After the Israeli curator, gallery founder, sculptor and peace advocate Chaim Peri finished writing Yarena, his children’s book about a grandfather and his granddaughter who go out to look for the moon, he asked the well-known Israeli artist Ophra Eyal if she would do the illustrations. He knew she would bring her poetic vision to his simple story, an encomium to nighttime and the night sky, as well as an unsentimental look at the bond of caring between a grandparent and grandchild.
The little book has a cover showing a child’s bedroom as it might be seen at night. There are drawings on the walls, a child-size table and chair, some toys—a wooden puppet set on a scooter and a rabbit with whiskers positioned in a little cart—as well as a scatter of stars floating in the air. On the back cover, you can see a small golden moon with tiny children playing at its uppermost edge. (For now the book is only available in Hebrew, but there is hope that it will soon be translated into English.)
Text and illustration from Yarena (Credit: ©Ophra Eyal).
Peri’s text is straightforward and carefully observed, as translated by Illustrator Ophra Eyal:
Grandpa and Ela are moving towards the road.
Soft light shines through the shades of the houses.
Headlights from passing cars draw lines
along the outside walls of the houses.
Cattle egrets are finding their places on the treetops,
making their voices loud as they’re getting ready for night.
Crickets chirp. A dog barks constantly.
Maybe his collar has gotten tangled.
Every squeak squeaks and every small sound
sounds loudly because of the silence.
It’s hard to reconcile the radiance and normality of the book with the fate of its author, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and died in a Gaza tunnel on an unknown date, sometime before his 80th birthday.
Born in Givatayim, east of Tel Aviv, Peri came to Nir Oz (“Meadow of Strength” in English) when he was 18 years old. As a member of Nahal, a program started by Ben-Gurion that allowed young soldiers to work together in combined military and farming service, he joined the army as a paratrooper, fought in four wars, and worked the land as a kibbutznik, retiring from the army at the age of 50. Like so many others who lived very close to the edges of the country, he was used to attacks but believed there was an unwritten contract that he had done his part, and in return the army and the government would always be there to protect him and his family.
Peri also believed that there must be a humane way to resolve what Israelis call “the situation.” In 1999, he started an art gallery, the White House, in an abandoned shack on the periphery of Nir Oz, and he took pride in representing all segments of Israeli society in his shows—men, women, gays, Arabs, Bedouins, and artists, both professional and the Sunday afternoon variety. For many years, he volunteered with Road to Recovery, driving Palestinian children from Gaza to hospitals and doctor’s appointments in Israel, and he was a proponent of peace. In April, five months after being taken hostage by Hamas, there was hope that Peri was still alive. His oldest grandson, Mai Albini Peri, spoke then about his grandfather’s values and his empathy, which had inspired the family: “I was raised to put yourself in the other side’s shoes, no matter how much you don’t like them or how much you don’t agree with them.”
I recently interviewed Ophra Eyal, the book’s illustrator. She knew Peri from about 2004, when she was married to a younger member of Nir Oz and they would go there on weekends and holidays with their children, sometimes bringing her father, a retired general and military historian who was the same generation as Peri and an old friend. The two men had served in the military together and enjoyed sharing memories of adventures and exploits during the perilous times of their youth. After Eyal finished her graduate degree, Peri invited her to exhibit at his gallery. “He gave me my first chance,” she told me. She described Peri as a man whose character was shaped by the experiences of Israel’s idealistic beginnings. She said he was “charming, funny, deep, serious in an understated sort of way—something like Alan Arkin’s Captain John Yossarian, the bombardier in the film Catch 22.” He often saw the absurdity in things and was known for both his strong opinions and free spirit. But he was also disciplined, “a man of the earth,” with the complex values of people who have seen the horror of war. Peri liked to work in the kibbutz’s metal shop, where he invented machinery like the little wheeled cart with a box seat and a steering wheel for Ela that you can see the grandfather pushing in some of the illustrations for Yarena. He designed a sculpture garden on the kibbutz that included a metal silhouette he cast of his own shadow, which the children on the kibbutz called “the scary sculpture.” He was entrepreneurial and helped establish the kibbutz’s small winery. He loved music, ranging from Israeli singers Arik Einstein and Chava Alberstein to rock classics and jazz. And he was a fan of the Hapoel Tel Aviv football team.
