Dawn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

This chapter opens with Elisha’s admission: “In all probability, I had killed before, but under entirely different circumstances” (24). He has killed political enemies in service of the Movement’s mission to “get the English out” (25). During his first six weeks in Palestine, Elisha learned to become a “terrorist” under Gad’s instruction. Elisha retrospectively views this as “indoctrination.” He recalls Gad’s incendiary speeches, laden with violent and religious rhetoric. Another leader in the Movement spoke of “the eleventh commandment: Hate your enemy” (26-27).

Elisha reveals that Dawson is being held in the basement below the house that he and Gad occupy. He thinks back to the first time he participated in a terrorist operation. He and five other Jewish fighters ambushed a group of English soldiers and shot them dead with tommy guns. The event made Elisha flash back to witnessing Nazis execute a group of prisoners via firing squad. He imagined himself as an SS officer and felt nauseous with self-hatred.

Elisha believes that killing as part of a group is easier than killing a hostage one-on-one. Again, Gad reminds him not to torture himself because it’s part of war.

Ilana and two bodyguards, Gideon and Joab, arrive at the house. Gad compliments her on her broadcast, which she credits entirely to the Old Man. She says that she saw him crying today. They discuss the wave of Jewish appeals to the Old Man, begging him to spare Dawson’s life for fear of English reprisal. Gad believes that he was crying because the Jews are “not yet free of their persecution reflex” (31) and are unwilling to fight back against their oppressors.

Elisha recalls the night of David’s capture and notes that David was a childhood friend of Gad’s. Elisha envies Gad’s bitterness about David’s capture because “I had no more friends to lose” (35).

The chapter ends with Ilana soothing Gad by telling him: “Don’t torture yourself, Gad. This is war” (36).

Chapter 4 Summary

Around midnight, Elisha, Gad, Ilana, Joab, and Gideon sit in silence drinking tea. They tell stories about their near-death experiences.

Joab says: “Death saved my life” (38) and recalls hiding from the police by pretending to be insane. An old friend of his was an asylum director and agreed to harbor him. The police found Joab and violently interrogated him for two days, during which he acted catatonic and pretended to believe he was a corpse. This earned him the nickname “the Madman.”

Gideon “the Saint” says, “God saved me from death” (39). Gideon is the devout son of a rabbi. When he told his father that he planned to join the Movement, his father gave him his blessing. Gideon claims that he survived torture and interrogation without giving up information by imagining that “God’s eyes were on me […] God is looking at me […] I must not disappoint Him” (40).

Ilana says that she was saved by a head cold. She and several other women were rounded up by the English, who were hunting for the Voice of Freedom. At the time, she had a cold; it changed her voice so significantly that the English eliminated her as a suspect.

Gad says: “I owe my life to three Englishmen” (41). When he was Elisha’s age, he was tasked executing an English captive. He had three hostages and had to choose which one to kill. Gad made them draw straws and killed the loser. Gad admits that, if they hadn’t chosen a loser themselves, he would have killed himself instead.

Elisha says: “I owe my life to a laugh” (42) and tells the story of being strangled by an assistant barracks leader at Buchenwald. While being strangled, Elisha felt his head swell and imagined that he looked like a “caricature” and a “miserable clown.” The barracks leader saw his face and “laughed so long he forgot his intention to kill” (43).

Gideon suggests taking food to Dawson, which Elisha rejects because “a man condemned to die can’t be hungry” (44). Gideon reveals that Dawson is unaware of his imminent death. Elisha responds that his stomach knows he’s about to die and will “tell him” he isn’t hungry. Gideon goes downstairs to check on Dawson.

Ilana cries and calls Elisha “poor boy,” which Elisha hates. It reminds him of his first girlfriend, a French woman named Catherine whom he met at a youth camp in Normandy in the summer of 1945. Catherine was the only other person there who spoke German. Elisha told her a story his rabbi told him about a young boy with a sick father. The boy tells God he’s too young to know how to pray and begs him to heal his father. God heals the father but also turns the boy into a prayer and lifts him up to heaven. Upon hearing the story, Catherine responded, “Poor boy!”

The first time she and Elisha had sex, Catherine begged him not to speak. He told her he loved her, and she burst into tears, repeating “Poor boy!” Elisha ran away and realized she was only interested in him out of morbid fascination.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Throughout Dawn, Elisha compares himself directly to the Nazis, emphasizing the theme The Post-Holocaust Jewish Experience. After completing his first terror attack for the Movement, he says: “I found myself utterly hateful. Seeing myself with the eyes of the past I imagined that I was in the dark gray uniform of an SS officer” (27). In addition, he compares the sight of English soldiers running for their lives to that of his fellow Jews trying to escape a Nazi firing line. These sentiments are especially self-loathing coming from Elisha, as he survived imprisonment in Buchenwald.

The connections Elisha draws between the Nazis and himself aren’t baseless expressions of self-hatred. He feels on some level that his role in the Movement is morally indefensible. Although he believes in the Zionist cause (or at the very least, wants to believe in it), Elisha struggles to justify the Movement’s means with its ends. Just as the Nazis dehumanized him and all other Jews, Elisha must dehumanize the British to support the Movement.

The Adolf Eichmann trials in Jerusalem were contemporaneous with Dawn’s publication. At these trials, Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, defended his actions by claiming that he was only “following orders.” This resonates with Elisha’s attitude toward his violent actions; he doesn’t attack the British out of hatred for them; he does it because he was ordered to do so.

Other elements of the Movement also parallel Nazi ideology and the trappings of the Third Reich. In his speeches (which Elisha refers to as “indoctrination”), Gad explicitly invokes Hitler and the Nazi’s extermination campaign. His rhetoric is highly provocative, passionate, and stratifying; it casts the British as interlopers who must be flushed out. As Elisha describes it, the Movement’s core goal resembles the Nazi mission to rid Europe of Jews. “The goal was simply to get the English out; the method, intimidation, terror, and sudden death” (25). While the position of European Jewish civilians is in no way comparable to that of an occupying army, Elisha sees the similarities between Movement and Nazi tactics.

The territorial maximalism that defines Revisionist Zionism (the Movement’s philosophical backbone) bears a resemblance to the Nazi principle of Lebensraum (“living space”) as well. Lebensraum was an ideological tenet for the Nazis that prized “‘racial purification’ and territorial expansion” (https://www.supersummary.com/war-and-genocide/summary/) for ethnic Germans, a feat that they could achieve only by violently removing Jews and other designated undesirables. Likewise, the Movement seeks to establish a Jewish ethno-state by “[getting] the English out” (24).