Prelude:  What We Have Won

When our great grandfather Akiva Holtzman landed in America and changed his name to Maurice Goldsman, he was 24.   He had fled the pogroms of Byelorus and conscription into the Russian army never to see home again; he traveled some 6,000 miles across Russia on the TranSiberian railroad and worked in China and Korea until passage to the Land of Opportunity was obtained.

Akiva's brother Shmuel had different plans.  A hard-core political Zionist, he believed that the solution to persecution of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere in the world was the establishment of a Jewish homeland.  He too tried to escape the Russian army and was caught and jailed once before succeeding in smuggling himself and a friend out on a ship bound for Mediterranean shores.  

Akiva-now-Maurice married his first cousin Bluma and they settled in Maryland.  They bore three children; the eldest one was Celia.  Shmuel met a young woman who remembered his family from their chicken-raising days in Russia, and they settled in Israel; they too raised a family and awaited the day when Israel would be a true country.

On my bookshelf, I have a leather-bound volume that Shmuel sent to his American brother in 1951, just after Israel's War of Independence.  It is a commemorative volume telling, in high literary Hebrew, the story of the Jewish refugees arriving in Haifa and Tel Aviv, the brave battles with the hostile indigenous Arab population, the odds against the Hagana in 1948 and the incredible victory and unfathomable loss of that war.  Most arresting are the pictures, pages and pages of sparse landscape, nascent cities, broken and resolute people.  "I hope this will help you understand how hard we struggled, and what we have won," Shmuel wrote to his brother in an inscription on the title page.  He wrote not in Yiddish, the language of their childhood, but rather in Hebrew.  This is my life now, the writing says.  This is who we were meant to be.

My grandmother, Maurice's eldest daughter, sits today not far from Annapolis in an elder care home in Silver Spring, MD, the town where she raised her own children and grandchildren.  She has dementia, which is why she doesn't know that the Israeli Head of State Ehud Olmert is here to ostensibly try and broker peace with the Palestinian Authority amidst representatives of the countries that fought Israel in 1948, 1967, 1973.  She struggled mightily during her more active years in support of the new State of Israel here in the diaspora, co-founding Pioneer Women and leading initiatives with the Labor Zionist organization Na'amat.  She kept attending meetings long after she could remember anyone's name.  She sent her children to Labor Zionist summer camps and to Israel; she supported the family there and saved money for her international phonecalls and trips to the region.  

Perhaps my cousin Ben and I will go visit Grandma after today's conference is come and gone.  He will tell her how it came to be that he is sitting inside the US Naval Academy as a technician for a major international newswire, brushing past heads of state, ministers and dignitaries and honing his skills as a photographer.  I will try to explain to her why her eldest granddaughter speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew, and how my two years of living and traveling in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel have led me back to the United States with the slim hope that it is as an American, not in spite of being American, that I can contribute to internationally responsible polity in the Middle East.

I know exactly what she will say.  "I'm confused."

"It's okay, Grandma," we will tell her.  

"I love you," she will answer.

Dispatch #1: A Tale of Two Cousins

Mimi is on the overnight train from Boston to Washington, DC with a Darwin's sandwich steadily disappearing next to her and a lot of hours to fill.  As of her last functional wireless connection, the world is abuzz with preemptive talk about the failure of Annapolis, from Haaretz leading with Ismail Haniyeh's refutal of Abbas' mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians to Al-Jazeera Arabic leading with the deaths of four martyrs in Gaza and a picture of a young boy crying and cradling the head of one of the militants in his arms.  The message is clear; heads of state can have all the congratulatory dinner parties they want: here, it's still war.

It's remarkable how some days, being able to read fluently in Arabic and Hebrew just reaffirms the futility of Mimi's very motivation for learning these languages: to be able to Make A Difference in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  People are often amazed at how quickly she can switch between Israeli-sounding Hebrew to Palestinian dialect and exclaim, "if only there were more people like you, this conflict would be over tomorrow!"  Or, everyone would give up right here and now.

She is 27, born and raised in Watertown, Massachusetts with an excellent early education at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Newton.  Her parents sent her to Jewish school less out of their own linguistic or religious conviction (neither speaks Hebrew or believes in a traditional God) and more because she was a miserable failure at making friends in public school kindergarten.  If they figured that there might be a higher percentage of the socially awkward in private school, they were right. 

Fast forward through the requisite drama geek high school experience—in college Mimi (re)discovered her connection to the Middle East, this time fueled by a beginning knowledge of the Arabic language and a desire to see Israelis and Palestinian on her own terms.  She spent two summers working in Nazareth with a Palestinian-Israeli women's organization before and during the al-Aqsa Intifada and went on pursue a Master's in Middle Eastern Studies.  She has recently begun curating a series of Talkbacks following performance of the play MASKED, an Israeli-authored drama about three Palestinian brothers. 

Ben, 24, is trying to grab a few last hours of sleep before his 5am call inside the Naval Academy to set up computer systems to monitor this seminal conference.  Ben grew up mostly in Silver Spring, MD, with forays into Canada and Queens during his formative years.  He is part of a third generation of tinkers and builders in the Goldsman-Keller family; Ben's grandfather's reputation for being able to fix any electrical gadget (as long as you aren't in a hurry) turned into an aptitude for fixing up cars and computers in his grandsons.  Not many people can claim to have bought a BMW "fixer-upper" for $100, or to have driven in a caravan of such cars from Maryland to Philadelphia for a cheese steak.  

After graduating from Blair High School, Ben enlisted in the US Army and as a Private First Class was in charge of what he explains is "a whole lot of important computers at Fort Lewis, Washington"; he ended his service after over two years and went on to work for Boeing before moving into journalistic tech support.  Ben looks forward to pursuing a BFA, and eventually an MFA, in photography; his specialty is sports photography but unless Olmert and Abbas really go at it, he'll have little use for that particular skill at Annapolis.