Lessons For Dylan by Joel Siegel

Author:Joel Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-05-03T14:31:02+00:00

14

Our Cousin, Dov

“Maybe you wonder why we never fought back,” my cousin Dov asked me. I was twenty years old, a junior in college, on my first trip abroad.

Steve White and I went to Europe. We lived on $100 a month, including gas for the new MGB he’d picked up in London. We stayed in youth hostels, ate in student restaurants, followed two girls to Vienna, visited friends on a UCLA exchange program in Bordeaux, and went to Israel on a whim. I wrote my mother to alert the family. We took a boat from Patros, Greece, to Haifa. The food was inedible, the hold was so dark when they turned the lights off, it was like the gag the rangers pull at Carlsbad Caverns; you literally could not see your hand even when it was pressing against your nose less than an inch from your eyes. And there, as we marched off the gangplank, was my Tante Dvaireh, my mother’s aunt, armed with my high school graduation picture, checking the picture against the face of every passenger until she found me.

“Yossel?” She asked. “Yossele?”

We took the Haifa-Afula bus to the family’s kibbutz, Kibbutz Yifat, where Steve and I would milk cows and prune apple trees. One day I collected garbage and rued that there were no pigs to feed it to.

In America we’re newcomers—I’m first generation American-born—but our family in Israel are the equivalent of pilgrims who came on the Mayflower. Two years after my mother and her parents and her aunt Rutke and her children came to America, her aunts who didn’t have children, who were still teenagers, emigrated to Israel: Tziviah, who would remain childless, and Odel, who would one day come to America on a visit; I remember her as quiet, purposeful, and educated. Her daughter, Rina, would marry an Auschwitz survivor, and her son, Ze’ev, would become one of Israel’s leading archaeologists. Ze’ev was one of the foremen on the Masada dig, and his crew discovered the bodies of the Jewish zealots who committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. Ze’ev himself found the lots they drew to decide who would kill whom; his discoveries proved a legend and made history. Dylan, you’ve met his daughter, Noga.

Dvaireh had been too young to come to Israel in the 1920s. She tried to come to Israel on the Exodus, the real Exodus, with her son, Itzhak, and her daughter, Sara. Dov was her son-in-law.

The real Exodus was an overcrowded, rusting hulk of a ship that never made it past the British blockade of Palestine. No one ever thought it would. A few days out of Italy, one of the decks on the ship collapsed, and Dov landed in Sara’s bunk. That’s how they met. “I had to marry her,” he says. Dov has been laughing at his joke for fifty-five years.

They lived and still live in Ramleh, a town near Ben Gurion airport, in a tiny two-bedroom apartment they and their two daughters gladly shared with me and Steve.

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