After reading my first novel you told me that my characters sometimes feel over the top, and the plot often strains suspension of disbelief. That it doesn’t feel real. I decided to test your claim in a scientific experiment—to write the events that’d happen as I visit Israel, and see if the resulting story is more or less reliable. The result of that experiment is what you’re going to read at the end of this forward. 

My conclusion, after analyzing the data, is that people and events in Israel are far less credible than anything I ever made up. Reality doesn’t feel real, there. So much so that there are going to be moments where you won’t be sure, moments where you’ll ask yourself whether these conversations and events really took place. 

So I’ll say this: It’s true that I changed the names, trimmed unnecessary parts, smoothed out the flow of conversations, and so on. But the events, strange as they are, did happen.

 And they changed me. The man you parted ways with is no more. The land you left behind is no more. And it’s that change, the ways in which we changed, that I’ve tried to capture here, through the lens of one person.

I’ll call him Aaron.

NEXT: Exiles