conclusion in those years.

And, it’s interesting to make a comparison between these two young women, because they literally have the same name. Anne, Hannah, it’s the same name. Anne is an English translation of the Hebrew name Hannah, but even more than that, her name in Hungary was actually Anna Szenes–that’s her Hungarian name. And, when she becomes a Zionist pioneer, she Hebreicizes the name and becomes Hannah.

So, she has consciously made a decision not to be Anne, but to be Hannah, who is a different person in that she’s not part of a universal or European story. She is definitely a Jew, and her name is Hebrew. So, there’s a story even just in the names of these two young women. Hannah Senesh is a bit older than Anne Frank. Anne Frank is a teenager. Hannah Senesh is a young woman. But they both write. I think they would recognize each other as kindred spirits in many ways. They’re both very literary. They both read. I’m sure they read some of the same books, and they have the idea that they can write.

So, Anne, of course, has her famous diary, which becomes one of the best-selling books in the world after the war, and it’s a best-seller in Japan. And, Frank really becomes a global icon. Hannah Senesh writes initially in Hungarian. And then, after she moves to Israel, she begins writing in Hebrew, and she’s incredibly adept at languages. And, she manages to write some really excellent poems, even though they are poems written by a young person who is not quite there yet. But, it’s quite clear when you read her early writing that had she been allowed to live past age 23, she eventually would have been probably an important writer. I think that’s clear. She had incredible powers of observation. She was really skillful with language. Even in a language that–Hebrew, which she only spoke for four or five years–she was already writing things of worth in that language. So, I think we could have seen some important literature come from Hannah Senesh’ pen had she lived.

And, her observations about the world are cut off, of course, by her death. So, she’s remembered for universalist pronouncements like her famous sentence where she says that, I’m not quoting this verbatim, but she says, ‘Deep in my heart, I believe that’–no–‘Deep inside, I believe that people are good at heart.’ She has that famous sentence–

Matti Friedman: That’s Anne Frank, right. And, that is her most famous sentence. And, as my friend and colleague, Dara Horn, pointed out in a great book called People Love Dead Jews, she pointed out that Anne wrote that, of course, before she was arrested by murderers and killed in a camp. So, had we been able to speak to her a few years after that, it’s possible that her conclusions about human nature would have been different, and it’s possible that her worldview would have been closer to that of Hannah Senesh. We don’t know, but it’s certainly true that the universal message of Anne Frank and the fact that she is a perfect victim–she’s just a girl and she’s murdered–that makes her a much more palatable character for people outside this story looking in. They want Anne Frank. They want someone who believes in the goodness of humanity. They want someone who doesn’t really do anything threatening. Anne Frank just dies and doesn’t live after the war to disturb the peace of Christians or Muslims by trying to set up a state where Jews can be at home.

So, Hannah Senesh, who is the more heroic character–it’s no fault of Anne Frank’s that she wasn’t a hero–but Hannah Senesh lived long enough to be able to make a decision about whether or not to take action, and she decides to take action. Hannah Senesh is known and venerated mostly among Israelis and Jews who value what she did. And, outside that group, she’s barely known. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this book once it comes out, if people can kind of maybe better understand her character if we understand what made her tick in the way that she saw the world. I’m not giving anything away to say that. I think that Hannah’s analysis of the world and human nature was closer to the accurate one, unfortunately.

Matti Friedman: Right. I guess the question asked by the woman at the skating rink is essentially the question I’m asking in this book: What motivated these characters to embark on a quest that seems quite hopeless? And, the chances of success were very small, if they existed at all. Certainly the idea that they were going to go save Jews or fight the Nazis–I mean, it seems quite unrealistic. There’s actually–I mention this in the book–a very funny skit, kind of funny in a painful way, done by an Israeli satire program called “The Jews Are Coming–HaYehudim Baim.” It’s a famous satire program here.

