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

I held the joint between my fingers, testing the give of the melted hash and wisps of tobacco rolled tightly into the little white paper.

"Puff puff pass, J," you said, laughing, and I was blown away by the fact that you knew that phrase.

Al-Kalf and al-Jouah.

Of course those are the two I remember now, habibi.

I know it sounds silly, Laith, but I was thinking about that night on the beach and how the Arabic blended with the sizzle of the sea and the crackle of the slow-burning joint, and so I was caught off guard when the man in Suswan spit, a heavy, viscous glob that stayed intact as it landed on the toasted earth, not far from my red-leather Paratrooper boots. He looked back up at me, and only then did I understand that the smile growing bigger on his lips was not one of gratitude.

"You want to help me?" he said. "Here's how you can help me: Get out of Palestine. All of you. Go back to Europe."

I was frightened by how quickly the tingle on my nape turned to raised hackles; by how ugly his eyes seemed; by how much I wanted to drive my fist or the butt of my M-16 into one of them. If I'd been Gadi or Eviad, I might have done it. Instead, I just spoke: "It didn't exactly go that well for us, back in Europe."

He was silent.

I thought about telling him that Tal's whole family was from Iraq and that Eviad was part Moroccan, but decided that would sound defensive. Anyway, I thought, what did it matter, Baghdad or Fez or Warsaw or Salonica? Jews deserved a home here too.

"This is our home too," I said.

He didn't say anything.

His silence pushed me over the edge.

"No, you know what? You're right. Maybe the Holocaust was just a mu'amira sahioniya," I said, repeating the Arabic phrase I'd heard a handful of times over the past year and a half, mostly from your sister. Usually Nimreen would grin when she'd say it, but I wasn't grinning now: "Maybe everything is a Zionist conspiracy. All your problems are because of a Zionist conspiracy. Is that right?"

The man spit again. He no longer looked at all afraid of me.

"Do you want anything else?" he said. "To search me? To arrest me?"

I pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth. It's hard for me to admit how badly I wanted his fear to return. I glanced over at the group under the olive trees, whose members had seemingly lost interest in the two of us and were gabbing to each other, comparing pictures on the small screens of their cameras. I thought about Jacko and about my grandfather and about refuge and about hopeless yellow-eyed revolts. About how history never seems to manage to wipe its tracks clean as it slumps into the present.

"No," I said, "go ahead. Go make up some more stories for your German friends."

Anger flashed unmistakable onto his face. He didn't say anything.

"Sorry," I said, "Austrian solidarity visitors."

I shifted my grip on my M-16 and glanced over my shoulder performatively, reminding him of my brothers standing by the Wolf. I didn't think about you then, Laith, or your sister, or what you would have thought if you saw me like that, chest swelling, nostrils flared, palms resting heavy on my pygmy angel of death, twisted into four kilograms of black metal warmth. He remained in place and swallowed. A current shot through my teeth. I felt invincible.

"What sort of critical intelligence did you gather, Yonatan?" Eviad asked as I rejoined the group. Tal rested his hand on the back of my neck, stroked his thumb over the nub at the top of my spine. You once told me it was called the axis vertebra, Laith, but I clucked my tongue and said that I was pretty sure that "topmost spinal nub is the more technically accurate scientific term," and you conceded. I took off my helmet and Gadi patted my head, bursting the sweat droplets balanced on the spikes of my hair like dew, and we all climbed into the Wolf, where Evgeny was already waiting in the driver's seat. I sat shotgun.

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.