Excerpt from Sadness Is a White Bird by Moriel Rothman-Zecher, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On a shelf inside my head, alongside the piles of my good intentions, I'd placed a little sign that read "No Illusions." These were the Territories, after all. This wasn't Beit al-Asal.

There was one village, Suswan, which seemed to have more going on than the other villages. Structurally, it was the same: dilapidated houses, tragic mutts, graffiti sprayed on the rocks reading "Freedom Falestine" in English and "No to the Zionist Colonization" in Arabic. The difference in Suswan was the number of people who seemed to be constantly coming and going. On the day of my birthday, July 23rd, our patrol passed by Suswan and I noticed a big group seated in a semicircle by the village's olive grove. We were packed into the belly of an armored vehicle called a Ze'ev—a Wolf—whose shell was built around the skeleton of a Ford F-550, and was designed to protect against light weapons' fire, as well as Molotov cocktails and rocks. The driver was a sullen, chain-smoking professional soldier named Evgeny. He was at least five years older than us, and Russian, and it wasn't clear how well he actually spoke Hebrew,

so he sort of faded into the background of the Wolf: dashboard, windshield, Evgeny. I'd been appointed patrol commander for the afternoon, and I told Evgeny to stop at the outskirts of the village. At first, it didn't seem like he'd heard me or, if he had, like he gave a shit about what I was telling him to do.

"Evgeny, man," I repeated, in louder, slower Hebrew, "Atzor kan. Stop here."

The Wolf veered left and rolled to an off-road stop, earth clods and small plants crushed under its tires, and from the way Evgeny looked over at me, I wondered whether he might murder me in my sleep. This was a running joke I had with Gadi and Tal and Eviad: "Good night, dudes," we'd say. "See you in the morning, unless Evgeny gets you first." I looked at him now, at the bluish bags under his gray eyes, and felt a little bad that we'd decided he might be a serial killer, just because he was pale and brooding. Maybe he wasn't even brooding. Maybe he was just shy.

"You don't have to come," I said. "You can wait here and smoke or something."

Evgeny blinked.

I looked back at Gadi, Eviad, and Tal, at their lopsided smiles as they stretched their arms and cracked their knuckles and tumbled out of the Wolf into the sweltering sunlight.

"I'm going over there, guys," I said, closing my door gently. "Any of you want to join?"

Gadi said, in English, and Tal and Eviad laughed.

Is this Arabian booty call, America?" Gadi said, in English, and Tal and Eviad laughed.

"Go fuck yourself," I said, in Hebrew, running a hand over the side of my beard to obscure some of the blood vessels glowing below the skin of my cheeks

"The Commander said we should make sure they notice us, right? And anyway, aren't you curious to see who all those people are?"

I gestured toward the semicircle: eight or ten fleshy pink faces sheltering from the sun in the sparse shade supplied by Suswan's silver-leaved olive trees. They were wearing beige vests, and some had crucifixes dangling from their necks. In the silence that followed my question, I could hear that they were speaking what sounded like German. There was one Palestinian guy sitting there with them.

"Not so curious, to be honest," Eviad said, and Gadi made a thrusting motion with his pelvis and I flicked both of them off and Tal laughed. I took a deep breath, tasting the smoke from the three cigarettes lit, almost in unison, around me. Evgeny had gone to smoke on the other side of the Wolf. I was the only guy in my platoon who didn't smoke, as well as the only one who spoke Arabic. A few others could speak a bit, and everyone knew "Waqaf, waqaf walla ana batukhak" and "Iftah al-bab." We'd all learned those phrases—"Stop, stop or I'll shoot you" and "Open the door"—from postdraft friends or older siblings, back when we were still in high school. And "Jib al-hawiya," of course. "Give me your ID card."

Excerpted from Sadness Is a White Bird by Moriel Rothman-Zecher. Copyright © 2018 by Moriel Rothman-Zecher. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.