Matti Friedman: And, they riff on Biblical stories, and they kind of make fun of Israeli national myths. And, they have this skit where you see–it’s in the 1940s, and you see this Jewish militia commander, he’s a really tough guy. He’s standing in front of a map of Europe with a big swastika on it. And, he’s saying, ‘We’re going to go. We’re going to fight the Nazis. We’re going to kill the Germans.’ And then, the camera swivels, and you see there’s just one person in the room, and it’s this very young woman; and it’s Hannah Senesh, and she raises her hand, and she says, ‘I’m sorry, who is we?’ And, the commander is forced to admit that actually it’s not ‘we.’ It’s just you.

And, what was Hannah Senesh supposed to do against the Nazis? And that, I guess, was more than anything else, the mystery that led me to write the book. Because there’s this incredible gap between the legend of the mission and the actual accomplishments of the mission.

And there’s this gap between what they said they were going to do and what they could have reasonably expected to do. Again, this is 32 people dropped in twos and threes in about a half dozen Axis countries in the middle of the war. So, I try to unravel it in the book.

And, my conclusion is that it’s related to storytelling. And, it was interesting to write a book, which is essentially about the act of storytelling. But Zionism has always been a movement based on telling a different story about ourselves. And, it’s not a coincidence that the greatest minds of Zionism are often writers. Most prominently Theodor Herzl, who is a playwright and a journalist. And, he comes up with political Zionism because he understands that the story that the Jews are telling themselves in the 1890s in cosmopolitan Vienna–which is a story of increasing assimilation and liberalism and acceptance in a Christian society–he realizes that this story is not true.

And, he understands that the Jews are going to need to tell themselves a different story and mobilize themselves for a different purpose. And, his idea is that–which seems insane at the time–is that there’s going to be a Jewish state and the Jews are going to emigrate from Europe and they’re going to go to this state and they’re going to be free people in their own land, to quote what ultimately becomes the Israeli national anthem. So, he’s a writer. Jabotinsky’s a writer, Begin’s a journalist; and these people are writers. So, the Zionist movement is essentially a storytelling movement. And it tells people that they’re not refugees, they’re pioneers. Which is a very effective form of storytelling because it takes people who are victims and turns them into agents of their own fate. And, they’re not running away from their home in Poland because that was never their home. They’re going to their real home.

And, whether or not this is real or fake is almost beside the point. It is a great story that saves the Jews in the 20th century. So, there’s a real connection between Zionism and the ability to tell a story.

And here, too, in 1944, we have an example of a mission that I think was mainly about a story. It was the Zionist movement using the story weapon. What was the idea? These people would go to Europe and they would write a different story about the Second World War. And, in this story, the Jews would not be victims. They would be heroes. And they would not be miserable people in cattle cars. They would be parachutists jumping out of airplanes into occupied countries to bravely fight the Nazis. And, this story would be so powerful that it would, of course, not change anything about the war, but it would change the way the war is remembered, and then change the actions of people after the war.

And, I think that if you understand the mission in those terms, it makes sense. And, it also then makes sense why the participants in the mission tended to be very literary people.

Hannah Senesh is a good example, but Enzo Sereni was also a writer. He wrote a history of Italian Fascism. He wrote a treatise, or he edited and wrote a treatise, on Jewish-Arab coexistence under Zionist Socialism, which is very interesting to read from 2026. But it made sense, I guess, at the time–it was written in the 1930s. So, these are people who wrote. He dreamed of writing a great novel. So, these people understood storytelling, and they understood themselves as characters in a story, and no one understood that better than Hannah Senesh, who was the daughter of a playwright and the daughter of a novelist, and a bookworm, and a theater kid.

She literally grows up in a media of theater people in Budapest. So she knows exactly what a heroic quest is. She knows what the role of the heroine is. She knows who Joan of Arc was. She knows what’s expected of her. She is not remembered because she’s the best commando. She’s remembered because she’s the best writer. And, I think that she instinctively gets this. And, when we understand that this enterprise is not a military enterprise–it is, at its root, a literary enterprise–the thing begins to make more sense.

