On the ascent

While my wife and I could never become native Israelis, our children could, and that was all we wanted.

By GERSHON BURSTYN
Israeli flags 521 (photo credit: Illustrative photo: Reuters)
Israeli flags 521
(photo credit: Illustrative photo: Reuters)
In the spring of 1949, my father and his family received a letter from Israel that would forever change their lives.
“Nisht azoi shnell,” it read in Yiddish. “Shver lieben du.” Don’t hurry. Life is hard here.
The letter, written by my grandfather’s brother, must have come as quite a shock.
Refugees of World War II, my 17-year-old father and his family were waylaid in a displaced person’s camp in West Germany. They were the “lucky ones,” the ones who had outrun Hitler’s war machine by fleeing Poland in the early days of the war. Refugees in the Soviet Union for five years, they migrated east, eventually reaching Kazakhstan. Constantly on the run, hungry, and lacking a roof over their heads, 10 years later they indeed may have felt lucky.
They were alive.
After a brief and unhappy stay in Poland after the war, they traveled to Germany, where the survivors of the Holocaust gathered for their next journey. To Israel or America? – that was the question. For my teenage father, it was no question at all. The son of an Orthodox Jew, he had nonetheless rejected yeshiva schooling postwar for an ideal that he felt was greater – Zionism.
That sense of connectedness and intensity for Israel was a fixture of my childhood in Skokie, Illinois, where my parents eventually settled.
In addition to daily stories about relatives lost and the struggles of those who survived, Israel was a symbol of strength, the place where free Jews lived. Israel was the place of salvation.
Israel was where Jews fought back and pride was restored. More than 9,000 kilometers away, in our little suburb of Chicago, Israel was, for me, nothing short of a miracle.
MY WIFE and daughter and I made aliya eight weeks ago. We came to the decision after much debate and discussion, but it really came down to one thing. During a “pilot year” in Israel in 2009-2010, Rachel and I, who were studying at Jewish seminaries in Jerusalem, sent our twoyear- old to a preschool in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood. Chana knew no Hebrew when she arrived. In fact, she couldn’t speak much English either, but we sent her to Hebrew preschool, figuring that she would adapt quickly. By the end of our year, not only could she speak Hebrew, but she wouldn’t even answer us in English. And there was one thing more: the songs. She would come home singing Hebrew songs she had learned. Patriotic songs, psalms, children’s tunes, songs my wife and I didn’t know but our two-year-old could sing by heart. A little girl singing Hebrew songs so naturally, that’s what did it for us. That’s what wrenched our hearts. That’s why we moved to Israel.
Of course, it was more than that, but it needn’t be. Chana had fulfilled our purpose for aliya. She had become a native Hebrew speaker.
While my wife and I could never become native Israelis, our kids could, and that was all we wanted.
But that’s not the whole story.
Before we came, we were warned that aliya would be difficult. Nearly every person told us that integrating would be a challenge.
Nonetheless, we were not deterred. How difficult could it be? Of course, we’ve only been here eight weeks, but the sense of dislocation and disorientation is profound.
The other day we took the train from Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem. It’s a stunning ride. The track slithers along a green valley capped by rocky mountaintops. A river flows at the valley’s bottom, and bikers use a gravel access road for their off-the-beaten-path forays.
But for all that, I felt something lacking. As much as I want to connect to the land, I have no childhood memories of those mountains.
There were no trips to the Jerusalem Zoo, no stories of grandfathers who rode the first rails to Jaffa. I feel as if I’m looking at a picture-book image of Eretz Yisrael that has bizarrely come to life.
When I was living in Brooklyn, I met a Ger Hassid at a Shabbat meal who told me that he was a convert. The man sitting next to me with long sidelocks and a streimel was a convert.
Fine. But he said something I’ll never forget. As much as he had transformed his life, he said, as much as he prayed three times a day and took on Jewish customs and married a Jewish woman; as much as every person on the street would never mistake him for anything but a member of an esoteric Jewish religious sect, he was still a kid from a farm in eastern Ontario.
And when he returned to that farm, that’s when he felt at home. He felt it in his kishkes, he said.
WE HAVE found that nothing adequately prepares you for integration. It is one thing to be a student or tourist here, quite another to live here and say “This is where we will live for the rest of our lives.”
Before we left for Israel, our families threw us a going-away party. I told them that while I understood we were making them sad, we also hoped we were making them proud.
Left unsaid was that I felt that I was completing a circle. In 1949 my grandparents held the tickets to Eretz Yisrael in their hands.
One letter changed that. My wife and I made a choice that my grandparents had not. Only time will tell if it was the right one.