Spit, Sand and Sun Tattoos - On The Beach

 

Spit, Sand and Sun Tattoos

On the Beach. For those of you unfamiliar with the literary references, see also: Nevil Shute and his novel of the same name (later also a movie). Published in 1957, almost exactly when this story begins too…

All of my earliest and happiest memories are on the beach. A tradition in my immediate family that pre-dates my birth by a couple of years. The annual pilgrimage to Ocean City Maryland. We lived in a suburb of Washington DC, at the corner of Virginia and Day Avenues in Silver Spring. My two older sisters, Sue and Anna and a bit later, my younger brother, Michael were all born there. Some ten years or so later, we were joined by my youngest brother, Peter.  My parents married in 1956 and there are photos of them here, ttaken (I believe) shortly after they married. They are so filled with youth and happiness.  From that time forward there are family photographs, year after year reflecting the joyous 2 weeks we spent on the beach every single summer of my childhood and into my teens. I don’t need the photographs to recall the sights, sounds and smells of the happiest time of my life. They live forever in my mind.

The trip would always start by loading 2 weeks’ worth of gear into our ’63 Pontiac “Safari” station wagon. Shouts of “I get the front seat!” signaled the start of an approximately 2-2 ½ hour journey east on U.S. Route 50, across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the ocean. At that time, there was only one span that crossed the bridge. The second would not be built until sometime in the mid or late 1970’s. The trip was peppered with bored whining voices repeating “are we almost there yet?” It wasn’t that far but it seemed like an eternity. We would make just a couple of traditional stops along the way. The first would come just after we crossed the Bay Bridge in Easton, Maryland at the H&G Restaurant. A traditional, family style restaurant where breakfast was served all day.  Of COURSE in our minds, the place was named for my dad, Henry. So… H&G must mean “Henry and Gelbmans.” It was ours for at least that moment every summer.

Reloaded, relieved of hunger and full bladders emptied, we would continue, passing through Salisbury Maryland, which we called “Feathertown.”  So named for the multitude of white chicken feathers that littered the grassy shoulders and medians of the highway flying off from the many tractor trailers carrying caged, live chicken from the chicken ranches terd scattered up and down the Eastern Shore. Salisbury was then and still is home to the Perdue family chicken magnates.  In those years, fields and fields of sweet Silver Queen corn and watermelons stretched out on either side of the highway.  One of the other stops along the way would be one of the ubiquitous fruit stands for fresh corn on the cob, and usually orchard grown peaches (which I still have a weakness for).

We always knew we were close when we made the other main stop in the small town of Berlin Maryland. Just off the highway, on the right was the A&P grocery store. A&P stood for “Atlantic and Pacific” tea company. Much later they would become “SuperFresh” but they would always be “A&P” to me.   A&P – to this day – still makes the 8 O’clock coffee brand that I still drink religiously. With 4 little Gelbman’s trailing behind her, Mom would stock up on things that we mostly never had in the house any other time. I remember in particular, the “variety pak” of little cereal boxes – six little individual cartons – sugar pops, frosted flakes, corn pops, fruit loops, apple jacks and rice crispies (we added our own table sugar to the last). You could cut the little cartons on the side, using the little perforations in the shape of a capital “I” tear open the inside waxed paper and pour your milk straight into the little box. We NEVER had those at home. Also – sour ball hard candies and oreo cookies. Envelopes of bright red Koolaid powder. Hires Root Beer.  It was a sugar bonanza for two solid weeks.  One last stop to make: English’s Chicken for a giant bucket of fried chicken. Another Eastern Shore staple – sides of coleslaw, potato salad and green beans (that no one but mom would eat given the choices).

Reloaded and stocked up, we made that last bit of the less-tha- ten-mile journey in reckless, raucous uproar. We knew we were finally “almost there.”

As we crossed over the small drawbridge that crosses over the Assawoman Bay into the downtown inlet of Ocean City we would all crow, “I can smell the Ocean! I can smell the Ocean!”  In fact, while there may have been a briny, fishy smell wafting in the car windows, what we really smelled were the sun baked, creosote planks of the boardwalk a block or so away. But that was the smell of the Ocean for us. And for me, still is.  As I recall it now, Ocean City only extended up to about 28^th St. Though it would grow further up the coast every year with multi-story motels, then towering condos as I got older.