Text and illustration from Yarena (Credit: ©Ophra Eyal).
In 2022, when Eyal first began to think about the pictures for Yarena, she decided the figure of the grandfather should look like Peri himself and she went to the kibbutz and photographed him in many poses and positions. But after that, the project stalled. She had never before worked on a children’s book and she confided in me that she hadn’t really known where to start. A lot of time passed while she put it off, taking care of other obligations.
The week before what the Israelis call Black Saturday, she and Peri happened to talk on the phone, and he said, “I just have a wish that the book could be ready for my 80th birthday in April.” Eyal replied, “It’s a done deal.” After that, he began sending her pictures of the metal wagon he was working on that he said he wanted to be in the story and she began making sketches, but they were very rough. On the morning of October 7, when all of Israel first heard about the terror attack, Eyal texted Peri at 8:30 in the morning. “Are you all right?” she asked. Even though he had long been in the safe room and knew the terrorists had infiltrated and that there was horror occurring throughout the kibbutz, in his typical way, he responded to her call, “Yeah, yeah, big mess. Waiting for the battle fog to lift. Every few years we like to be surprised.” Eyal told me that even then he was downplaying the situation, making light of it, trying to keep her from panicking. That was their last conversation.
It’s hard to reconcile the radiance and normality of the book with the fate of its author.
The story of Peri’s heroism on the morning of October 7 is well-known in Israel. He and his wife Osnat had gone to their safe room early that morning, responding to alarms but assuming they were only sounding because of missiles, an occurrence that was not unusual in the Israeli communities that border Gaza. It didn’t take long for them to recognize the devastation that was happening at Nir Oz, and they managed to send a few texts during the first hours when bands of terrorists were going from house to house, murdering entire families, setting fires, looting, emptying cabinets of children’s clothes and toys. The elderly couple were together in the safe room when a terrorist came for them, pushing open the door. Amazingly, Peri had the strength to shove the man out, while motioning to his wife to hide in the darkened area behind them. When the terrorist returned with three other men, one of them said to him, “Don’t cause trouble and we won’t kill you.” Osnat was concealed in a laundry basket full of clothes not far from them and Chaim realized they didn’t know she was there. He stood up and surrendered, saving his wife, since the terrorists assumed he was alone. Osnat Peri remained in the safe room for seven more hours until the security forces arrived, but one of the many sorrows for the family is that Chaim didn’t live to find out she survived.
During the traumatic aftermath of October 7, it was difficult for Eyal to think about the children’s picture book, but in December she created an exhibit honoring Peri’s White House Gallery at the French Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv. Osnat was there and they talked about the book. Osnat hoped it could still be completed before Chaim’s 80th birthday in April as he had requested. According to Eyal, at that point there was still the aspiration that a deal would be made and that Chaim would be released in time to celebrate publication.
While the terrible news was coming from Gaza, it was very painful for Eyal to work with the original pictures she had taken of Peri, to see happy images of him with his bold walrus mustache and piercing blue eyes, laughing or making humorous faces, and be reminded of how she had been with her friend just a few months earlier. Since she envisioned the story of the grandfather and granddaughter taking place on the grounds of the kibbutz, she went back to Nir Oz for a photo shoot. It was a totally different place than she remembered. “It was terrible,” she said. “For 20 years, I knew the kibbutz by heart, every little road. Now, I saw the destruction, burnt houses, the blood in the soil. It’s a dead place. You can’t imagine how it was before and then after. Everywhere you look you see death and you smell death.”
