By Tal Bahar, Community Shlicha
Savta Leah and Saba Ben Zion, Boris, made Aliyah to Israel from Moldova in 1977, during the Soviet Union era.
My mother, Marina, who was two years old at the time, came with them.
Savta Esti was born in the land of Israel in December 1947, shortly after the civil war began, which later became the War of Independence in 1948.
Saba Avraham was also born in Palestina, the land of Israel, during the British Mandate. He told me he used to go outside to play soccer with the British soldiers in Tel Aviv, while his grandmother would yell at him from the window to come home immediately.
But he would keep playing. They were friends of six-year-old Grandpa Avraham, and he remembers everything from that time. He also recalls the night they sat around the radio listening to UN Resolution 181—namely, the partition plan for Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
He remembers that they went out to dance in the streets and that the Arabs living with them threw stones.
Then the war began.
As a child and a teenager, I always felt as though I was born in the wrong time and wished I could see what they saw, feel everything they felt on that special day.
Later, I was exposed to Amos Oz’s book “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” Suddenly, I felt as if I were there, in euphoria with them, in that revolutionary moment, when history was the present, and redemption was approaching in leaps and bounds.
Blessed are Savta Leah and Saba Boris for choosing to leave their home and immigrate to the land of their ancestors; blessed are Savta Estee and Saba Avraham for being born in Israel and choosing to stay live there.
I am grateful to all four of them for creating our beautiful Israeli family, for making it possible for me to be Israeli.
And of course, blessed are the gifted writers of this nation, through whom we can all taste the flavor of the past. Well, to be honest, it’s both fascinating and concerning how similar the taste of our past is to the taste of our present.
I invite you to read, enjoy, and ‘bon appetit.’
“…But my father said to me as we wandered there, on the night of November 29, 1947; me riding on his shoulders, among the rings of dancers and merrymakers, not as though he was asking me but as though he knew and was hammering in what he knew with nails: Just you look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won’t forget this night to your dying day and you’ll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we’re long gone.
And very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed, maybe at three or four o’clock, I crawled under my blanket in the dark fully dressed. And after a while Father’s hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I’d got into bed with my clothes on but to get in and lie down next to me, and he was in his clothes too, which were drenched in sweat from the crush of the crowds, just like mine (and we had an iron rule: you must never, for any reason, get between the sheets in your outdoor clothes).
My father lay beside me for a few minutes and said nothing, although normally he detested silence and hurried to banish it. But this time he did not touch the silence that was there between us but shared it, with just his hand lightly stroking my head. As though in this darkness my father had turned into my mother.
Then he told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honor, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some Gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too.
And the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down onto the paving stones in the middle of the playground and removed his trousers too, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that the Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.
And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking me), my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of November 30, 1947, “Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school someday.
They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. Forever.”
I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of a sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears. Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry. And in fact I didn’t see him cry that night either: it was too dark. Only my left hand saw.
(“A Tale of Love And Darkness” / Amos Oz, pages 345-346).