Matti Friedman: So, the poem that I refer to as Hannah’s second-most famous poem is called–in Hebrew, it’s called ‘Ashrei HaGafrur.’ And, there’s a debate about how to translate that name. Most of the translations will translate that as–most of the translations you’ll see in English translate it as ‘Blessed is the match.’ That’s the most common translation of it. Which in my opinion is a mistranslation of it. It’s much closer to ‘Happy is the match.’ The word ‘Ashrei’ in Hebrew comes from the prayer book. It’s from a prayer that we say multiple times a day, which is, ‘Happy’–Ashrei Yoshvei Veitecha: ‘Happy are those who dwell in your house.’ So, Hannah is playing on the words of a prayer.

And I’ll read it in Hebrew, and then I’ll read my own translation into English. So, that in Hebrew, it reads like this:

אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת אַשְׁרֵי הַלְּהָבָה שֶׁבָּעֲרָה בְּסִתְרֵי לְבָבוֹת אַשְׁרֵי הַלְבָבוֹת שֶׁיָדְעוּ לַחְדוֹל בְּכָבוֹד אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת

So, that’s the poem.

In my translation, which differs a bit from the most common one in English, it means something like this:

Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.Happy is the flame that burns secret in the deepest hearts.Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop.Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

So, this is a poem that we have because of a pretty incredible series of events. Hannah is about to cross the border from Yugoslavia, where she’s been with Tito’s partisan army for a few months in the spring and early summer of 1944, and she’s about to cross into Nazi-occupied Hungary. And, she knows that she’s crossing a hostile border and that there’s a very good chance she’s not coming back, and her comrades are actually trying to convince her not to go. They think it’s too dangerous, and she is not listening to reason, as they see it, and she’s insisting on crossing the border.

She needs to get into Hungary. She needs to complete her mission. And her mother is trapped in Budapest, literally a few streets away from the villa where Adolf Eichmann is planning the liquidation of the Jews of Hungary. So, she needs to get into Hungary; and she insists on going.

And, as she parts from a comrade named Reuven Dafni–another one of the Jewish parachutists–in the forest near the border, she shakes his hand, and he feels that she’s pressing something into his hand. And, she leaves, and he sees that she’s left him with a folded piece of paper. And, when he unfolds the paper, he sees that she’s written this poem.

So, in many ways, this poem is Hannah’s last will and testament. She will write a few other documents in prison after she’s captured, but this is something that she’s writing with the knowledge that it might be her last communication with home.

So, Dafni says in his account of these events that he was so annoyed at this theatrical gesture that he throws the poem away. He throws it into the bushes and kind of stomps off back to the partisan camp. And then regrets it and comes back to look for the piece of paper, and he finds it in a bush and brings it back. And, it eventually travels from Yugoslavia across the Mediterranean back to British Mandate Palestine. And, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the note. It’s kept at a kibbutz in Northern Israel.

So, that’s how this poem makes it home. And, it’s a very famous poem at the time. It’s printed almost immediately. It’s put to music. It becomes kind of a staple of youth movement meetings and rallies. And, what Hannah’s saying here is something that I think is very important–that the ideological style of the poem, I think, hasn’t aged well.

So, we kind of have to reinhabit that world where people felt comfortable making high-minded ideological pronouncements, which is what she’s doing. But, it’s quite clear here, I think, what she’s saying.

If you look at the common English translation of the poem, the first line reads, ‘Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.’ That’s the way it’s usually translated.

And, when I went to the Hebrew, I realized that that’s a mistranslation. And in fact, that mistranslation tells us something very important about the mission, because the whole point of the first line is not that the match is consumed in kindling flame. The point is that the match lights the flame.

The match is consumed after lighting the flame. And, in fact, that word, I think, explains what Hannah thinks that she’s doing. And, it kind of explains her transformation from a young woman living in Bohemian Budapest into a Zionist pioneer, because what differentiates Anna Szenes from Hannah Senesh is action.

