Stone Hearts — Chapter 18: The Holtz Family

What happens when a surgeon turns his eye from the operating room to crime fiction? In "Stone Hearts", Craig R. Smith, MD, cardiac surgeon and former Chair of the Department of Surgery, builds a medical caper rooted in transplant, intrigue, and the peculiar moral weather that hovers above and beyond the hospital.

Follow along each Friday as we release the novel one chapter at a time. You can also see more on Dr. Smith's Substack, Long Incision.

In Chapter Seventeen: Anchors Aweigh, Reggie was unchained and introduced to his stateroom, where he settled in with his belongings collected during the day’s terrestrial travels. Peter, Grace, and Reggie had dinner together, then Grace delivered a cryptic message related to Reggie’s disappearance before everyone retired for the night. On the first day of his new life Reggie awoke to find Dulcinea in New York Harbor, heading for the East River.

Forty Years of Assimilation

Leah Meyer and Nathan Holtz were children when their families escaped from parts of Poland in the nineteen thirties and found their way to New York City. In 1943, on his eighteenth birthday, Nathan enlisted in the US Marine Corps and fought for his adopted country on the beaches of distant Pacific islands through half of 1944. His officers recognized Nathan’s organizational abilities and plucked him out of combat for their headquarters in Oahu, where he finished the war. When he was back in New York City, Nathan met Leah when both were undergraduates at City College, and they married in 1950. In a flush of idealism they emigrated to Israel in 1951 and acquired dual citizenship under the Law of Return. Attachment to the country that had welcomed them as children pulled them back to New York in 1955, proudly bearing 1-year-old David.

Nathan joined his parents running a small camera store in midtown Manhattan. Nathan’s ambition drove expansion into other kinds of new electronic technology and entertainment. The store outgrew its space and relocated twice before it was bought by an expanding national chain in 1970, and Nathan became a vice president. The family bought a 3-bedroom apartment in an upper west side building with a courtyard and a partial view of Central Park.

Leah’s parents lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx until 1951, when their only daughter emigrated to Israel with her young war hero. The Meyers moved to Tenafly, New Jersey, where the strain of an unsuccessful struggle to establish themselves in the life insurance business destroyed their marriage. By 1970 Leah’s father was living alone in Miami and her mother was living with relatives in a poor neighborhood in Newark. Leah’s world was reduced to her husband, who was deeply engrossed in business, her diligent, studious son David, and her headstrong daughter, Eva, born in 1956.

As soon as the Holtz family business was profitable enough to support private education, David enrolled in Horace Mann. Eva insisted on staying public, but wanted a test-in magnet school that was not all math-science. She wasn’t afraid to break barriers and became one of the small number of young women attending Stuyvesant in its first few years of coeducation. Eva’s interest in the worlds of art and entertainment worried her parents.

The Yom Kippur war in October 1973 stirred Nathan and Leah’s cultural loyalties. The same fervor took root in David, who was a sophomore at Columbia. In response, Nathan negotiated with his company to launch its first international joint venture, in Tel Aviv, in 1974. The apartment was put on the market and quickly sold. The profits were rolled into leases in Tel Aviv for an apartment and a retail site.

Eva was enjoying her senior year at Stuyvesant and had trouble grasping the genius of these plans. Someone needed to explain to this strong-willed young woman, born and raised in Manhattan, captivated by theater arts, and already competitive for the best colleges, why she should actively choose to be anywhere else.

When Nathan tried to explain, with Leah and David in the chorus, Eva took center stage to counter. She loved her father beyond reason, she explained, and couldn’t stand idly by while he ran his life off the rails. She opened with appeals to high principle. “Dad, how many times have you told me about all those other Marines…the ones who fought just as hard as you did, but weren’t snatched out of harm’s way because of their glittering brains?” Nathan braced himself, not wanting to go back there; but Eva was just getting warmed up. She went on, “Those gritty farm boys? The savvy city boys? Weren’t they like brothers?”

Eva knew how to make tears well up in her father’s eyes. “You’ve told us how guilty you felt sitting on the veranda in Oahu while they died in the surf, or bled out in the sand.” Hands on hips, leaning forward, Eva drove it home. “That’s why this is our country! My country! And those Israelis have already shown how tough they are. They can take care of themselves.” David had the temerity to ask if her objections had anything to do with that senior boy she’d been hanging out with. Eva hadn’t seen that coming, but shot back “You mean Jason? Don’t be ridiculous!”

Eva was lean and taller than average, with sleek black hair spilling over her shoulders, and large appraising eyes that were a deep rich brown, set in a face with classically striking and symmetrical features. As she had grown through adolescence and into early adulthood her proportions had changed enough to accommodate the essential gender bolt-ons while retaining the silky sleekness of a Ferrari. Eva walked, ran, stood, and sat with poise and graceful agility. She turned heads without trying, with an air of indifference to the male gaze. It wasn’t that boys, and later men, didn’t intrigue her—how they stared, all higher cortical functions in full flight! So flattering but disconcerting. They don’t know it’s only me in here?

Jason Argonne was somehow more compelling. He was a Stuyvesant senior when Eva was a junior. Jason was from a wealthy upper East Side family with Parisian roots; he was the only one of the four Argonne children to eschew the Lycée on 72^nd Street and compete successfully for a magnet school. They met at tryouts for an ambitious Stuyvesant production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Eva wanted Elizabeth and got the role. Jason wanted Brick but got Gooper. He was nonetheless a Leading Man in the Stuyvesant heterosexual scrum, and was considered an enviable catch. At first Eva thought he might be afraid of her, then she worried that he might be indifferent. Just before dress rehearsals Eva resolved the issue by ambushing him with a kiss on the mouth during an unobserved moment in the darkness. Poor Jason went up like a Roman candle and they were a thing.

