When I Was a Soldier

When I Was a Soldier is a young adult memoir by Valerie Zenatti about her experience being forced into military service in Israel as a teenaged girl after growing up in the more Westernized world of France. Zenatti talks about the conflicting worlds of military service and girlhood, her pleasures when working for a spy ring with the intelligence branch of the Israeli army, and the forced maturity that comes with military conscription. The book was translated from its original French and published in 2007 by Bloomsbury.

Valerie Zenatti begins her memoir as she ends her last year of high school. She takes her exams to prepare her for college, breaks up with her long-time boyfriend, and finds herself conscripted into the Israeli army. Born in France, Zenatti came to live with her parents in Israel when she was thirteen years old. Her background, as a result, is mixed – she has a strong sense of the Western audience to whom she writes, in combination with her experience coming of age in Israel during a volatile time in the Middle East. Zenatti makes it clear that while military service is a common occurrence in Israel – every teenager, boy and girl, is forced to do two years of service before going to college – it is startling as an eighteen year old to move from a comfortable life to one of grueling manual labor, long hours, and little privacy.

Zenatti has a complicated relationship to Israel and Israeli identity, making it even more confusing for her as she steps into the shoes of an Israeli soldier. Part of the Jewish diaspora, Zenatti connects on a deep level to Israel's Hebrew language and Jewish culture. On the other hand, she was raised in southern France, and in many ways has the ideology of a Westerner. This is particularly true in situations like the invasion of Palestine by Israeli forces – a problem which Zenatti struggles to come to terms with over the course of her military service.



There is a stark contrast in tone between Zenatti before her time in the military, and her time during and after. Before her conscription, Zenatti worked shelving toiletries at the Extrapharm to make money, and spent a lot of her time with her two best friends Yulia and Rahel, both Russian expats. She is preoccupied with finishing her baccalauréat exams, though not so preoccupied that she doesn't have time or energy to mourn the loss of her high school boyfriend Jean-David, who slowly phased her out of his life. Going into the military nursing this heartbreak, she is immediately thrown into the world of physical raining, latrine duty, and late nights on guard shifts. Zenatti is told that by the end of her two years in the military she will no longer be a girl, but a young woman.

Zenatti works her way up through the ranks, moving from a rookie soldier to a corporal in the intelligence services. She wakes each day at four o'clock in the morning, goes on long runs, and has to learn how to handle a machine gun. She takes more tests – this time, memorizing the pieces and parts of military equipment and learning how to repair it. Though worn out from her long hours as a soldier, Zenatti feels a change when she comes home, and her parents look at her with respect – she has more responsibility than them now, in a sense, as she carries the nation's security and its secrets in her hands.

In that two-year stint in the army, Zenatti learns the ropes of Israeli intelligence, gets back together briefly with Jean-David, finally breaks off the obviously dysfunctional fling, and begins to think about what she wants to do with her life after military service. When she finally leaves the military, Iraq is in chaos, and Zenatti can't help but wonder if she will have to go back sooner than she expected.



Valerie Zenatti is the author of three books that have been translated into English; Jacob, Jacob, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, and When I Was a Soldier. She lives in Paris, where she works as a Hebrew translator. Working on screenplays based on two of her novels, she lives with her two children, Lucas and Nina.