When We See You Again

ממואר יוצא דופן בכנותו, שהגיע מיד עם פרסומו לפסגת רבי המכר של הניו יורק טיימס, שבו מספרת רייצ'ל גולדברג־פולין על בנה, הירש, שנחטף לעזה בבוקר השבעה באוקטובר 2023 כשהוא פצוע קשה, ונרצח שם לאחר 328 ימים בשבי החמאס. היא כותבת על המאבק שניהלה עם בעלה ג'ון פולין, שהוסיף לספר אחרית דבר, לשחרור בנם; והיא כותבת בעיקר – על אהבתה ועל געגועיה לבנה, על ההתמודדות היומיומית עם החלל שהותיר האובדן, ועל כאב האבל שנוכח בחייה בכל רגע ורגע.

A searing portrait of a mother’s grief and strength in the wake of unthinkable tragedy. 
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s beloved 23 year old son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love—and, in that moment, her life was forever separated into The Before and The After. Over the next eleven months, she and her husband, Jon Polin, would work tirelessly — in public and behind the scenes — to secure the hostages’ release, to breathe some humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And when Hersh and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost.
In When We See You Again, Rachel pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper, giving voice to the broken among us, and reminding us that even when the world feels choked with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it? Her own experience has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love.