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

"Nothing," I said, trying to steady my voice as I shifted from Arabic to Hebrew, and from Jonathan the Curious to Yonatan the Patrol Commander, "I just wanted to know who the internationals were."

"Nu? And?"

"Nazis," I said.

Gadi leaned forward, smiling impishly. "Listen to America here. Forty seconds in the desert and Yonatan's already getting hard."

Evgeny may or may not have let out a small laugh. He could have just been clearing the postsmoke mucus from his throat.

"You know what else?" I said. "That guy I was talking to said some shit about how the Jews want to destroy his village, and when I offered to help, he told me to 'go back to Europe.'?"

"Wait, what?" Tal said. "You offered to help? What exactly were you planning on doing?"

I shrugged.

"Exactly," Eviad said. "They live in this dirt pile, and we try to help them, and what do they do in return? Jihad. They blow up our buses and cafés in order to get their fucking seventy-six virgins. It's not about land or freedom. It's a holy war for them, and they're mostly just starved for pussy. Ha!"

Eviad's laughter then was a hyena's, and everyone in the Wolf went quiet. Eviad's little sister, Maya, had been on a bus that exploded in Haifa in 2004. She was thirteen and had lost most of the right half of her face. The doctors managed to keep her alive for almost a week.

"Seventy-two," Tal said.

"What?" Eviad said.

"It's seventy-two virgins."

I turned around in time to see Eviad's dark-blue eyes widen first, and then crinkle as he started to laugh, a pretty, clear laugh, like a cool spring bursting forward from the earth's belly. The tension inside the Wolf evaporated.

"Wait," Eviad said, "don't tell me that if an Iraqi Jewish guy gets killed in battle, he gets seventy-two virgins also?"

All of us laughed, except for Evgeny, who wasn't really one of us anyway.

Tal was bespectacled and as scrawny as Eviad was muscular. His dad's parents were Communists from Baghdad, who fled to Ramat Gan in 1950. Despite his familial history of flight—and from Muslims, at that—Tal was the other bleeding heart in our company.

We drove in silence for a few minutes until we arrived back at our base. We climbed out of the Wolf, and Evgeny shuffled slowly inside, his hands stuffed deep into his uniform's pockets. When Evgeny was out of earshot, Tal spoke in a hushed tone, and Eviad and Gadi and I crowded around him, leaning close, inhaling each other's familiar scents and recycling each other's familiar breaths.

"I heard there's going to be a demonstration there on Friday," Tal said.

"Really?" I said. "In Suswan? Where'd you hear that?"

We'd finished Advanced Training ready to be sent into battle, but we hadn't seen any action to speak of so far, just patrols like this one, and a false alarm outside Kerem El, when a fox had tripped the security wire.

Eviad shot at it and actually hit the stupid critter, which lay there whimpering for a good three minutes until we finally got radio permission from the Commander to leave our posts and put an end to its suffering. Eviad executed it with another bullet to the head, and I covered it in rocks, trying to stay somber but gagging as the weight of the stones pressed into the creature's soft body and a bit of its organs bulged from the hole in its side, blood surging out onto the ground around it, stench filling the air. We left the animal half covered, and Eviad and I ran back to our post in silence.

"I just heard it," Tal said.

I pictured then what I wanted to picture: men wearing purple polo shirts and keffiyehs wrapped around their faces, brandishing weapons and burning tires, chanting "Go back to Europe," a row of Germans standing there, clucking their tubby tongues and clicking pictures with their fancy cameras, proving to the world that the Jews were just as bad as they'd always said we were. I had mixed feelings about guarding the settlement that I didn't think should be in the West Bank in the first place, and I felt a little uneasy about waltzing into tin villages like we just had, but I was ready to fight the actual enemy. I was ready to feel like I was there for a reason.

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.