If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?

What I learned from this book: the meaning of Israel.

"For the Russians, a longing for home was not an unreasonable hope, even probable: a yearning to go back, a call. For the Jews, the regret for their houses was not a hope but a despair, buried till then under more urgent and serious sosrrows, but latent always. Their homes no longer existed: they had been swept away, burned by the war or by slaughter, bloodied by squads of hunters of men; tomb houses, of which it was best not to think, houses of ashes. Why go on living, why fight? For what house, what country, what future?"

Despair is what drives Levi's partisans to fight. They fight because there is nothing else for them to do, nowhere else for them to go, no one else to strike out against. And as they fight, they move gradually south, towards Italy and that mythical place called Palestine, that place where Jews can finally be free of persecution.

The tragedy is that thanks to hindsight, we know what happened to Israel and Palestine. There was no peaceful utopia waiting for the Jews "beyond the sea, in fairy-tale land, where milk and honey flow."

And what really makes this book special is the end. Bittersweet. Symbolic. Beautiful.