Alisa Flatow’s legacy inspires novelist
Teaneck author’s ‘Alive and Beating’ dramatizes organ donations
A few days before Passover in April 1995, 20-year-old Alisa Flatow of West Orange was rendered brain dead by a suicide bomber who drove his explosive-laden van into the bus she was riding to a seaside resort in Gush Katif, the formerly Jewish enclave in the Gaza Strip.
Alisa’s parents, Stephen and Roz, agreed to donate her organs after consulting with rabbis, including Jewish medical ethics authority Rabbi Moshe Tendler of Yeshiva University.
Six gravely ill Israelis got another chance at life by receiving Alisa’s heart, pancreas, liver, lungs, and kidneys. Ultimately, three of them survived. Her corneas also were retrieved for transplantation.
The Flatows’ decision helped ignite a new discussion on the halachic permissibility of cadaver organ donations in Israel and worldwide, encouraging many potential donors.
Rabbi Tendler was quoted at the time as saying that Alisa Flatow would not only “get credit in heaven above” for the people saved with her organs, “but also for the many hundreds who will be saved because other people will be inspired to follow her example.”
Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, said in a press conference after Ms. Flatow’s passing that “Alisa’s heart is alive and beating here in Jerusalem.”
Longtime Teaneck resident Rebecca Geller Wolf, who went to high school with Ms. Flatow, used that phrase, “Alive and Beating,” as the title of her recently published first novel.
“I was 20 at the time and wasn’t thinking about a novel, but those words stayed in my head as I got older and paid more attention to the amazing effect Alisa had on organ transplantation,” she said.
As a former journalist — she was a college reporter and editor for the Columbia Daily Spectator and then reported on heavy industries for Dow Jones Newswires — Ms. Wolf was intrigued by the idea of writing a novel from the viewpoint of Israeli organ recipients.
Her novel describes the day when seven Jerusalem residents on the transplant list learn an organ is available due to a young woman’s murder in a terrorist attack on a bus.
The purely fictional characters are Leah, a young ultra-Orthodox woman; Yael, a daughter of Holocaust survivors; Hoda, an Arab hair salon owner; David, an Iraqi Jewish restaurant owner; Severin, a Catholic priest; and Youssef and Yosef, teenage Arab and Jewish hospital roommates — only one of whom can receive the young victim’s heart.
“Alive and Beating” was published by Arbitrary Press on March 11. It’s for sale on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
Ms. Wolf said she hopes that the novel’s debut, nearly 30 years to the day from Ms. Flatow’s death, also will move readers to remember her former classmate at the Frisch School in Paramus.
“Our lockers were next to each other,” Ms. Wolf said. “I was always grumpy in the morning; Alisa never was. She came in every day with a smile. It’s no exaggeration to say that everybody liked her. She drove a big car that we called the ‘Flatowmobile’ and she’d drive everybody everywhere.”
In April 1995, Rebecca was in London for the semester, studying political science at Kings College. Her fiancé, Daniel Wolf, also was spending that semester in London. Ms. Flatow had taken a semester off from Brandeis to study at Nishmat Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women in Jerusalem.
“On that Sunday, April 9, I was in my flat working on a term paper,” Ms. Wolf recalled. “Daniel called and said there was a bombing in the Gaza Strip. Quickly we found out that Alisa was on that bus.”
Daniel’s family happened to live next door to the Flatows in West Orange. His father, Paul, flew to Israel with Stephen Flatow immediately after they got the news that Alisa had been taken to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. Daniel, an IDF veteran, flew from London to act as their translator. Rebecca managed to get a flight the next morning. She still recalls vividly the sight of Alisa’s flag-draped coffin being loaded on a plane for burial in New Jersey.
In the acknowledgements at the end of her novel, Ms. Wolf writes: “I wish there had never been an inspiration to write this story. But in the nearly thirty years since Alisa was killed, there have been countless other victims of war and terror whose organs have been selflessly donated by their families. Every time I read about one of these donors, I immediately think of Alisa. She started it all.”
Ms. Wolf still spends time in Israel at least once a year; she and her husband own an apartment in Jerusalem, which helped her describe various scenes in the book. But she wants the novel to be accessible to any reader, not only to Jews, or to people familiar with Israel.
Her literary agent started showing the manuscript to publishers after Memorial Day 2023. And then the Hamas attack in Israel changed everything. “On October 8, my agent said, ‘I’m not going to be able to sell this book.’ She saw how the tide had turned” against authors perceived as Zionist. “I can’t blame her. What publisher would take me on?”
Ms. Wolf showed her manuscript to The Record columnist Mike Kelly in the spring of 2024. Mr. Kelly wrote a nonfiction book, “The Bus on Jaffa Road: A Story of Middle East Terrorism,” about the 1996 bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed Sara Duker of Teaneck and her boyfriend, Matthew Eisenfeld.
“Mike said, ‘I love this book; you’ve got to get it into the world,’ and he put me in touch with his agent, who was kind enough to get me connected with Peter Alson of Arbitrary Press, a small independent publisher.”
Ms. Wolf’s decision to include Arab characters in the story has caused consternation among some local Jewish readers. “I’ve gotten more pushback than expected,” she said. “And I hear where people are coming from, because it’s hard post-October 7. It’s really challenging, especially when you see the circumstances of the hostages coming out of Gaza.
“But I genuinely believe if we cannot find the humanity in each other, we have no hope for peace.”
The mother of three, whose parents, Andrew and Beverly Geller, still live in Teaneck, as does her sister, Aviva Laib, has several book events planned.
On April 3, she will be featured at a meeting of the AMIT Greater Teaneck Hindy Weinstock Geula chapter, where Dr. Meryl Feldblum, the chair of the English department at the Frisch School, will interview her. She has another appearance lined up at the West Orange AMIT chapter and will appear at several local book clubs. She also has been interviewed by book podcasters.
Ms. Wolf, a member of congregations Bnai Yeshurun and Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, said she has another book planned. This one, she said, “will have nothing to do with Israel or Jews, but it will deal with terrorism, because that is what fascinates me.”
In a promotional blurb about “Alive and Beating,” Mr. Kelly wrote: “Stories of terrorism are often told in political terms. But, inevitably, terrorism is personal, with the heartbreak, tragedy, and efforts to repair the damage rippling across families and generations. Rebecca Wolf has taken a real act of terrorism, and, as all great novelists do, imagines how the lives of six people changed. I found ‘Alive and Beating’ to be a most creative and gripping story on the human cost of terrorism — and how love can always triumph over evil.”
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