"Tammar Stein's Six-Day Hero (Kar-Ben, 2017) introduced readers to one Israeli family's tragic experience of the Six-Day War. With Beni's War, she continues their story. The Laor family has just moved to a moshav in the Golan where their youngest son Beni has a hard time fitting in. When he stands up for Sara, a girl whose appearance marks her out as 'different,' he's bullied by Yoni and Ori. It takes Beni's older brother Motti, on leave from the army, to put the bullies in their place; it will take the common experience of the Yom Kippur War to bind the teens together as friends. Sitting only five kilometers from the Syrian border, the moshav is set to evacuate when Syrian shells rain down. The residents huddle in shelters, emerging to 'a festival of bonfires. All the work, the hours in the hot sun, the new crops ready for harvest--for nothing.

' Without reading like propaganda, Beni's War sheds light on the strengths and vulnerabilities of Israeli life. Kibbutz Lavi welcomes the evacuees with clean diapers and baby formula. Watching a troop convoy, Beni muses, 'Every single person in those vehicles is facing danger to protect us. I wish I could do something,' then gets busy making sandwiches for the troops with Sara.When a truce is signed, Beni's family faces a second ordeal: Motti's capture by the Egyptians. It strains credulity when twelve-year-old Beni just happens to be in the right place at the right time to help repair the bus shuttling the Egyptian POWs to the border (thus ensuring the return of his brother). One also wonders whether Beni's empathy for the Egyptian POWs reflects contemporary Israeli sentiments or is aimed at a American readership: 'One by one, the Egyptians walk by me. They don't look angry or hateful.

The next man who passes me smiles and nods in silent greeting. I smile and nod back.' Still, Beni's War depicts neither an idealized Israel nor a flawed country which needs to be apologizedfor. Instead, it faithfully paints life as lived in a country where war is never far away." -- Marjorie Gann, retired teacher; author of Five Thousand Years of Slavery, Toronto, Canada, AJL.