It always seemed to me that we arrived just ahead of sunset. Upon arrival and the chore of unloading of the car, it was off for a long walk along the beach – sun sinking into the west – bayside - and fully dark by the time we returned, with buckets full of shells and toes caked with sand.  Dinner was the cold fried chicken, a fight over who slept where and off to the tub to get the sand and sweat off our tired little bodies.

The next morning and every morning thereafter, was the same. Up just after dawn, cold cereal out of little boxes - mine invariably corn pops or sugar pops, everything else got too soggy for my taste. Perhaps I’d have Fruit Loops when faced with no other option though I did not like that it turned the milk blue with it’s artificially blue dyed “fruit.” Eac of us with a big glass of ice cold orange juice. Then - straight into our bathing suits and terry cloth beach cover-ups, flip flops, gathering beach towels as we dashed down to the beach to set up our “camp.”   Mom would gather the rest of the gear and meet us there a bit later.

Sometime after we’d gone to bed the night before, now that the car was emptied, Dad would take the pile of inner tubes we always had down to the gas station to get them blown up. Dad was in the tire business (till the day he died) and we ALWAYS had inner tubes. Mostly oversize truck tire tubes with long valve stems that had to be bent down so they didn’t jab you in the thigh. Sometimes we had the GIANT earth mover tire inner tubes. The kind you can put a dozen kids on. We were very popular at the beach. The smell of hot rubber and carbon black is another evocative smell that instantly will take me back to the beach. We also had rubber rafts for “surfing” on though I generally preferred (and still do) body surfing. Boogie boards were not a thing in those days.  Neither were swim goggles. Vendors rented beach umbrellas and also rubber and canvas rafts of better quality than the cheap dime store versions mom had brought. 

Mom would haul down the rest of the days gear (I don’t know where dad was, probably still in bed, or on the “throne” reading the paper?).  Big, red, metal encased Coleman Cooler and a giant thermos of ice and Koolaid.   More cold chicken, hard pretzels, green apples, sour ball hard candies and oreos. The staples of our diet for two solid weeks.  Dad would eventually appear. He would haul out the itchy wool Army blanket that usually lived in the “way back” of the station wagon, together with some aluminum beach chairs, mostly with nylon woven straps – somewhat sagging and frayed.

From 8:30 in the morning til at least 5 p.m. that’s where you’d find us all. Sun screen? Not a chance. I don’t know if it even existed in those days. At most, Coppertone with the kind of naughty “Coppertone Girl” with her bathing suit bottom being pulled down by her dog to reveal her white behind. Usually, nothing more than baby oil slathered on head to toe. Later, thick layers of Unguentine brand zinc oxide ointment smeared on our noses to keep the sun from charring what remained of our skin. Another evocative smell seared (literally) into my memory.  After a day or two in the sun, burnt to a crisp, we would don plain white tee shirts to keep the sun off, including when swimming in the ocean.  I don’t remember ever drinking water. Koolaid, or at perhaps lemonade or ice tea for the adults (mom and dad were not teetotalers but they rarely indulged in alcoholic beverages).

All day. Every day.

I do not have any recollection of NOT knowing how to swim. None at all. I do remember mom plopping our tiny little butts into inner tubes and swimming us out beyond the breaking waves. Scary and exhilarating, it seemed that the ocean must be at least 100 feet deep there.  Mom was, I think, at her very happiest swimming in the ocean. If ever there was ever a meaningful “full immersion” baptism, that was it. For all of us. Scrubbed by salt and sand, tossed in the breaking waves, we were cleansed of all sins for sure.

I have many, many happy memories with mom at the beach. But a few with Dad also stand out. One of them, my favorite was his “spit & sand” tattoo. He would lick his finger and with the spit, trace our names on the top of our thighs or it out on our backs between our should blades. Then he would dust it with sand and blow the excess off. After a few hours in the sun, we would be sporting a “sun tattoo” with our names written in the pale skin under our now tanned bodies. Dad had a Navy tattoo on his forearm. It was – in those days – still very clear and I remember it well. It was a huge sailing ship – a frigate of some kind – emerging from a cloud bank.  It would later blur and fade into a blob but not for many years. Dad was also the master of kite flying. Each of us had our own kites and he would help us get our flying fleet in the air. Once they were up, he would pick up bits of flotsam and jetsam on the beach – a paper plate, an empty soda can – and somehow affix them to the kite string and when the wind caught them once on the taught string – he’d send them up the string as “messages” to our kites. 

