The Day Everything Changed: An Aesthetic-Artistic Experience of Ongoing Trauma

"The Day Everything Changed" succeeds in telling stories of survivors and victims from October 7th where many other texts have failed, creating an aesthetic-artistic experience from trauma that is still unfolding for us.

first publication (Heb.) October 8, 2024

The Day Everything Changed: Ten Stories from October Seventh, edited by Neta Gorevitz and Asaf Hanuka, Yooka Publishing, 2024.

The Day Everything Changed: Ten Stories from October Seventh, cover

"The Day Everything Changed" is a collection of graphic stories about ten stories from October 7th. The book was published by Yooka Books, a new publishing house for visual literature, and this is their first project to see the light of day. The collection's editors, Neta Gorbitz and Asaf Hanuka, describe in the book's introduction why the visual medium stood out in the creative response to the trauma of October 7th.

They mention the immediacy and directness of the medium, the fact that it was (and still is) difficult to find words that would convey the great trauma, and above all, the fact that the medium of illustration, comics, and graphic storytelling were the complete opposite of the horror videos, the live documentation.

Everything really changed on that day, so it's not surprising that a less standard medium was needed for testimonial stories. This collection succeeds where many other texts have failed, in creating an aesthetic-artistic experience from trauma that is unfortunately still unfolding for us. The small (too small) distance from the disaster expands when creators need to mediate a story that isn't their own, and when each of them is given complete creative freedom.

This is a carefully crafted collection in every respect, wide-ranging in large format with a hard cover, and I'm sure it was preceded by a thorough process of investigation and processing. In this review, I'll delve into three lines of thought that seem significant to me for understanding the stories themselves as well as the place of this collection within the field of Israeli literature, which is required to deal with enormous trauma, from a distance of only one year.

Heroes in a Distorted Reality

The collection is very balanced from almost every perspective: five of the stories will probably be familiar to most readers, five may have escaped collective consciousness. There's one story here of a survivor from the Nova party, six stories of Gaza envelope residents, and four more heroes who left their relatively safe homes to help others. There are heroic women here, heroic men, heroic boys and girls, and even one dog.

The anthology's editors emphasize that it seems the diverse displays of heroism in the collection are taken from the world of legends, but they're not. There's historical importance to documenting them because they actually happened, and there's moral importance to these specific stories because they emphasize values of humanity, brotherhood, kindness, and friendship.

From this, some have physical, combat heroism like that of Ido Rosenthal z"l, described in Yonatan Poper's story as a superhero from the comic book world. The heroism of paramedic Amit Mann z"l and policewoman Mali Shoshana stems directly from their strong character, but also from their dedication to their role. Another kind of heroism is managing to hide from absolute evil, as in the stories of Michael and Amalia Idan and Maya Alper.

Double heroism can be found in the heroism story of Noam Tibon and Gali Mir-Tibon created by Daniel Goldfarb. Noam's story is relatively well-known, but Gali is also an active heroine and significant partner throughout the journey. They drive to rescue their son Amir, his wife Miri, and the girls from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. While Gali's face is full of anxiety, shock, and sadness, Noam's face wears a concentrated, focused, tense expression.

Goldfarb's mastery of the medium and especially his control of the page space is wonderful. He reverses the reading direction to succeed in compressing more events and incidents, and combines in the page margins a kind of timeline in the form of Noam and Gali's car entering and exiting the frame, thus explaining at every moment what kind of journey this is.

On the way to the kibbutz, they evacuate survivors from Nova to safe places, see the horrors with their own eyes, and meet police officers and soldiers. When they enter Route 232 (and this moment is intensified by smart choices of layout and frames) and into a shelter that has already been hit, he tries to protect Gali from the horrors. Later, Noam joins a YAMAM team, Gali evacuates wounded to hospitals.

Noam's heroism stems from the combination of civilian and military, and the illustration emphasizes this wisely. Noam started the day with swimwear at Tel Aviv beach, passes by home to get dressed and take a personal gun, and later he equips himself with a helmet and long weapon. But even when he fights alongside soldiers to clear Nir Oz and rescue people from there, he's wearing a yellow shirt. He's a person whose heroism stems from his military experience and credit, but no less from the paternal and grandfatherly feeling that led him to jump into the fire.

Finding the Right Perspective

Even a year later, when the trauma is still happening day by day for the hostages in Gaza, for the destroyed communities in the envelope and the north, when the war claims casualties in body and soul daily, we're still very far from the perspective that would allow us to process the trauma and recover. Some of the creators chose to integrate moments from the past into that day's story to help build the character and their motivations (Ron Levin, Ovadia Benishu). Tohar Sherman-Prediman actually integrated moments that happened after that day as part of Mali Shoshana's recovery process.

Dana Berger chose to tell the story of Chaim Peri z"l through his grandson, Mai Albini-Peri, who gave a speech at a rally for the return of the hostages about a month after they were kidnapped to Gaza. Mai tells in his speech about the heroism of his grandfather and grandmother who hid in the safe room, about Chaim's struggle (dressed in a Vive la Resistance shirt) with one terrorist and his walking with the many terrorists who came afterward, to protect his wife Esnat whom they didn't see.

He continues and tells about the destruction of Kibbutz Nir Oz, about the destruction of trust in the government. The unique perspective here is in describing the Israeli public's struggle for the hostages and ending the war.

At the same time, despite the difficulty of extracting optimism from a story that is now known to have ended tragically, Mai emphasizes his peace activist grandfather's legacy, and the visual interpretation gives this additional weight. The last two pages place the childhood landscape, where grandfather and grandson ride a motorcycle with a boat in the kibbutz landscapes in great freedom, against the grandson riding alone on Ayalon in darkness, against graffiti background calling "all of them now." There's great darkness in the world, but the direction is forward.

