Publisher's Weekly Review
Friedman, an Israeli journalist and writer, recounts the history of a hilltop bunker in southern Lebanon that was held by the Israeli army during the 1990s, beginning with the biography of a young soldier stationed there and transitioning into a memoir of his own time on the hill and his post-war visit as a tourist. Friedman's personal reflections alternate with a history of Israel's conflict in Lebanon, which he refers to as an unnamed and forgotten war, as he covers civilian sentiment, political responses to war and protest, and military strategy through the period. Though short, the book is remarkably educational and heartfelt: Friedman's experiences provide a critical historical perspective on the changing climate of war in the Middle East, shifting from short official conflicts into longer unwinnable wars full of guerilla tactics and the deliberate creation of media narratives and images. His lyrical writing, attention to detail, and personal honesty draw the reader into empathy along with understanding. Friedman's memoir deserves wide readership. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Powerful account of youthful Israelis maturing, fighting, and dying at a forgotten Lebanon outpost. In this limber, deceptively sparse take on the Middle East's tightening spiral of violence, Friedman (The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, 2012) combines military history and personal experience on and off the line in deft, observant prose. The narrative is reminiscent of novels by Denis Johnson and Robert Stone, linking combat's violent absurdity to the traumatized perspectives of individual participants. Friedman covers the period from about 1994 to 2000, and most of the action takes place at a fortified border emplacement, nicknamed the Pumpkin, meant to prevent guerrilla incursions from southern Lebanon. The author notes that he and his predecessors found themselves "in a forgotten little corner of a forgotten little war, but one that has nonetheless reverberated with quiet force in our lives.Anyone looking for the origins of the Middle East of today would do well to look closely at these events." In the first section, Friedman dramatizes the experiences of an early unit serving there, focusing on Avi, a soldier who fulfills the infantry archetype of the rebellious miscreant who was changed by vicious combat, here against an increasingly professionalized Hezbollah. Avi's death in a helicopter accident fueled the civilian peace movement, represented by the anguish of the mothers of such casualties. Yet, as Friedman discovered during his own tour of the Pumpkin, the enemy they faced was quietly mutating: "Israel found itself facing an enemy other than the one it thought it was fighting." Throughout, the author grapples with questions regarding both Israeli aggression and the nature of the state's survival. In a chilling final section, he chronicles his travels as a Canadian tourist to his former combat zone in Lebanon, encountering friendly residents in thrall to Hezbollah and seething with anti-Semitism. A haunting yet wry tale of young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Writing out of a surprising sense of gratitude, Friedman gives thanks for what he learned by serving in the late 1990s as an Israeli soldier assigned to a vulnerable hilltop fortress in Lebanon called the Pumpkin. Above all, the Pumpkin taught Friedman that a frighteningly thin line separates him from soldiers who perished during the Lebanon conflict, soldiers like the free-spirited writer Avi, whose life ended in a tragic helicopter crash. But then the Pumpkin repeatedly exposed realities hidden behind conventional boundaries. Readers marvel, for instance, at how battlefield events dissolve beneath the illusion of media images captured by a Hezbollah cameraman. The definitions separating soldier from civilian also repeatedly fade as the guerrillas threatening the Pumpkin vanish into village populations and as Israeli mothers spearhead a pacifist movement forcing military planners to abandon their strategies. Even the hard division pitting Israeli against Arab softens when Friedman recognizes a genial countenance in the photograph of a dead Hezbollah fighter. Disturbingly, however, readers finally contemplate the way Israel's failed incursion into Lebanon has catalyzed a new regional turbulence, vaporizing hopes for peace between Israelis and Arabs and plunging Syria, Iraq, and their neighbors into a cauldron of chaos. A compelling narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ISRAEL, LIKE AMERICA, is an idea, not just a place. As a result, it has been subjected to much metaphorical thinking - it is a refuge, a beacon, a start-up company, an unlikely flower blooming in an unforgiving desert. Since the Middle East's descent into chaos following the Iraq war and the aftermath of the Arab Spring, not to mention the crash and burn of the peace process, Israelis have had their own preferred metaphor for their current situation: an isolated hilltop fortress in hostile territory, where a semblance of normal life persists within concrete barriers. In "Pumpkinflowers," Matti Friedman's sober and striking new memoir, this metaphor finds its sharpest articulation. Friedman was, literally, stationed at such an outpost. Canadian by birth, he served in the Israeli Army during the late 1990s in the last years of its military presence in southern Lebanon. The security zone, as it was known, was made up of a series of fortified lookouts, each surrounded by trenches and housing little more than bare bunkers. The army gave these lonely outposts unusually perky names like Red Pepper and Basil. Friedman was stationed at the Pumpkin. The book is as much about Friedman's time in Lebanon as it is a narrative of the Pumpkin's final years, and especially the young soldiers who fought and died to defend it. Friedman is haunted by the deaths. By the 1990s, the rationale for Israel's continued presence in Lebanon - a remnant of its 1982 invasion - had worn thin. When a midair helicopter collision near the border in 1997 took the lives of 73 soldiers on their way to the security zone, grieving mothers began a movement demanding that Israel evacuate, which it did in 2000. Friedman's own time at the Pumpkin is filled with a sense of inertia and pointlessness - like the trench warfare of World War I, he often notes. But there is also intimacy and brotherhood. There's the absurdity of all the waiting and watching, as well as the adrenaline rush and confusion when the boredom is punctuated by spectacular violence, streaking out of the sky. Friedman understands, too, as few outsiders do, how central the military is to Israeli identity - as much a rite of passage before adulthood as a matter of citizenship. A weekend leave from the base was for these young soldiers, he writes, a time when "your father hugged you and your mother cooked you dinner, and the washing machine whirled green as you fell asleep in the room where you grew up." The collective portrait puts "Pumpkinflowers" on a par with Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" - its Israeli analog. In the book's last section, Friedman describes a secret trip he took to Lebanon in 2002, two years after the end of his service and the Israeli withdrawal. He used his Canadian passport to enter and roam the enemy country, stand again on the hilltop of the Pumpkin and visit the neighboring town, which he had seen only through a gun sight. The Pumpkin had taken on a larger meaning for Friedman both as a precursor to the counterinsurgency warfare everyone would get to know in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the kind of place that incubated the hardened and disillusioned Israelis of today, unwilling to entertain hopes for peace. A fortressed existence has made them good at blocking out the rest of the Middle East, imagining themselves somewhere else, Silicon Valley perhaps, or wedged between Paris and Berlin. Remembering an improvised, shirtless, sweaty rave inside one of the Pumpkin's bunkers, Friedman sees a microcosm of the Israeli condition: "Laughter inside the perimeter; outside, the quiet of the trench and young men in guard posts." The Pumpkin is a metaphor born of practicality and a truly bad situation all around. But it's also one with a dreadful portent. The rave came to an end, and the scruffy outpost Friedman used to call home was eventually mined with explosives, blown up and abandoned. GAL BECKERMAN is the author of "When They Come for Us, We'll Re Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry."