The coolest thing of all was having him read the semaphore the life guards used to communicate from lifeguard chair to chair up and down the beach back in those days. He learned semaphore (flag signaling, and morse code) in the Navy. He taught us the alphabet, but we couldn’t read the lifeguards signals fast enough. He probably couldn’t either and very likely made up all the things he said they were saying. Mostly gossiping about the pretty girls walking up and down the beach (because… they would invariably wander by our encampment just a moment or two later so – had to be true, right?) Mom did a lot of eyerolling.

Come sundown, we’d trek back up to our condo, fight over bathtime and then off to the boardwalk. Or the amusement park, Jolly Roger.  Really, it is no wonder I’m a diabetic today given that for two solid weeks every summer my diet consisted mostly of sugar. Cotton candy, candy apples, saltwater taffy (which I could not bear), fudge, Caramel Popcorn from Dollies, chocolate covered frozen bananas (probably the healthiest thing I ate).  And fries. Boardwalk Fries from Thrashers! The secret is peanut oil. And NO ketchup allowed. They don’t have any and if you ask for ketchup they’ll growl and frown at you. Vinegar and salt are the only condiments you’ll get at Thrashers.   Jolly Roger, with the giant pirate standing and straddling the gate, should have made us all puke up that smorgasbord of sugar but it didn’t.  Mom, like some visitor from another world that I didn’t recognize, was just as fond of the roller coasters as she was the ocean. Sue and Anna also loved them but I was not (and still am not) a fan. I preferred the gravity defying Rotor or “Tilt-a-Wheel – a cylinder cage you could stand inside, with your back to the wall, and when it would spin, it would tilt, in my memory, completely sideways,  while the centrifugal force pinned you to the side. Then they would drop the floor out as you spun suspended through space.  Or the equally gravity defying Zipper (which would come close to making me lose my oreos!). None of us were drawn to the more sedate ferris wheels or spinning tea cups. The bumper rides allowed us to vent a lot of aggression towards eachother and others. We would occasionally team up to batter some poor unsuspecting stranger.

Dad meanwhile, with little Michael in tow, perhaps pperched on his shoulders, was off on the hunt for carnival prizes. Neither one of them was fond of rides – both got queasy and not fond of heights. (Dad could get seasick on a floating pier – no idea how he managed in the Navy). Off those two went to shoot targets, throw balls, toss rings and such for stuffed animals or other prizes for each of us. One of those longstanding stories retold for dozens of years family gatherings was the time he was throwing balls at a guy in a dunk tank and when they guy jeered at him, “c’mon four eyes! You can’t hit me!”  Dad nailed him all three shots. In those days, Dad wore those then-popular heavy black, square frames so popular in the late sixties and early seventies.

On other nights, or rainy days (though I don’t recall anything other than brief thunderstorms in the late afternoons) it was cards. Interminable games of cards.  Beginning with Old Maid when we were very small, graduating to “War” or “Slap Jack”. Eventualluy playing “Crazy Eights” , “Bloody Knuckles”  or “PIG” (which is played with spoons). Later we’d get into more sophisticated games of rummy and gin rummy. Ultimately Hearts here we learned how to play with a trump suit, and later, Spades in which we learned to bid with a partner. All ll leaving me well prepared to learn Contract Bridge more recently.

Finally worn out, hardly able to keep our eyes open, the final nightly ritual. Out would come the giant, cobalt blue, glass jar of Noxzema.  Cool, soothing Noxzema! On every inch of our sunburnt little bodies. Taking turns rubbing that eucalyptus smelling balm everywhere. Probably the worst possible thing for sunburn as it basically served to dry out the skin. Which was just fine with Dad. The next night he would take some pleasure in peeling huge swaths of burnt skin from our necks and across our shoulders. Not the flaky, scaly kind. Big sheets of still slightly moist skin.  This is kind of gross now that I think of it, but we were forever peeling and it felt good to have someone do it and relieve the itch while he was at it.

