Beginnings,1948

In 1946, twenty-year old Gertrude Segelman sailed for Palestine, looking to reconnect with a father who had left when she was six to follow his Zionist dream. What she found was an incredible adventure. In her first year, she dodged British soldiers to build illegal settlements, worked the earth for the first time on a kibbutz, changed her name to Tova, and married Mordechai Eizik, an Irgun idealist living in a tiny village on the Syrian border.

When she married Mordechai, and moved to far-flung Mishmar HaYarden to join his Irgun pioneer group, Tova found herself sandwiched between two hostile forces: the Syrians just across the Jordan River, and the powerful socialist Mapai party that controlled most of the Jewish arms and fighting men. It was no surprise that the Syrian army was able to conquer Mishmar Ha Yarden in the 1948 war. The surprising part was that Tova and Mordechai survived.

In this poignant memoir, Tova tells a story of the tumultuous birth years of Israel from the perspective of a nave but gutsy American girl left on the margins of the Jewish state. Tragic, funny and stranger than fiction, it is tribute to the memory both of Mordechai and of Mishmar HaYarden, and to Tovas amazing strength and big personality.