“Every day anoth­er person’s life ends. But He pass­es me by. I hope that He won’t also take me. It’s unknown. It’s unforeseen.” 

This is the first stan­za of one of the more mov­ing poems left to us by Bat-Chen Sha­hak in a new Eng­lish lan­guage com­pi­la­tion enti­tled The Bat-Chen Diaries. This book is a diverse com­pi­la­tion of diary entries and let­ters writ­ten by Bat-Chen Sha­hak who was killed by a sui­cide bomber on her 15th birth­day on Purim 1996. Tak­en in this con­text this poem in par­tic­u­lar is quite mov­ing and can be quite pow­er­ful to those of any age who read it. The entries and poet­ry span from her third grade school assign­ments through the day she was killed. Togeth­er they help piece togeth­er her life, that of an aver­age teenag­er in Israel. Select entries may be use­ful to teach­ers of mid­dle school and high school stu­dents to help them relate to an indi­vid­ual who trag­i­cal­ly died so young. It is not a cohe­sive vol­ume in that one would sit down and read it straight through. The lev­el of the writ­ing is appro­pri­ate to the age lev­el at which it was writ­ten mak­ing it effec­tive as a psy­cho­log­i­cal thought pro­vok­er, but less so for its lit­er­ary val­ue. The trans­la­tion was done with regard to the words and not the style as not­ed by the trans­la­tor, hence much of the rhymes and rhythm are lost. This may have affect­ed the lit­er­ary qual­i­ty of the work. With the prop­er back­ground, sup­port and insight, this book would be appro­pri­ate for youth ages 12 – 16.