It's Yom Kippur 1973-the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. A massive attack of Arab armies threatens Israel's survival. Four decades later a compulsive volunteer reviews his chronicle of The Yom Kippur War. "Another Holocaust? Never again! I'm going."
In 1973, Adolfo boards a plane to Israel. Driving a red Subaru at the front line of the war, he emerges unharmed from the shrapnel rain of a dismembered tank. A shot blinds his headlights. He is wounded, rolling down a hill into a God-sent bunker. In danger, his imagination carries him to his personal bunker, his past. He re-lives his earlier visit to Israel: an adolescent stowaway under a bunk in the female dormitory of a Jewish ship-which lands him in a Jewish jail. Ducking death, his mind jumps to his escape from the Las Vegas mafia. Crossing devastated Syrian towns, he recalls his search for handicrafts in the mountain villages between Bolivia and Peru. While Israel is running out of ammunition he sings his song to an enemy, a Syrian hero.
But he lands over and over on a reality of senseless mutilation and death; of young men killing young men they never met; of patriotic Jewish and Arab mothers sending their children to kill for "The Cause", getting back a hero inside a wooden box.
This book is about Adolfo's chase of a chimera that may still be going on.
About the Author: Adolfo Neufeld was born in Argentina. During his adolescence he shared many hours of discussion with Ernesto Guevara, the budding "Che." He aborted a medical career and, penniless, he ventured wayward to see other lands. For three years he traveled around the world hitchhiking across Brazil, the U.S., Europe and Israel; moving between continents as a sailor and a wanderer across lands.
He returned to Argentina to cultivate his writing passion. He tried to study philosophy and literature, but the universities were corrupted by a military-clerical culture. In his second departure his objective was financial independence.
With ten borrowed dollars he jumped ship in New York City. He worked as a bus boy, delivery boy, sandwich man, and door-to-door salesman in Spanish Harlem. He tried his hand as a language teacher, retailer, wholesaler of handicrafts, importer and designer of leather goods. He finally founded his own enterprise gradually clawing his ascent to become another example of the achievers of "The American Dream."
Reviving his early ideals, in 1973 he volunteered to the Yom Kippur War. Thirty-five years later he collected stories of his life strung like beads, laced to his take of the Yom Kippur War, and he wrote To War in a Red Subaru. Only months after the first edition, on a visit to Auschwitz, reconnecting to The Holocaust, he fully understood the true engine that drove him into the war. In 1995 he retired to Switzerland to center on his youth's ambition: to write. He joined the Geneva Writers Group, and for many years was part of their Steering Committee.
He wrote a "cybernetic story", Love@First Site, now in the publication process. He is now polishing The Admiral Made a Deal, an extended historical novel, a fifty year saga of an idealist starting in Argentina and ending in Fidel Castro and "Che" Guevara's decaying Cuba, and New York.
