Moving Kings

This is a novel about two young Israeli soldiers who travel to New York after fighting in the Gaza War and find work as eviction movers. It’s a story of the housing and eviction crisis in poor Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that also shines new light on the world’s oldest conflict in the Middle East. The year is 2015, and 21-year-olds Yoav and Uri have just completed their compulsory military service in the IDF. In keeping with national tradition, they take time off for R&R: a gap-year spent abroad. They come to America and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin, David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the owner and operator of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the Tri-State area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move past their militarized selves when their days are spent kicking down doors, working as eviction-movers in the nongentrified corners of Brooklyn and Queens, dispossessing delinquent tenants and homeowners who’ve defaulted on their mortgages. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job quickly turns violent, when they encounter one homeowner who refuses to leave.