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22 August 07.
We begin with a necessary disclaimer. This is a family history, not a political broadside. I'm sticking to the facts, as best as I can reconstruct them. If you take this as some sort of commentary on current politics, then I hate you. I think it is interesting history, however, because it's not often that a new country just pops up one day. I get the impression that some people think that Israel as a Jewish state just appeared one day, by UN decree. In one sense it did, but in another, it formed over the course of a century or so as individual people contributed. Since the members of my family are included among those contributors, my family history, in my mind, is tied to the history of Israel.
My grandmother was born in Botoşani, Romania, as the daughter of Rosa
Ashkenaz and Aaron Cordova (a German).
There are two main streams of Judaism: Ashkenazi and
Sehpardic, where the Ashkenazi were primarily found in Eastern Europe, and
the Sephardic in Spain and North Africa. Noting that Cordova is a town
in Southern Spain, we see that this was a marriage of the two traditions.
It was an orthodox household in an orthodox community.
This list of Jewish
Cemetaries
(which seems to be trying to cite its sources and get things right) has this
to say about the town:
She left around 1930 (don't recall the exact date), to the British
protectorate that was called Palestine. The coin pictured here was in my
grandmother's collection, along with the cute little tokens Israeli
payphones used to run on and other such oddities. You can see that it
is in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. The Hebrew in parens (at about 7
o'clock in the picture) is an acronym for what the Jew folk like to call
this plot of land (Israel), so the conflict of naming is already
beginning to show, though the Brits are showing their clear preference.
The choice of Palestine, I am told, derives
from the British fetish for all things Roman.
Millenia ago, the Romans had renamed the territory from Judea
to a variant on Palestine. The term also lives on in conversational
English in another variant form, philistine. Once again, if you think this bit
of etymology from the late 1800s has any relevance to modern politics,
you've got issues. But ain't it interesting?
Romanian sentiment toward Jews is famously bad. Arendt, in Eichmann in
Jerusalem, explained that when the Nazis came to train Romanians about
how to properly persecute a Jew, the Nazi representatives were horrified
by how inhumanely Romanian Jews were treated. As my grandmother tells
it, the Romanians kept telling her to go back to Palestine, so she
did. There, she was able to continue life as an observant Jew primarily
in the Ashkenasi tradition, while others in her family were able to do the same
in the Sephardic tradition. Her brother had already arrived, and as shown
by the stats above, by the end of WWII everybody in the family had gone
separate ways, to New York, Palestine, or, in one case, a gas chamber.
I asked her what she thought of the British protectorate, and she said
“the Brits were brutes.” She cited one example that she witnessed
where the British police allowed hundreds of immigrants arriving via
sea to drown rather than let them onto shore.
My grandfather was born either in Bulgaria, just
before the family went to Palestine, or in Cypress, en route; my mother
is unsure. They met and married before Israel existed, and eventually
settled in a little apartment in Haifa. The current edition of
Wikipedia
lists Haifa's
population in 1922 as 24,600, which is a small town by any measure;
e.g., Washington, D.C. is 22 times larger, at 550,000 people (without
suburbs). So their
apartment was in a little, sparsely-populated seaport at the edge of a great big desert.
My grandfather lived in that same apartment until
he died about a decade ago; my grandmother lives there now. When my
mother described the place as she remembered it, she doesn't paint a
very pretty picture, and I only picture it as worse fifty years later.
So a few more years pass. My aunt was born three years before the
official founding of Israel, my mother three years after.
I'm not entirely clear on their involvement in the many wars that Israel
the country has fought. During the War of Attrition with Egypt, mother
was stuck watching radar screens near the Sinai Desert, since women in
the military get trained in combat but are kept off the front lines.
Meanwhile, my father was born in Prague, Bohemia, Czechloslovakia. I've
only met him briefly, but he says that his father, a doctor, was
somewhat acquainted with Bertrand Russel, and a letter from Russel
allowed the family to leave the country and go to Israel, where he
mostly grew up.
One nice thing about the Israeli military: it is a meat
market. It's a little more busy now, but in the past it's just been
thousands of 17-year old boys and girls with nothing to do but
work out and flirt with each other. So, my parents met, my brother was
born, and I was born a little later (in Australia, because, uh, why
not).
Meanwhile, my aunt moved to the United States, after meeting the
well-to-do owner of a condom factory, who whisked her away and married
her. Since this was the 1970s and the USA still liked immigrants--more in
the next entry--it was easy for my infant self to wind up in the USA as well.
My aunt had a son, who married a woman from Ohio, and they had two kids who
self-identify as Catholic.
[link] [2 comments]
Replies: 2 comments
on Tuesday, August 28th, d said
Narcissist!! She looks like you in that photo!
on Monday, September 10th, Miss ALS from San Diego said
i can't believe how similar your mom and bro look...i mean, he only got HALF of her DNA, right? |