No doubt we read before the lights went out. We ALWAYS read. Constantly. Everywhere. All the time. Like swimming, I have no recollection of not knowing how to read. Or, being read to by Mom (which is probably how I learned to read to begin with). We didn’t like to have Dad read to us. He got all the voices wrong.

Conked out for the duration only to wake up early the next morning and do it all over again. Two solid weeks, every single summer.

For all the fights and squabbles, with my siblings over the years, and with my parents as well, seemed to disappear during that summer interlude. As the years went on, and I became deeply angry and resentful of the family I grew up in and ultimately became fully estranged, I forgot these sun-drenched days and sugary nights. Days and nights when we were so very happy, joyous and completely free. Joyously free.

They come back to me now. Grateful for every minute of them.  I am happy to say that I reconciled with my parents well before they died. I made peace with my siblings, but we are not close (and I remain estranged from some).

I look to these memories especially now, to remind me – every day – what it means to be happy, joyful and free. And to work to return to that reality.  So I can write about THESE things. The laughter. The love. The carefree innocence.

Hope you’ll join me. See you On the Beach.  The beach of my memories and hopefully NOT Nevil Shute’s version.

 

On Exile. And Return

Israel/Palestine. In Diaspora. In Exile. Who has the Right of Return? I have thought about this for decades. I have very, very unconventional thoughts about both. Most of my Jewish and Christian friends and family are shocked – gob smacked - to learn about them. Hence, I have been reluctant to share them. Especially recently.

 My thoughts are very much informed by my 7 years’ experience of living in Israel (I am a citizen to this day and speak fluent, if rusty, Hebrew).  I am informed by observing the situation intimately both then and from afar since. I have visited periodically since I moved from there to London and eventually back to the U.S. My brother was an Israeli tank commander in both Lebanon and the West Bank. Many of my friends also served in the IDF. Several people I know, and love were killed or gravely injured (mentally and physically).

  My views are also informed by my family history, religiously speaking, both Christian and Jewish. My family was heavily impacted by the Holocaust. My father and grandmother were the only survivors of their family in Southwest Poland.  

 It may surprise you to know that my thoughts do not flow only from my personal experience.

 As an undergraduate, I studied history and concentrated my interests on the history of Europe from 1870 to World War II, including the interwar years.  I invested an extensive amount of time - academically as both an undergraduate and at law school - researching the European Holocaust and several the other genocidal events in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia (and the list goes on). I spent the better part of my law school career – to the extent possible - concentrating on Humanitarian Law and the Law of War, including war crimes prosecution and various conventions and treaties. I wrote and published a dissertation for the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda on the Hierarchy of International Laws. I worked on projects including a study  of the intersection (particularly the contradictions) of the new Afghani Constitution and the UN Convention (to which they are signatories). I closely followed the nascent International Criminal Court in the Hague (from which the U.S. withdrew under George W. Bush).  I lived in, or traveled to some 35 countries around the world. 

 As a person and a lawyer, I am deeply conscious of the role the law plays in maintaining a civil society. I am also acutely aware that many approach the issues of Israel from a religious, spiritual, and emotional place. I respect that. I am not immune.  I am also of the belief that ALL living beings are chosen by God. There is not ‘one’ Chosen People. ALL people are chosen by god.  In my belief system my god is a god of love.

 The Law of War, or International Humanitarian Law, is well established. The basic tenets were laid down centuries ago by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in the 3^rd century. His is the first systematic exposition of the law of war. It was expanded upon by Thomas Aquinas – famous for his philosophical and theological proof of the existence of God in the 13th century. In his Summa Theologicae, Aquinas presents the general outline of what would become the traditional “Just War Theory.” Aquinas sets forth the basis for entering into a just war and once engaged, the kinds of activity that are permissible (for a Christian) in war. The two are known as Jus ad bellum and Jus in Bello. Jus ad Bellum - entering into war -is limited to self-defense against an attack or to avoid an imminent threat. Jus in Bello sets forth conduct that is forbidden in war. Jus in Bello states that the defense must be proportionate to the force brought against the defender. It proscribes “necessity” as the sole measure of the force that may be used as a defense. War must be entered into with specific intention. The intention must lead to greater peace and justice than existed prior to the outbreak of war.  Critical in the current discussion, force may not be used for revenge and civilians must be protected.

