The Aftershock

Detailed summary

Mohammed R. Mhawish and his family escaped the destruction of Gaza. In the quiet of exile, they discovered the cost of staying intact.

Long before the snow started to fall around midnight, turning a pale orange under the street lights of Paterson, New Jersey, my body had decided that sleep was something it could indefinitely defer. A string of dried coffee rings stained my desk. I waited for a call from Mahmoud Wadi, an acquaintance whose internet had gone out, again. When his number finally lit up my phone, Wadi was outside looking for firewood—anything that he could salvage, from the destruction around his family’s tent, to stay warm. In Gaza, it was too cold to sleep past 4 A.M., and he had metabolized the work into the rhythm of his morning.

By the time we hung up, it was around six in the morning, and time to wake up my son Rafik, for preschool. I walked into our bedroom, where he had splayed himself next to my wife, his arms stretched wide. His younger brother, Zein, slept quietly in a crib, his chest rising in barely visible swells.

It was December, 2025. Rafik was four years old. He had been born in Gaza in November, 2021, in the wake of a two-week bombing campaign by Israel, and as a new father I hadn’t known how quickly those circumstances would shape his childhood. A boy of small, playful routines—lining up his toy cars in rows, wearing his sneakers on the wrong feet—he had never been to school before Paterson. Soon after his enrollment, his mother and I began to see how fundamentally out of step the experience was for him.

On the first day of school, I had received a call from this teacher, who asked me to come immediately, for an urgent matter. I walked over and, as soon as I entered the schoolyard, saw Rafik red-faced and crying in a corner. The teacher was standing nearby, visibly shaken, holding what I recognized to be Rafik’s brand-new dark-navy sleeping bag. It had been nap time. In the process of settling the kids, she had unrolled the sleeping bag, helped Rafik inside, zipped it up to his chest, and turned off the lights. She couldn’t have known that she was setting a trap for him.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The New Yorker. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.