We were the future, to borrow the title of a book by Yael Neeman. But now it’s behind us. Tuesday we gathered once again on the banks of the Yarkon River for our Tel Aviv Ironi Aleph high school class reunion.
We’re all around 70 now; we were 60 the last time we met up. But very little has changed. Daniella died two days before the reunion, Reuven a few weeks earlier. And nevertheless, despite everything, most of us came. We were 219 in 1971. By May 2013 there were 10 deaths, 18 who had emigrated and 14 who had vanished. I wrote at the time, “We were 219 kids, with 2,190 dreams.” Little remains of those dreams. I dreamed of being either prime minister or a bus driver, whichever came first. But neither did, and evidently never will.
It was a melancholy evening; perhaps the success of these reunions lies precisely in their sadness. It’s a beautiful sorrow. It’s a moment to look back, and there’s no way for that not to be sad – looking back at how beautiful we were, and how innocent; at what we achieved, and what we didn’t. And despite it all, we were so happy to meet, judging by the responses the next day. Our photographs flickered on the screen – our children, and our teachers. They seemed so old to us then, but now, the truth is revealed: Most were the same age our children are today. My grandfather, when he was the age we are now, already walked with a cane. Some of our teachers were crazy Holocaust survivors, just as some of our parents were.
The Holocaust was everywhere, but we didn’t want to know or hear, neither from our parents nor our teachers. We thought they went like sheep to the slaughter. Of course we never heard about the Nakba, not even the name. We never asked about the ruins that were everywhere and what had happened to their owners.
We were the first generation of the state, born five years after its establishment in secular, Ashkenazi, egalitarian Tel Aviv. None of us were very rich or very poor. Nearly all of us were total Zionists and patriots, except for Nitza, who was in the anti-Zionist movement Matzpen.
Because of a chance meeting with her on the steps of Beit Sokolow, Amir and I were sent to the vice principal, who pulled out pictures the Shin Bet security service gave him, demanding explanations, 50 years before the government coup that destroyed Israeli democracy.
We have grown, we have grown. Ten years ago, I wrote, “Next time, there will be fewer of us, and we will be joined by Filipino aides,” yet another of my predictions that proved false. We were indeed fewer, but without a single Filipino. Dov said the date that matters for him is this October, the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And then he embarked on a long, painful monologue that showed that he is still stuck there, at the Suez Canal.
Yigal, who lived in the Netherlands for years as an assistant to the Transcendental Meditation guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, came specially from America, where he is a therapist. He wore a large, colorful kippa. The last time we met was 31 years ago, when he tried to persuade me to interview a U.S. presidential candidate from the Natural Law Party. Yigal got married in America some years ago, and he and his wife adopted a teenager from Mali.
Amir reminded me of our trip to Eilat, which began in Tel Aviv’s wholesale produce market with a search for a truck driver to take us south. It continued with a nighttime drive on the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, July 21, 1969. And it ended in disrupted sleep on the floor of a gas station outside Eilat. And I was so happy to see Idit, my first kiss, in the stairwell of 19 Bloch Street.
Ten years ago, I thought that we were a messed-up, screwed-up generation of middle-of-the-road children who went with the flow, missed out, disappointed and achieved little, with the exception of the 40 lawyers that our class produced. This week, it looked a little different: We lived our lives. We have made our peace with what was, and also with what was not. Only let us make it to the next reunion.
We Were Israel's Future
12
1
19.05.2023
We were the future, to borrow the title of a book by Yael Neeman. But now it’s behind us. Tuesday we gathered once again on the banks of the Yarkon River for our Tel Aviv Ironi Aleph high school class reunion.
We’re all around 70 now; we were 60 the last time we met up. But very little has changed. Daniella died two days before the reunion, Reuven a few weeks earlier. And nevertheless, despite everything, most of us came. We were 219 in 1971. By May 2013 there were 10 deaths, 18 who had emigrated and 14 who had vanished. I wrote at the time, “We were 219 kids, with 2,190 dreams.” Little remains of those dreams. I dreamed of being either prime minister or a bus driver, whichever came first. But neither did, and evidently never will.
It was a melancholy evening; perhaps the success of these reunions lies precisely in their sadness. It’s a beautiful sorrow. It’s a moment to look back, and there’s no way for that not to be sad – looking back at how beautiful we were, and how innocent; at what we achieved,........
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