What We Are Forgetting: A Requiem for Israel and America |
There is a photograph sitting on my desk as I write this.
It is from 1948, the year Israel declared itself into existence and was immediately fighting five armies for the right to keep existing.
Two young men are dug into a shallow trench in the sand. Both wear steel helmets. One has his cheek pressed to the stock of a light machine gun, his eye down the sight, his hands steady on the grip. The other crouches beside him, watching the field.
Behind them stands a single wooden barrack with three dark windows and a chimney. There is nothing else. No town. No reinforcements. No country, yet, to defend.
The man behind the gun is Yakov. Edna’s older brother. A Jew from Warsaw who was supposed to be dead.
There were four of them, in the end. Yakov and Harry, who fought. Edna, who survived as a child in Warsaw and lived a long second life. Miriam, Edna’s sister, whom I never met but whose name has been in this archive for as long as I have been working on it.
In the early years, all four came to the same small piece of ground in the Western Galilee: Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the kibbutz called House of the Ghetto Fighters. They lived there. They worked there. They helped build it from nothing into something.
In time, the family split, as so many survivor families did. Yakov and Miriam stayed in Israel, where they are buried now in the soil they fought for. Edna and Harry came to America, where they built second lives and are buried in the country that took them in.
And there were two more.
My mother in Navy whites, a lieutenant in the WAVES, serving stateside. My father in Army green, fighting his way up the Italian peninsula in a Sherman tank.
They were on the other side of the same war Yakov had survived. They served so that there would be a world left in which Yakov could one day stand in that trench at all.
They are gone too now.
So when I say I sit at a table with ghosts, I mean six chairs, not four.
Two of them rest in Israel. Four of them rest in the United States.
All six paid for the bond between those two countries in the only currency that ever truly mattered.
Six lives. Two countries. One inheritance.
Six lives. Two countries. One inheritance.
Lately, I find myself wanting to ask them something I never thought I would have to ask.
Do you think they can survive?
Israel, with an army stretched thin, an economy under strain, a government whose conduct I cannot defend, and an ally whose public support is shifting beneath its feet.
America, with its postwar consensus eroding, its institutions........