Tuesday 12 May 2009

Speaking about Serendipities

Last year I did research for a radio article about Israel’s struggle for Independence, and stumbled upon “Machal” – overseas volunteers who fought in Israel’s War of Independence.

Reading about those wonderful people whose WWII experience was such an important asset in all areas of Israel’s survival, something ‘clicked’ inside of me. I longed to know more about those people. I wanted to write a novel about them.

But in order to give the characters enough back story, I had to go back to 1938, and that’s where the series starts. The Machal part will probably only introduced in part three ~ a long way to go yet.

You can read the text of the radio article about Machal on the “For the Love of History” blog. Even though the Machal novel is still a long way ahead of me, I'm constantly on the look-out for interesting information, that is added to the ever growing Machal file.
Lately, the Jerusalem Post published several articles from Zipporah Porath, excerpts from her book. Since last year, I kept a printout of the flyer on file, thinking that I would order the book when the time came to dig deeper into research.
But this week I felt I should order Zipporah Porath’s book “Letters from Jerusalem” now.
Thus, I send her an e-mail, and a wonderful correspondence began. She linked me up with a friend who happened to live very close to us, from whom I obtained the book.

Many ideas to help Zipporah find an audience to share her first-hand experiences have sprung up, and I’m excited to with the prospect of so many possibilities. More info about her book will be posted on my website, on the book review page.

It’s so amazing how God leads!