One Thousand Words, Part 8

This one is from sometime around November 1973 at a wedding in Nahariya, Israel. I'm the kid in the center. My arm is around my great uncle, who was the spitting image of my grandfather. The groom (next to the bride) is my cousin and his brother is next to me on my right with his then girlfriend now wife. My great aunt is on my far left. This may be the only picture I have of me in Israel. I have a bunch of photos in my memory box, but I think they are all of scenery.

At the time, I was living with the parents of my cousin's girlfriend on a moshav (small community farm) near Raanana. War had broken out in September of that year. I had actually been in Israel for August and much of September living with my great aunt and uncle, but wasn't there at the start of the war. In August, I had come with my backpack filled with a couple of changes worth of clothes and about 15 pounds of paperback books (philosophy and European novels in translation). They thought I was an odd kid, which I was.

I remember walking into their apartment for the first time. My uncle immediately looked at my hiking boots. He'd never seen such things he'd said. They were heavy duty, probably weighed about five pounds with thick leather and vibram soles. "Those will last longer than you," he said to me in Yiddish. He was right. I still have them. Then he looked me in the eye. "Why do you look so dazed?" He asked. "There's nothing new here. It's the same sky as in America. It's the same air." I told him I had jet lag. He'd never heard of such a thing.

I was there to see relatives and be a tourist. I'd travel around to see the sights for a few days and then come back to my uncle's apartment for a couple more. I'd been doing this cycle for awhile. One day I was sitting in their living room reading Gorky. My aunt looked at the cover of the book. She couldn't read English but she could read the name of the author. "Enough," she shouted. "What kind of teenage boy reads Gorky? Go outside! Go find a girl!" She was incredulous that I found enjoyment in reading such a thing. "I'm sure you don't have any friends in America," she said to me. When I told her I did have friends, she said she didn't believe me. At the time she was reading a romance-gone-bad novel, Naarah Mimishpacha Tovah, A Girl From a Good Family. We just had different taste in literature.

Actually those two were very nice to me. My aunt really hammered on my Yiddish and it improved dramatically. She loved soap operas on TV and would watch Jordan broadcasts of Peyton Place with Arabic subtitles. I'd sit next to her and give her the dialogue, translating into Yiddish.

The day before the war broke out I left Israel to fly to Switzerland. It was an odd time for me. I'd read the news every day about the war and feel guilty I wasn't there. Eventually I went to Athens, which was the only city in Europe that was flying planes to Tel Aviv during the war, and slept on the airport floor for a week trying to catch a night flight until I caught a plane back.

I had some vague plans of doing volunteer work for the Israeli Army. I went to a volunteer recruiting office and tried to lie about my age, but they looked at my passport and said no way. So instead I went to the moshav to help pick tomatoes and grapefruit. Because of the war, they had no labor, and the food was just rotting. They were very nice to me as well. I'd wake up early every morning, go out in the fields, plant, pick, and shovel chicken shit around. I grew about seven inches in three months.

The family would get infuriated, though, about how slow I picked. I remember one time the mom of the family watched me pick some tomatoes and just got exasperated. "Every time you pick you look at the tomato like it's a piece of art. It isn't a piece of art! It's a tomato! Just pick it!" But the truth was I knew they were pieces of art. They were beautiful.

After about a month on the farm, my right shoulder started to hurt horribly. I could barely lift it. I thought I must have pulled something. A cousin who was a physical therapist came by - the groom in the picture - to look me over. "There's nothing wrong. You've just never picked fruit before. Keep working. You'll get stronger and better." He was more or less right.

The war was a bleak thing, the first time the Israelis ever felt vulnerable, the first time they lost thousands of lives. It changed the complexion of the country completely. Women were weeping in the streets over lost loved ones. Before the war Israelis felt confident and cocky over their place in the Middle East. They felt comfortable as a colonial power in the West Bank and Gaza. All of that disappeared in the Yom Kippur War.

My aunt and uncle died sometime around 2000. I've completely lost track of the groom and bride. But my other cousin lives in a small community in northern Israel. He was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and is probably about sixty years old, maybe sixty two. I recently "friended" his wife and a couple of his kids in Facebook.

When I got back home to the US, I called my house to have someone pick me up at the airport. My grandmother answered. She handed the phone to my mother saying, "There's this crazy man on the phone with an Israeli accent who says he's Shtulah." Shtulah was her name for me. My dad picked me up. My grandmother was still at my house. She looked at me up and down. "You're not Shtulah. You're too tall." Eventually I lost the accent. My height remained. I don't know when my grandmother decided I was Shtulah and not some imposter. Maybe she never did.