Author duo finds renewal in book about October 7 heroes

Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach had a packed schedule of events lined up for their bestselling co-authored book, “One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories,” when Israel’s open conflict with Iran began in the early hours of Friday morning.

Within hours, Israel’s annual Book Week was canceled, and Mevorach was asked to speak to a group of Jewish tourists on the Birthright program who were unable to continue their itinerary and were stuck in Israel due to the closure of the airspace.

Meanwhile, Agmon, who was in London to give a talk along with one of the book’s heroes, Yadin Gellman, is now one of the tens of thousands of Israelis stranded abroad.

Still, it’s been a relatively minor blip for the two writers who traversed a complex emotional path to co-author this book about the heroes of October 7, 2023.

No one had initially planned the pairing of religious settlement-dwelling editor Mevorach with secular Tel Aviv screenwriter Agmon to write a book about the disastrous Hamas attack that saw some 1,200 people massacred and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, sparking the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

And yet that’s exactly what happened, leading to the unexpected bestselling book compiled in the months after October 7. The book has been translated into English, with work now underway on Romanian, French and Portuguese versions.

It relates 40 stories of individuals, both living and dead — men and women, religious and secular, civilians and soldiers, Jews and non-Jews, and children too — and their unplanned acts of heroism tied to the terror invasion.

Mevorach, an editor at Koren Publishers, and her boss, Koren’s editorial director Reuven Ziegler, wanted to create something powerful and uplifting for the Israeli public and had been following the inspiring stories of heroism emerging within hours of the massacre.

“My husband was following the stories, but I almost couldn’t read them or listen to them,” she said. “It felt too soon.”

Mevorach felt sure, however, that Agmon, an award-winning author and screenwriter, was the right writer for the job.

When she turned to him, however, he told her he had been shut in at home since the onslaught and was deeply depressed and unable to do much beyond watch the news and be with his young family.

“I was crying endlessly, and I felt weak, unable to write,” recounted Agmon.

It was hearing the story of Ofek Livni, a surviving partygoer at the Supernova desert rave who acted under fire with impressive composure to rescue seven friends, that convinced Agmon to write the book.

“It was just the opposite of what I could imagine, and it raised me up,” he said.

The pair ended up working together for an intensive five months, working with an investigator who tracked down people at the center of heroic stories being shared throughout social media and the press.

“There were hundreds of stories being told,” said Mevorach. “We wanted a wide range of locations and different kinds of people and heroes.”

Agmon and Mevorach worked from interview transcripts, some conducted by them, others by an interview team, to craft poignant, compelling first-person prose narratives that use the interviewees’ own words to describe what happened to them or their loved ones on that fateful, tragic day.

The stories of the heroes who fell on October 7 are told by their loved ones, whether a spouse, parent, child or other relative, who describes in their own words the personality and character of their hero, killed saving others on that Saturday.

“It was really important to me that the readers love these heroes,” said Agmon. “But not just that — we wanted readers to know who they are and know little details about them, like how they drink their coffee. I wanted them to know not just that Golani reservist Roe Klein jumped on a grenade, but to get to know him a little.”

“I wanted to make it easy for the readers to love them,” he added.

The final book is just that, an ode to the heroes themselves, with each story designated as its own chapter, with a title and an underline that identifies the person or people central to that story.

Some stories may be more familiar to readers, such as that of Youssef Ziadna, the brave Bedouin van driver who saved dozens from the Supernova massacre; Yotam Haim, the redheaded drummer from Kibbutz Kfar Aza who was accidentally killed by IDF troops in Gaza; Amit Mann, the heroic paramedic killed in Kibbutz Be’eri and Aner Shapira, who threw grenades back at Hamas terrorists.

There are other stories as well, that of Shaylee Atary and her baby, saved by the selfless act of her husband, actor Yahav Winner, who was killed, or Tali Hadad, the brave mother from Ofakim, who transported the wounded from the battle with the terrorists.

Mevorach said that writing “One Day in October” helped her understand different parts of Israeli society, such as hearing from Daniel and Neriya Sharabi, two brothers who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox home and were partying at Supernova — which took place on Shabbat that also marked the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah — where they saved dozens.

“I had never tried to understand those people, but then one of the heroes explained why that kind of partying is important to him, and I saw it differently, without criticism,” Mevorach said. “Before October 7, I was very locked into my sector, my space in this country.”

It was a similar experience for her concerning the Israeli police, another sector of society that she hadn’t given much thought to beforehand, but found herself rediscovering given their heroism on October 7.

“It’s like Yair says, it’s to see the human and less how he lives and his opinions,” she said.

The authors conducted every kind of interview, said Agmon. There were survivors in deep trauma who had a hard time speaking, and those who readily agreed to be interviewed, either about themselves or their loved ones who didn’t survive, and then read the final draft and took themselves out of the book.

Mevorach had insisted on sending the final accounts to the interviewees, to the surviving heroes or their bereaved families, to get their final approval and make sure they felt comfortable with having their story told in the book.

“I said, ‘You’re crazy, don’t do it, it will ruin the book,'” said Agmon, concerned that participants would end up taking their stories out, leaving them with gaps in their book.

Yet he recognized that there was an added value in gaining their participation and approval.

Neither writer expected the book to take off, and both assumed it would sit on library shelves or be read 10 years from now, long after the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre.

“We were in shock that it sold,” said Agmon. But he’s starting to understand why it resonates so for readers.

“It’s their words,” he said. “We’re just the editors, we hold their work, and the readers access their greatness through us. The readers deeply feel that the interviewees’ participation and involvement are wrapped in the stories of the heroes themselves.”

Mevorach called the process a collective tribal experience.

The pair now deliver lectures across Israel, reading excerpts from the book and telling about their own experiences in writing it. The duo plans to tour the United States in October with the English language version of the book.

Agmon said he tends to focus on the issue of the individual and the soul of each person while Mevorach speaks about heroism and values. The lectures are often emotional, as the audience hears the stories and experiences them as a kind of salve or balm to the pain of the last 20 months.

“Oriya lives a more national life and I live a more humanistic, individual reality and the book lives in that,” said Agmon, who grew up religious in Jerusalem and left that way of life as an adult.

“We’re a pipeline,” Mevorach said. “It feels like a story hour as we tell their stories and the audience sits and listens.”

There’s an element of rehabilitation in reading the book, said Mevorach, an experience mentioned by many readers.

“The readers themselves experience a kind of partnership with the heroic images and stories,” she said. “We all went through something crazy — the heroes give us all some kind of understanding of it, and that creates less of a gap between the heroes and the readers.”