Q&A with Tammar Stein, author of “The Six-Day Hero”

Just in time for the  50^th anniversary of the Six-Day War, author Tammar Stein has written a middle grade historical novel set in Israel in the days leading up to the war. Though much has been written about the Six-Day War for an adult audience, her novel, The Six-DayHero, is one of the only books geared for school age readers.

The Six-Day Hero tells the story of Motti, a 12 year-old boy living in West Jerusalem. His brother is a soldier in the IDF and Motti dreams of being a hero like him one day. But as tensions rise and the war draws near Motti realizes not all heroes wear uniforms.

Here’s an interview with the author about the unlikely spark for her novel, and why the Six-Day War just might be more important to the history of the Jewish people than Hanukkah.

Q: What inspired you to write this book?

TS: My mom called me after a rabbi from her synagogue told her he had nothing to assign his fifth grader to read about Israel. My mom followed this up with career advice for me: “You should write something.” I kept thinking about this. Nothing about Israel for fifth graders? Really? Someone should do something! Then I had one of those aha moments. Oh wait…me. I should do something.

Q: The Six-Day War took place before you were born. How did you become interested in writing about it?

TS: It was remarkably easy to set a children’s book in that time period. Even though the geo-political situation was precarious, children had an incredible amount of personal freedom. They were free to roam after school without adult supervision and had amazing scraps and adventures that their parents never knew about, daring each other to go right up to the barbed wire border between Israel and Jordan, racing each other in the streets, checking out protests and Arab markets. It made them scrappy and independent. It was fertile ground for a novelist. Anything could happen. 

Q: Did researching and writing about this war change any pre-conceived notions for you?

TS: Yes! I thought it was a simple story. The war lasted 6 days. Israel won. Not much left to say. But as I started interviewing friends and relatives who had lived through it, I realized there was so much more to say. The month leading up to the war was a bitter, frightening time. For many Israelis, it felt like a redux of WWII, which for a small country with a significant percentage of Holocaust survivors and refugees, was a terrifying reality. Was history going to repeat itself? Were millions of Jews going to be slaughtered again? Would the rest of the world sit back and watch it happen again? 

Q: You spent part of your childhood in Israel. Was your family touched personally by this war?

TS: My dad was an 18-year-old Israeli soldier in the Six-Day War. He helped me with the details, the mood, sharing the thoughts and fears that raced through his mind. I spoke with my aunt and uncle, family friends. Because of the national draft, everyone of a certain age was personally touched, either as an activated soldier or as a relative of one.  Leading up to the war they really thought they were going to be annihilated. Newspapers were using words like Holocaust and catastrophic and existential threat.  To win so completely, to unify Jerusalem for the first time in 2000 years…it felt like a bigger miracle than Hanukkah and Purim put together.

Order a copy now.