She is a woman of action. And, she knows the match might be consumed, but first it will light the flame that consumes the match.

And, that’s what this poem says.

So, the poem has kind of been forgotten. It’s much less known today than Hannah’s most famous poem, which we could talk about if you want, but it’s still–

Matti Friedman: It’s still quite a famous poem, in Hebrew. And, it kind of falls on hard times along with all of the simple-sounding ideology of early Israel. And eventually, of course, there’s a discomfort with martyrdom, and there’s a discomfort with this whole story and what it seems to mean.

But, if we recreate the headspace of this very young woman in the summer of 1944, I think we can understand what she’s saying. She knows she’s about to cross the border between life and death, and she explicitly tells us that she’s happy to cross.

Matti Friedman: Hannah’s most famous poem, which is probably one of the most famous Hebrew texts in our times, is a song that is now called “Eli Eli.” That’s the song title as it eventually becomes famous. Hannah actually gave that poem a different name. She called it ‘The Walk to Caesarea,–Halikha LeKesarya’. Caesarea is a Roman ruin that was not far from the kibbutz where Hannah lived, which is called Sdot Yam.

And, it’s this very short poem. It’s just a few lines, and she writes it in 1942. And, there’s no ideology in it. There’s no pronouncements about anything. It’s just a very personal moment on the beach looking at the water, seems to be during a storm. And, it’s discovered along with Hannah’s belongings after she vanishes in Europe. And, it’s put to music immediately. It’s put to music in 1945. And it’s given this absolutely beautiful tune, and it’s kind of a perfect marriage of a melody and words.

The composer adds a word to the text to make it match the melody. So, he repeats the first word of the poem, which is ‘Eli,’ which in Hebrew means ‘My Lord.’ So, Hannah writes that once in her poem, and he adds another one. So, it becomes “Eli, Eli” in order to make it fit the scheme of the song. And, that song becomes what Hannah Senesh is known for. And, it’s been covered hundreds and hundreds of times.

As I was writing this book, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine–this was a couple of years ago–I happened upon a video on YouTube of these very burly Slavic guys in camouflage uniforms singing “Eli, Eli.” And, it was a Ukrainian military choir doing a version of “Eli, Eli.” So, people who may know nothing about Israel or about Hebrew literature know this song; and anyone, any of our listeners who attended Hebrew schools or Jewish summer camps or something like that probably encountered “Eli, Eli.” They might not know the story behind it or the woman who wrote it, but it remains one of the most famous songs in modern Hebrew.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely. The original Hebrew song, which is slightly different in one word from the poem that Hannah wrote, goes like this:

  אֵלִי, אֵלִי

שֶׁלֹּא יִגָּמֵר לְעוֹלָםהַחוֹל וְהַיָּם,רִשְׁרוּשׁ שֶׁל הַמַּיִם,בְּרַק הַשָּׁמַיִם,תְּפִלַּת הָאָדָם

That’s it. That’s the whole poem. And in English, it means:

My Lord,May these things never end.The sand and the sea,The murmur of water,the lightning in the sky,a human prayer.

That’s it. It’s kind of a perfect poem. And, it’s written by someone who writes it in Hebrew and has been speaking Hebrew at this time for three years.

And, what a funny detail that I discovered when I was looking into this: I was looking at the original copy of the poem from Hannah’s notebook where she writes this poem, and there’s a spelling mistake in it. She writes the word “לְעוֹלָם” [sounds like ‘le’olam’], which means in this case, ‘Never’–‘may these things never end.’ She writes it with–she gets one of the letters wrong. Instead of the word, the letter Ayin, she writes the letter Aleph, and it’s a reminder. It’s kind of like finding a typo in Yeats or something, because it’s such a famous poem, or finding out that Shakespeare didn’t know how to spell ‘fish’ or something like that. She was a new immigrant to this country, and she was operating in a place that she didn’t know very well and in a language that she had only recently learned.