 These principles were later codified in law. Among others are Lincoln’s Civil War “Order 100” which itself is based on the then-contemporaneous “Lieber Code” which shortly thereafter forms the basis for the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

 One useful way to look at the situation in Israel- Palestine is take it out of this historic Jewish/Muslim/Christian context. I feel that one cannot discount the influence of Christian Evangelicals and “Christian Zionism” in this equation.   We can still frame it in religious context and not end up in the same distorted view we have of Israel/Palestine.

 One can imagine a situation involving Irish Catholics, who by and large supported Irish Catholic terrorism under the IRA. There were many bloody, horrific attacks in which the IRA attacked Protestants. Imagine that as a response, Protestants were to confine all Catholics into a small geographic area, walled it in, and surrounded it with a well-armed military, bristling with very high tech, advanced weapons, all heavily financed and supported by their co-religionists, the British. Now the IRA have retreated into that enclave, tunneling beneath the civilian population. Women and children. Dense with homes. Schools. Hospitals.  If Irish Protestants were to begin indiscriminately firing rockets, including white phosphorous shells, into the Catholic enclave - from thousands of feet in the air where they are free from any risk to themselves – any civilized nation and its citizens would stand on its hind legs and howl. If they were to indiscriminately kill all those trapped within, destroy infrastructure, homes, churches, hospitals? Deprive all inhabitants of food, water, fuel, and medicine – we would not hesitate to call that a war crime. 

 Were there also of the Irish Terrorists? Absolutely yes. (to the Irish Catholics, they were “freedom fighters”) Did the IRA massacre Protestants? Absolutely yes.  Does that justify the wholesale slaughter of ALL of the Irish Catholics?  Absolutely not.

 While living on Kibbutz Ginegar near Afula, in 1982, I watched tanks roll northward and heard the jets flying low to avoid radar detection as Israel surged into Lebanon. The jets, roaring past us at the speed of sound caused sonic booms that rattled our windows. Kibbutz Ginegar, in the northern end of the Valley of Sharon, is not far from Meggido. Har Meggido (Mount Megiddo) that is. If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, you might know it better as Armageddon. It surely felt like Armegeddon was imminent.

 The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed an earlier invasion in 1978 that pushed Palestinians north of the Litani River in Southern Lebanon.  Thereafter, civil unrest among Lebanese factions allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to continue operations against Israel to the south. In 1982, Israeli joined forces with Lebanese Christian Militias to expel the PLO.  

 I watched in horror as the Lebanese and Israelis systematically massacred Palestinians at Sabra & Shatilla refugee camps near Beirut. 

 All of this occurred when Jewish Settlers were ramping up settlements in the Occupied Territories further displacing Palestinians. Displacement of Palestinians is a fact that has been going on since at least 1948. Actually, long before that.

 More recently, Israel built "security barriers" around both the West Bank and Gaza. These are concrete walls, as high as 20 or more feet in some places, topped with barbed wire and guard towers. The roads that run from one Jewish settlement to another (settlements illegal under international law) bisect the remaining Palestinian villages.  Palestinians are forbidden to use those roads.  This is what many refer to as the Apartheid State in Israel.

 Many do not realize the occupation of West Bank and settlements have nothing to do with religion, although they are justified by the biblical notion of Judea and Samaria. Nor are they connected to nationality - historical or cultural connection to the land. No. If you look at a map of the Jewish settlements and overlay it with the hydrologic maps identifying of the natural aquifers providing the primary source of fresh water in the region you will find that the Jewish settlements are placed strategically over and around the only natural aquifers in the region. Israel has systematically deprived Palestinians of the water necessary for their mostly agricultural villages. The desert blooms only for Israelis but at the expense of their Palestinian neighbors.  Palestinian settlements that have been in place for hundreds of years and held by generations of Palestinians. These Palestinian farms – utterly deprived of water – are destroyed and Palestinians herded into ever smaller enclaves. Olive groves hundreds of years old that supplied food and sustenance for generations of Palestinians are bulldozed into oblivion, along with their homes.