A different kind of perspective can be found in Or Yogev, who tells the story of Maya Alper, a survivor of the Nova party. This is a story where salvation comes from within, in a kind of combination of intuition, listening to the environment, and a deep inner moment. After hours of escape and being saved from death, she hides inside a bush, closes her eyes, does breathing exercises, and smiles her biggest smile "so that if my mother finds my body, she'll find it smiling."

Other female illustrators used here the visual language identified with them, but with Yogev this is particularly prominent and powerful. He uses works he created as immediate responses in the first months to surround Maya lying in the bush with closed eyes, and thus he adds to her private story all the broader cultural load of representing this disaster. Additionally, there's a clear parallel between the tarot cards integrated as a motif throughout the story and his images that have already become iconic, turning the entire story into something mythical.

Artistic Distance

In the strong stories in the collection, illustration allows distance from concrete reality, the imagination necessary to grasp an impossible reality. In Dana Berger's work, the dark watercolor illustrations connect between past and present and between the grandson's character and the grandfather.

In the Matias family story created by Daniel Peleg, the first page succeeds in accurately capturing the chaos that survived in the house, and the speed with which the safe room fills with blood, fragments, and smoke. This stage ends at 8:02 when Rotem announces to his sisters that their parents have been murdered. The three children visit the kibbutz in January, and at its end all three lie on their backs in the aired safe room. An Alterman song that Shlomi composed and accompanied their family connects the three living children to the dead parents, between a childhood photo full of warmth and love to a reality where it's already allowed to cry and there's really no other choice.

In the story of Michael and Amalia Idan created by Aviel Basil, the distance is especially strong because at its center stand a 9-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. To give them ownership of the story, it must be from their perspective alone. This literary choice dictates the visual language and soft color palette, and to some extent returns to these children something of the childhood they lost there.

At any given moment, Michael and Amalia only know what they know. For example, that already at 6:40 both their parents are dead, and they need to call the MDA emergency center to ask for help. Luckily, Tamar the volunteer calls them and guides them by phone to enter the closet and hide there in silence. She calms, mediates reality to them, and protects them inside the closet despite the difficulty.

The children's disconnection, a necessary disconnection that saved their lives from everything happening outside, is expressed in three explosive double-page spreads that are emotional but also restrained with composure. When they entered the closet, they distanced themselves from the absolute horror they saw with their own eyes, so in the story a raging storm is built around the closet.

Through a human voice and image in a broken conversation, Tamar builds for them an alternative reality, where the high waves become an isolated and forested island, thus making a 12-hour stay in the closet alone possible. The yellow closet transforms from a makeshift raft to a safe shore.

"When You Belong to Something, You Must Protect It"

The story that succeeds in connecting all these points in the most moving way in my eyes is the story of Saliman Shlibi created by Alina Gorban. Saliman, a Bedouin from the Azazma tribe, describes a tense morning with the children at home and a slow understanding of what's happening. They're in the Negev, but far from immediate danger. He starts receiving more and more messages from shepherds and guards at solar sites. He creates a huge WhatsApp group and organizes 12 jeeps with rescue teams in a short time.

His conversations with Gorban are integrated throughout, and the gap between the terrible sights that morning and his relaxed lying position (apparently, it's clear he's in an emotional storm) when giving testimony stands out. He opens and quotes an Arabic proverb, "This is remembered and therefore will not return," as if expressing hope that the very act of storytelling protects him, all of us, from its repetition.

He describes how his heroism stems from being a believing Muslim whose fate is determined from heaven, and from a humanistic conception that he has an obligation as a human to rescue other humans in distress. And also, he says, he risks himself knowing clearly that if something happens to him, the state will take care of his children and won't abandon him in Gaza.

This story holds a total of five double-page spreads but with smart and elegant frame distribution, and with precision of maximum information quantity per page. For example, on page 55, in the middle of the story there are only three frames: in the first, Saliman kneels in his field, with a phone bleeding from so many messages and pleas for help. In the background, thick smoke (in the distance, he doesn't have to enter it).

The second half-frame shows the creation of the group that became huge and painfully efficient within a moment, and in the third, three jeeps race in the open field. The jeeps are the heroes' tool in this story, thanks to them they could bypass the roads, thanks to them they could help many.

But this story deals with conflict, and the vehicles appear a page after descriptions of the terrorists' vehicles from Gaza, so the very choice of this tool endangers the rescuers. He says "If the Nukhba had come here [...] and the army had arrived, they wouldn't have distinguished between me and them. They would have slaughtered me too..."; three frames that fold almost everything within them.

The powerful double-page spread in the story is the only moment that spills from realistic to fantastic. Saliman is drawn as a superhero whose power comes from connection to the land, to the place, and from tradition: his father was Ben Gurion's guard, fought in the Six Day War. "From him I learned that when you belong to something, you must protect it."

But facing this page stands the page of disrespect, the part in the story that puts everything into the discriminatory perspective of Israeli society. In complete contrast to his sense of belonging stands the state's treatment of him, with frequent uprooting from the place, with lack of regulation as a recognized and organized settlement. On the next page, he describes how the blue ID card was arbitrarily taken from him, how they demolish houses and neglect education and welfare services.

All the stories in the collection present heroic revelations of individuals who rose and acted, and some in their heroism even saved others. In binding them together there's a marking of moral values that hopefully will stand by us in times of distress and in life itself. Beyond that, Saliman's story also marks a correction that Israeli society must make, if we want to maintain a human, complex, and life-loving society here.