Nonetheless, Eyal managed to take photographs that helped orient the setting of the story. When you turn the pages of the book, you see illustrations of Nir Oz’s sun-shaped botanical garden with its many different kinds of grasses, which have thrived over decades in the desert climate. And there are several lighthearted touches showing the simplicity and intimacy of kibbutz life—a chair left out, a little pinwheel planted in the ground, or the handmade sign Peri once affixed to a tree. It says “Village Fools,” but the Hebrew is a pun for “Village Drinkers,” and is a testament to his joie de vivre.
Ophra Eyal uses a charcoal pencil medium for a darker mood (Credit: © Ophra Eyal).
Originally, Eyal had wanted to illustrate the book with watercolors, giving it a lighter tone and character, but when she started to do sketches, including a picture of one of the kibbutz cats that survived the massacre and still lives on the property, she realized that wasn’t the correct medium and turned instead to charcoal pencil, which creates a darker mood. Eyal told me she had a dilemma, worrying that the style was inappropriate for a children’s book, but she consulted with a friend, an expert children’s book illustrator, who reassured her and she began to understand that the project was going to fall somewhere between a graphic novel and a children’s book. “Nothing is by the book in this story,” she explained. In fact, light glows on the pages where she’s drawn the globe-shaped street lamps of the kibbutz as well as in the interior scenes where she placed the shower of stars that brings magic to the granddaughter’s bedroom. And Eyal uses brilliant colors—oranges, yellow, green and lavender—on the page that depicts the ravishing Sun Queen. She told me that the image was inspired by a picture on social media of Shani Louk, the beautiful, free-spirited young woman killed during the massacre at the Nova Music Festival, her body famously brought back to Gaza and paraded by terrorists on the back of a pickup truck.
In many ways, the book was a communal project. “Everybody does what they can for the sake of the hostages,” Eyal said with sadness. While she was working to meet the April deadline, she assembled a whole team—a children’s book designer, a literary editor, members of Peri’s family, a graphic editor and a printer—and they formed their own WhatsApp group, encouraging one another and resolving the many problems that occurred because the author wasn’t there to approve or disapprove of decisions. When they had to make cuts, for instance, they called Osnat Peri and read the text out loud to her, listening for fluency, making sure that Chaim’s voice could be heard in the cadences. Together they chose the title, which is a combination of two Hebrew words for the moon, yare’ach and levanah; made the decision to keep the granddaughter’s name as Ela, even though there were many other grandchildren born after the book was conceived (Peri was the father of 5 children and 13 grandchildren); and they also agreed it would be essential to include an epilogue that was a wish or a prayer that Peri would see the book published for his 80th birthday and that he would come back and be safe.
There are two epilogues to the book. The first appears in the last pages of the early edition, which was delivered three days before Peri’s birthday and pictures him as a clockmaker smoking a pipe, a tribute to the pipe he loved, which survived the decimation and was found lying in the grass after the massacre. Eyal pointed out that smoke is an age-old symbol used in vanitas, as is the skull you see in the background and the collection of books, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, which all reference time and the transience of life. In the illustration, Peri stands in a workshop with an open birdcage, surrounded by clocks that have all stopped at 7:10, which was the time the terrorists entered Nir Oz and an indication of a communal wish that time might be reversed. This first epilogue reads: Chaim Peri, member of kibbutz Nir Oz, wrote a poetic story that takes place on the paths of the kibbutz and in the realms of the imagination. On October 7, 2023, he was cruelly abducted from his home and contact with him was lost. Chaim had a wish—that the story about his granddaughter would be illustrated by the artist Ophra Eyal and published for his 80th birthday, in April 2024. May he get to hold this book in his hands.
Sadly, a different epilogue appears in the later edition and tells of his fate as we now know it, an emblem of the cruelty of this historic moment.
Note: The first Hebrew edition sold out and a second edition of 8,500 copies has been published, which in a small country like Israel is quite a lot. The book can be obtained for a donation at the headquarters of the families of the abductees.
Top image: From Chaim Peri’s “Yarena” (Credit:© Ophra Eyal).