I am writing this through tears. Yishay Ishi Ron’s Dog is so touching, so human, so powerful that I can’t yet collect my thoughts properly.
What comes first to mind is Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir, the 2008 animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, built from false memories, traumatic flashbacks, and the impossible work of reconstructing what the mind refuses to remember. Like Folman’s film, Dog centers on trauma, moral injury, memory, and living with the unthinkable.
Both works understand that trauma operates through dissociation—the mind protecting itself by creating distance between the self and unbearable experience.
In Waltz with Bashir, Folman discovers that his beautiful, ethereal memory of bathing nude in the Mediterranean while golden flares light the Beirut sky is false; in reality, he was part of a team shooting those flares to facilitate the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Memory, as the film’s psychologist explains, is “dynamic…alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the hole with things that never happened.”
Ron’s Geller operates in the same dissociated space. A decorated officer from an elite combat unit, he stalks Tel Aviv’s underbelly to feed his heroin addiction, living with other junkies in a squat. He is haunted by visceral memories of comrades burning alive in an armored personnel carrier during a Gaza campaign. But he also fixates on a dog, cruelly killed during combat operations, a dog whose death becomes a stand-in for all the deaths he cannot mourn directly. When a stray dog crosses his path, Geller desperately attempts to care for it despite struggling to feed himself. The dog becomes both a tether to life and a route back to buried memory.
What makes Ron’s novella extraordinary is its unflinching honesty about the moral dimensions of trauma. This is not just PTSD as medical condition, though Ron, drawing on his own experience, renders the mechanisms of extreme stress and rewiring of the brain with clinical precision. This is moral injury, the wound that comes from what one has done, not just what one has seen. Geller muses bitterly about his father, comatose in a hospital, “connected to his drip irrigation system like a hydroponic plant”: “I know that if he were conscious he’d show me the way out of drugs. Sometimes I hate him for all the poison he’d fed me over the years about the commandos, his stories about the First Lebanon War, the conquering of the Beaufort. He bottle-fed me Golani lore…I had no choice but to grow up to fill his shoes.”
Here Geller becomes a surrogate for generations of Israeli youth, raised on an idealization of militarism and self-sacrifice in pursuit of nationalist goals. The book’s most challenging passage confronts this directly: “I started crying over Yehoram and the other dead soldiers and those damn Arabs we were forced to kill when we flattened their homes with D9s and blew them up with missiles and ruined their messed-up lives.” The passive construction—“we were forced to kill”—sits uneasily against the active verbs: “flattened,” “blew them up,” “ruined.” Ron doesn’t resolve this tension. He allows Geller to mourn both his fellow soldiers and the dog killed in Gaza: “I remembered his eyes, a deep black surrounded by yellowish brown. They were the kindest eyes I’d ever seen…instead of helping him, instead of petting him and rubbing his belly and scratching behind his ears, Yuval cocked his Glock and shot him in the head, that son of a bitch, and then kicked him too, as if a bullet to the head wasn’t enough.”
The dog’s innocence, its fundamental blamelessness, makes it the only death Geller can fully grieve. This is the book’s most powerful insight: sometimes we can only approach the unbearable truth obliquely, through displacement and metaphor.
Though Dog was written before October 7, and published in Hebrew in June 2023, I couldn’t help but read Geller’s story as the story of a whole country. Not as allegory, but as a portrait of what Israeli society has experienced these past two years.
Yardenne Greenspan’s translation is fabulous. The prose forces you into Geller’s dissociated consciousness, where time collapses and Gaza bleeds into Tel Aviv and the past refuses to stay past.
Ron dedicates the book to “combatants whose eyes have seen things that their minds refuse to forget.” For that reason alone, Dog deserves the widest possible audience. But it is also simply a masterpiece of contemporary war literature, raw, compassionate, unsparing, and ultimately about the possibility of redemption through the simplest of connections: the bond between a broken man and a stray dog.
I am shattered. It was a devastating read. Time now to take a break and do some work of my own.