When Jason started at Princeton in the fall their moments of connection became less frequent but more intense. He was a passionate kisser, but a pneumatic humper with clumsy fumbling hands who seemed less goal-oriented than Eva, who had already decided that Jason’s mission was to remove her virginity, a mission unfulfilled when Nathan and Leah shared with Eva the great news about emigrating to Israel. Semper Fi and Eva’s other best arguments made no headway. Her challenge was increased by David’s general enthusiasm and his willingness to swap Columbia for the University of Tel Aviv. All subtexts aside, Eva’s desire to finish her senior year at Stuyvesant was hard to discredit, and all parties were satisfied when Eva arranged to finish school while living in the West Village with the family of Dorothy, her best theater friend and classmate since elementary school.

Early in 1974 the rest of the Holtz family moved to Tel Aviv. Nathan’s business was profitable within six months, and David embraced the stress and excitement of his new University. Back in the States, Eva’s campaign succeeded, in Jason’s dorm room. It was a Saturday night anchoring one of her weekends at Princeton—on her eighteenth birthday. The girl born on the first day of Purim noted that in 1974 her birthday was a week past Purim, and there she was in bed with a French Catholic. That aside, it had all been very wonderful, although she was quite certain that the earth had not moved. Any associated transformations seemed to be concentrated in Jason, who became abject and insatiable, prostrate with love, and couldn’t stop talking about it. Is that all there is?

Emigration acquired a new sense of urgency. “What are you running away from?” Dorothy demanded to know. She was starting at Columbia in the fall, Eva would have been nearby at Yale, and they were planning to keep working their theater connections together. Eva insisted she was running toward something larger than herself, broke up with Jason, withdrew from Yale, and reunited with her family immediately after Stuyvesant graduation in June of 1974. She enrolled at Tel Aviv University for the fall semester.

David, a rising Junior, was intellectually excited by the overthrow of the military junta in Greece. He seized the chance to witness the birth of a new democracy by arranging for a semester abroad at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. On September 8, 1974 he was a passenger on a TWA flight to Greece. PFLP militants detonated a bomb in the baggage compartment, the plane crashed into the Ionian Sea, and all 88 passengers perished. The Holtz family had been intact again for less than two months when it was shattered.

The Holtz family was not alone. In the 1970s Israel suffered many attacks on its civilian men, women, and children. The Avivim school bus bombing killed 9 children and 3 adults. 11 Olympic athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics in 1972 by the Black September terror group. 21 children were killed in the Maalot school massacre. More adults and children were killed in the Nahariya attacks and in the attack on the Lag BaOmer celebration.

The suffering caused by an irrational and incalculable loss tears at the integument of any family and the Holtz family survivors were not spared. Eva felt like a hopelessly inadequate substitute for David. She blamed herself for failing to fill the void and pull her parents back from grief. Even so, she often felt like saying “Hey, it’s me, Eva, over here—you still have a daughter—doesn’t that count?”

It helped Eva suppress her own grief and guilt to be a student in a stimulating University surrounded by the delights of an exotic new city, and Eva did not deny herself academically or socially. She took challenging courses, enjoyed the burgeoning theater scene, indulged in squash, volleyball, surfing…and men, of course. There were a few older predators, but most of them were shy, abashed boys. None held her interest long enough to cause trouble. Her body still knew how to respond and sweep her away in its flood—until—all too often—the sight and smell of some naked, inconsequential, needy man-boy too close to her skin drove her back to her parent’s apartment to hold her mother while they cried.

Four years after David’s death, Eva graduated with a major in theater and a minor in English literature. She received honors and awards that were nice to have, but still didn’t feel like enough to replace David. The Holtz family’s painful loss had a clear cause—more than that, their loss was the result of a clear, premeditated intention—and that invited rumination.

Having arrived in Israel after age 17, service in the IDF was not compulsory for Eva, and she could complete a university degree without applying to the Atadu (Academic Reserves). But she wasn’t interested in being exempt. As soon as she graduated Eva was accepted into the Havatzalot (Academic Officers Program), and joined the IDF with the will to do more than simply fulfill an obligation. After five weeks of basic training, following what had been the standard practice for women, Eva and her female peers were being sorted into roles in communications, air traffic control, office support, and intelligence.

Eva knew that a few women the year ahead of her had fought successfully for access to the fighting forces. She and three classmates did the same and were granted three months of combat training. Those in command were still preoccupied with the hazards of rape for women who were prisoners-of-war. Despite the training the women had been granted, they would not assign Eva’s group to roles that would expose them to capture.

The Yom Kippur war had begun with an embarrassing failure of Israeli intelligence, and as soon as the war was over the Agranat Commission created the Intelligence Corps of the IDF. Yitzhak Hofi retired from his leadership role in IDF to become the Director of Mossad. The rescue at Entebbe, the surprise attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osirak, and numerous assassinations of terrorists took place under his Directorship, all while Eva was attending the university.

With that history in mind, and frustrated by the obstacles to a combat role, Eva requested assignment to the Intelligence Corps—and not just to do office work, she wanted training in counterintelligence and espionage. This was a woman who was hard to deny. Eva excelled in marksmanship and weapons-handling and held her own in hand-to-hand combat with the men. Near the end, trainees were subjected to a simulation of interrogation. Eva spent 48 hours in a cell, handcuffed to a chair, thirsty, hungry, and sleepless, and was waterboarded twice. Her instructors were impressed by her intuitive grasp of resistance techniques. To Eva, it seemed familiar, not unlike acting.

Eva’s superiors were also impressed by her poise, presence, and attractiveness. CIA Director William Colby once observed that a spy shouldn’t look like James Bond, he should be a person who has a hard time flagging down a waiter. That was not Eva. But she was a young woman who could be weaponized.