In her book, “When We See You Again,” out today, Rachel Goldberg-Polin gets granular with grief. She makes us not just a reader but a witness to her story of loving her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and the heart-shattering journey of trying and failing to get him back alive after he was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7.
“The book is about two things and two things only, and that is love and pain,” Goldberg-Polin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is not a memoir. This is not a tell-all… This is really just pain in words.”
If you’ve been following any news out of Israel since October 7, you’ve definitely seen Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s pain, whose 23-year-old son was captured at the Nova Festival. You may have seen her tears on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in 2024, flanked by her husband, Jon. Or at a podium in the UN. Or howling out in pain at the Gaza border with other parents and family members of hostages. And you probably saw, just a few days later, crying her love and her pain at Hersh’s funeral, after his body was returned to Israel along with the other “Beautiful Six,” all executed at close range by Hamas as IDF forces neared in August of 2024.
Despite that overwhelming pain, you’ve also probably been awed by Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s eloquence and elegance. In a recent interview with Good Morning America, she said that in her advocacy for her son and the rest of the hostages, she found herself channeling the stateliness of Meryl Streep. Yet in that stateliness, she also touched so many of us, especially fellow Jewish mothers.
Pain, Goldberg-Polin writes, is universal — all loss, she has learned, is the same, even if the backdrop and stage design is different.
“I have learned that the specifics of pain are not critical to understanding actual suffering. But I share those details so that you don’t feel lost in learning about our loss,” she writes in the introduction of her book. Goldberg-Polin’s prose is a marvel, so precise and singular, so full of feeling. She paints an image of Hersh more evocative than any actual photos, from his hair to his toes.
While, as Philissa Cramer writes in JTA, Goldberg-Polin “doesn’t attempt to balance emotional devastation with a message of resilience,” there are definitely moments of light in her story. One came, quite literally, from Or Levy, a hostage who returned to tell her about the few days he spent with Hersh in captivity. His words, she likened in an interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” this week, to “shocking, life-affirming CPR from beyond.” Levy tattooed the mantra Hersh gifted him and the rest of the hostages when they spent time together, a paraphrase of a Viktor Frankl quote: “He who has a why has a how.”
When Goldberg-Polin asked Levy what Hersh’s “why” was, he gestured toward the grieving mother. He also told her that Hersh had heard her fighting for him in the tunnels of Gaza, through her many public appearances calling for his return.
“Part of Jon and me is now buried in the ground overlooking a forest. It’s pretty there. And quiet. But we are still here. What does it look like here now? Come, and I’ll tell you,” she writes in her book. It’s impossible not to answer her call to bear witness.
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