And, that’s, I think, an important insight into her character.

Afterwards, she becomes kind of a legendary Israeli pioneer hero. So, she gets turned into almost the ultimate pioneer. So, she loves menial labor, which she’d hated. And she was ready for sacrifice, which she was. And, she is, of course–she’s a daughter of the nation. She’s essentially Israeli, even though she never lived in a country called Israel.

And, when you read this poem, you remember that she was a very young woman who came from somewhere else. And, the character of Hannah Senesh, the pioneer, was, to a very large extent, a character that she created. And again, this is a very theatrical, literary young woman. She understood character, and she made a conscious decision to stop being the character that she had inhabited until she finished high school, which was a Hungarian bourgeois, a girl named Anna Szenes, and she becomes something else. She becomes a pioneer named Hannah Senesh. And then she becomes a heroic parachutist. And, these are all very conscious decisions. And, she documents it in these poems. She has a notebook full of poems that she doesn’t tell anyone about because she’s embarrassed about writing poems because she’s meant to be a simple laborer and a socialist pioneer. And the sabras in those days did not respect poets.

You weren’t supposed to be an intellectual. The Jews had enough intellectuals. What they needed was dairy farmers and people who were happy to, I guess, scrub the pots in the kitchen. And, she had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with her own poetry, which she hides in a suitcase. And then, this notebook is found after her death, and people realized that she’d been writing quite striking poetry.

And again, I don’t want to oversell it. It’s not the most amazing poetry ever written, and she was a very young person. And, what it is really, I think “Eli, Eli” is a wonderful poem, particularly when put together with the music. But, this is poetry written by a very young person who would have been great, who could have been great. So, when we read Hannah Senesh’s diaries and letters and poems, and she left a lot, you see that it’s potential. It’s something that should have been allowed to grow into something amazing, and wasn’t. And, that’s part of the tragedy of this story.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely. These people are kind of fated to be remembered as cartoons. The fate of the hero is essentially to be venerated to the point where you’re a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a person, and that has definitely happened to Anne Frank. And, we can see that now as Anne Frank’s memory is abused by every conceivable political movement from left to right. And she’s a symbol of immigrants and progressive ideology and non-conformist sexuality. She’s a symbol for Palestinians if you’re on that side of things. She’s a symbol of people being forced to wear masks because of COVID [Coronavirus Disease], if you remember that, that episode. So, she’s a symbol of whatever you want. And it’s a terrible abuse of that person. She was just a little girl who was killed because she was a Jew, and she never thought anyone would read her diary, and she never asked to be famous.

And, there’s something tragic about it just as there’s something tragic about Hannah, who–she’s venerated. She becomes a national heroine, and she’s remembered beyond anything that she could possibly have expected when she was alive. But part of that process is just this flattening of her character.

And, one of the great things for me about writing this book was discovering what an incredible character she really was.

So, I also want to end with this idea that she was kind of–you know, it’s like Davy Crockett–like, how seriously are you going to take? It’s like George Washington and the cherry tree. I mean, literally, these are the things that people remember about people who are fantastically complex. And, Hannah Senesh was young, so she didn’t have time to be that complex, but she was an incredibly intelligent and determined woman. And, when you read her letters and her diary entries, even from a very young age, you see that this is someone with very powerful powers of observation and a very skillful way of expressing herself.

And, to turn her into the kind of Sabra poster child actually does her injustice. And, it’s better than the alternative, I guess, which is forgetting her. But, one thing that I’m trying to do in this book is to rescue her and, to some extent, her comrades, not just from amnesia, but from mythology. Because when you realize that they’re real people, they’re much more impressive. The cardboard cutouts aren’t impressive because they don’t seem like human beings. When you understand that she was a human being and she did what she did, I think she’s more of a heroine than I appreciated at the beginning of my work on this book.

Matti Friedman: I started writing this book in one state of mind and finished writing it in a completely different state of mind.

