Week 2 Prompts

Those who forget history are forced to relive it, first as tragedy, then as farce.

“Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world - the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism.”
David Ben-Gurion

I only learned about my fathers' part in world war-II late into my forties. I heard for the first time about my mothers' family only a year before she passed away. I never spoke, or could understand, my fathers' mother tongue (Hungarian) and my mother's tongue was never my mother tongue.

I am a first generation, Israeli born, a Sabra. So I, together with my friends, are the live representatives of this social experiment called: creating a new image...We Sabras, like the fruit of the big cactus plants, growing wild everywhere in Israel, were supposed to be at the same time, tough and prickly on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside. Strong, unemotional, take control kind of people who were taught to believe that power comes from the barrel of the gun.

We were not supposed to be like “them”, them, being six million, faceless, wimpy, Jews, who did not know how to fend for themselves. “This will never happen again”, was the mantra we grew up on, reciting it on the top of Masada, where another group of Jews, decades before, took their own life so they will not become slaves to the Romans. 

But being a second generation to a Holocaust surviving family, this part of my history was kept away from me.  We walked around it like a well kept family secret that no one wants to talk about, but is never-the-less still there. It was in the old black and white pictures in the falling apart albums, it was in the refusal of my parents to speak the languages brought from the “old country”, it was in the stories that should have, but were not told.

Looking back at my childhood and watching my children and their friends coming into adulthood I wonder about the results of this. I am not sure if what we are witnessing now is the tragedy, or the farce but I have a feeling that something went wrong.

 I think about my parents’ generation. Did they lose their faith and failed to give us, in place of it, another? Did we, by having to prove that we are different become confused and disoriented? Did we stray off course? Did we lose our core? Did we lack a strong sense of who we are and a sense of continuity? The fact is that the new generation, who is now coming into its own, is so much different then what we expected them to be. Somewhere, somehow, all the beliefs and hopes and teachings created very disturbing results.

 I don’t know how inner strength turns into aggressiveness. How lack of continuity and respect to the past develops into detachment and indifference, how not having faith translates into deficiency in strong ethical base. The only theory I have is that when utilizing force as the only fall back alternative, the price tag is rather high and the payment, subtle at the beginning, becomes more and more obvious with time.

The stuff I've collected over the years in my little box/bureau drawer/keepsake chest marks every step of my way.

Few weeks ago, on a spur of the moment, I bought a fire safe box. Nothing fancy, the kind every one can buy in Walmart. I never had one, nor had the need to own one. It must have been growing older, and wiser, that made me realize all the possible dangers of holding irreplaceable documents, and pictures, in a card box.

Until that moment I lived in an utter bliss, completely blind to the possible dangers. Over the years I managed to collect a nice amount of documents:  school certificates dating back to my elementary school years, my daughters’ birth certificates and every school document I ever received, professional licenses, and even a will. In the last few years, as a result of my genealogy research, some very precious evidences of my family past existence were also added.

So now that I had a safe box in my possession I dug out all my treasures and after few unsuccessful tries to fit them all inside, had to face the harsh reality. This pile of papers, pictures and assorted memorabilia will have to be sorted out. I will not be able to fit everything in.

 Sorting and deciding which of these items will be deemed “not so important”, and which will be granted a safe, fire protected, environment, proved to be harder than I anticipated.  How to weight my school fourth grade certificate against my grandmothers' original birth certificate, dating all the way back to 1879. The picture of the soon-to-be-my-husband, and me, on the Tel-Aviv marina, just hours before we'll discover that we had missed our flight to our planned wedding, in the US. This second temple, supposedly, original coin from my days as an aspiring archeologist. And how about Puffs', my dead German Sheppard, tag? Or this shell I brought, years ago, from my first visit, while still in the army, from Sharem-el-sheik. It is one of this shells that when you put next to your ear you can hear the sea humming softly inside.

With every item priceless and if lost irreplaceable, there was only one reasonable act I could think about. I repacked the safe box and returned it to the store. “Was anything wrong with the product?” the sale person asked me. “No, it was fine “, I answered. “There was something wrong with me...” and with this sentence still hanging in the air I turned and left the store, back to a life of looming danger.

It was the first, but not the best--or was it?

My first big love was the desert.

The year was 1967. The six day war had just ended and I went to the Sinai to check on the soldiers from the reserve unit I was in charge of. It might have been the fact that I flew there and it was my first plane ride ever. It might have been the sense of adventure, landing on the half destroyed air strip. But it probably was the open space, so open, so empty.  “Sharem el Sheik, we are here again, you were always in our hearts”, I found myself humming the lyrics of a very popular song as I stepped off the plane and looked around.  The jagged mountains seemed as if they were penetrating the sky and the sea had a color of blue that I could not believe really existed. It felt like a sharp blow to my stomach. It took my breath away, I have never fully recovered.

And then there was Eric. He came, no, not on a white horse, but on the next best thing, an open roof, dust covered jeep.  He materialized, so it seemed, out of nowhere but there he was; light colored curls, blue eyes and a big smile.  I surrendered without even pretending to fight. For three days he showed up every evening with his loyal jeep and we went riding into the desert. He knew of places that no one but the locals knew. We stopped by hidden coves where the water was warm and quiet. I put my hands in the salty water and felt the fish so sleek, as they went through my open fingers and the corals rough and spiky.  He accelerated on open stretches of sand, and I had to hold on to the side rail and could feel the wind caress my face.  He took me up the hills and high up I got a once in a life time look at this primal land.

 On my last night we sat on a big flat rock at the water edge. Small ripples of water were shining in the pale light of the stars.  There were stars everywhere in the sky and in the water. He put his hand around my shoulders and I leaned against him. It was so peaceful.

That was the last time we met.  Later that evening it turned out that while I was happy with watching the water, and the stars, he had another plan in mind. My knight, with the dusty jeep, that had all the right moves and words, transformed in front of my eyes and became just another ordinary guy. The ride back was very quiet and then he was gone.

And as for the desert, this is a whole different story. The desert was, and still is, a big love.