Dawn

The protagonist and narrator of Dawn, Elisha was raised a Hasidic Jew in Poland. During World War II, Nazis invaded his town and captured everyone in it. The Nazis orphaned him and delivered him to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was tortured and nearly killed. When Buchenwald was liberated in 1945, Elisha moved to Paris, where he was granted asylum. He remained isolated there until he was recruited to “the Movement” by Gad. The two left Paris for British Mandatory Palestine, where Elisha was trained to become, in his own words, “a terrorist.” For most of Dawn, Elisha grapples with the fact that his superiors have tasked him with killing an English hostage.

Elisha’s experiences in the Holocaust left him isolated, neurotic, and obsessed with entropy. He’s prone to flashbacks, near-constant reminiscing, and (arguably) psychosis. His struggle in accepting orders to kill a hostage are ironic, as he’s a Holocaust survivor; as a boy, he was beset by killers who were likewise following orders. As a Nazi might, Elisha believes (or tries to believe) that the situation justifies his violent action. Although Elisha implicitly understands that the Nazis were barbarous aggressors, he struggles to square the Movement’s stated ends (defending the welfare of Jewish people) with their extreme means.