I started the research more than a year before October 7th. And when I did, I thought I was writing a book about a very distant historical episode. And, suddenly the times that Hannah lived in really came to life for me. And I’m not saying that this is the Holocaust and I’m not comparing the darkness of these times to the darkness of her times, but it’s much easier to imagine her times now than it was when I started researching this book. And I think that when I moved here–from Toronto in my case in 1995–I really thought that I was moving from one Jewish solution to another Jewish solution. I did not feel that North American Judaism was precarious. And I thought that actually liberal Western democracy had essentially solved the problem for people who wanted to partake in it. And that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem for people who wanted to live in a Jewish state.

And this is the mid-1990s, so it’s a pretty optimistic time and things seem to be going in the right direction. It’s the peace process.

And I’ve been through a lot here, long enough to doubt my certainty that everything was going in the right direction, but certainly it all crashed down on October 7th for everyone. And I think that anyone with their eyes open in the Jewish world understands that neither of these is a solution to the Jewish problem. And in fact, that we were, to a very large extent, deluded about where things stand–in North America in one way, in Israel in a different way–but that many Jews had been pretty sanguine about our situation in the 21st century when we should not have been. And I think we’re in a very different headspace right now.

And I think there’s not much that’s good about it. But, one thing that was good about it for me was that I think it allowed me to inhabit more effectively the world of my characters and to understand who they were and how they saw things and just to understand what it’s like to live in a world with–where all the doors are slammed shut and where there is no clear way to progress. And, if we feel that way now, then I mean, Hannah and her comrades felt that a million times over. We have a state; they had nothing and there was no clear path to one. And in 1944, it was the heart of darkness. There was nothing good that we know that seems possible.

And yet they didn’t live in denial. They didn’t go into their bed and pull the covers over their head and they didn’t run away and they didn’t pretend to be something else. They got on an airplane and jumped back into the fire. And they offer us a model for how to act in a time where the options are unclear. So the Zionist path is action. And that’s what Hannah is saying in that poem. The match isn’t consumed in the flame: the match lights the flame. So it’s all about action.

So in 1944, it seems that there’s nothing you can do. Well, Ben-Gurion would say, “We need to build another farm. We need to pave another road, to build another school; we need to teach some more kids to speak Hebrew.” It seems like nothing when six million people are being murdered, but eventually that nothing becomes something.

And just like this mission–which was essentially nothing in military terms–becomes something enormous that plays a part in saving the Jewish people. And that seems like a grand claim to make for a mission that clearly did not accomplish its goals, but it’s the story that Zionism tells people that allows the Jews to move past the catastrophe and become actors again, and become agents of their own fate again, and not fall into the trap of victimhood–which many have, including our most proximate neighbors. The Palestinians, who have a story that is about victimhood, and that is a trap, because if you see yourself as a victim, you’ll never be able to get anywhere.

So the Jews basically make up a different story where, again, they’re not refugees: they’re pioneers. And they’re not homeless because this has always been their home. And when you run away to Israel, that’s not running away. It’s called Aliyah, which means ascent. So there’s a different way to see your situation and stories are powerful things and no one knows that better than the Jews, of course, who survived for 2,000 years, thanks to stories. That was all they had, right? That was their only superpower. They certainly weren’t known for military prowess, and they weren’t known for their architecture or their art or for statecraft. What they knew how to do was tell very powerful stories that kept this thing going through the generations.

Ironically, it’s a superpower that we seem to have lost to a large extent since regaining sovereignty. So it’s possible that once you have the regular kind of power, you lose that old alchemy of storytelling. And what we’ve seen over the past few years has been an abject failure of this country to tell a story that makes sense about itself and about what it’s doing. And we’re dealing with the consequences of that, of course.

But all of these thoughts occurred to me thanks to–that’s a weird way of putting it–but occurred to me in the context of the post-October 7 world, which I think allowed me, gave me a different window into the time that I was writing about.

Matti Friedman: It was a pleasure, as always.