 Meanwhile, south and west of the Occupied West Bank and not connected by any land bridge, Israel claims to have "completely withdrawn" from Gaza in 2005. That is fiction. They "withdrew" their occupying military forces but retained control of all ingress/egress (now walled in) They control the water, fuel, electricity and all imports and exports including food, building materials and medical supplies. They never relinquished that control. That is why they can, overnight, turn it all off.

  If you cannot see the obvious comparison to these Pales-stans, I will make it plain: Israel created their very own Warsaw Ghettos. They are now bent on “liquidation” – which does not necessarily mean death. Liquidation, or “ethnic cleansing” is a term not defined explicitly identified as war crime on it’s own. However, the U.N. Security Council’s Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992) , citing to it’s interim report states (emphasis mine):

 ``55. The expression `ethnic cleansing' is relatively new. Considered in the context of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, `ethnic cleansing' means rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area. `Ethnic cleansing' is contrary to international law.

`56. Based on the many reports describing the policy and practices conducted in the former Yugoslavia, `ethnic cleansing' has been carried out by means of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property. Those practices constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.

Zionists (both Jewish AND Christian) justify ethnic cleansing to address the "Existential Crisis" of the Jews. Or the Rapturous Ecstasy of Salvation. Our existence, or salvation, is theoretically only guaranteed by the existence of the State of Israel. The long Jewish existential nightmare was, of course, set in collective minds of Jews around the world by the Holocaust. Long before that, the Jewish Diaspora, following the destruction of the 2^nd Jewish temple in 70 CE, together with repeated experience -  across generations - of antisemitism, pograms, internal exile to The Pale – all a steady crescendo culminating in the Holocaust. In Europe.

 This existential threat is the reason all Jews everywhere in the world have a "Right of Return" to the land of Israel. It's automatic. We can ‘return’ anytime – to a place some have never been before - claiming the right to make Aliyah (the right to “go up” to Israel). Upon arrival we may instantaneously become a citizen (as I and my entire family did in 1979). When you do that, the State of Israel pays a very generous part of your transition. They provide housing, language schools, subsidies, loan guarantees, free importation of all your household goods (including duty free appliances and cars).

 The Gelbman family – all of us - received all of that free even though we were a wealthy American family.  In our case, we were given – rent free – two apartments in a lovely seaside suburb of Ashkelon. In our “Merkaz Klitah” (Absorption Center) there were three brand-new high-rise apartment buildings with a view of the sea a few blocks distant. Mom, Dad and the 2 boys in one building, I and my two sisters in a second apartment across the courtyard. Both apartments were furnished with basic furniture and household goods which were ours to keep. Those items referred as “Sachnut” (Jewish Agency) furniture, all pretty utilitarian, but we were very comfortable.

 For you who are believers and know your Bible, you’ll recall Ashkelon as the place where Samson did his thing with Delilah and the Philistines.  See also The Book of Judges (ספר שופטים) chapters 13-16.

 

 Ashkelon is roughly 15 miles north of Gaza – both snug up against the same Mediterranean Sea and some mighty gorgeous beaches.  There we were provided with intensive Hebrew language lessons in an “Ulpan” (studio) 6 hours a day, 6 hours a day. My two younger brothers (then 8 and 14) went straight to Israeli public schools the day after we arrived.  So, our life as Jews, Returning to the Land of Israel, began. Having had no Jewish upbringing at all prior to arrival.

 For hundreds of years, following the destruction of the 2^nd Temple a small remnant of Jews continued to live peacefully side by side with the other indigenous people - the Palestinians.  The Jews in Diaspora (Dispersion) were displaced by Romans. In turn, those of us claiming our Right of Return would displace Palestinians.

 That was NOT in 1948. Nor was it following the Holocaust or the Israeli War of Independence. It was well underway before that. The Holocaust accelerated the establishment of the state and only after Zionist militants – terrorists – convinced the British to depart. Menachem Begin was a leader of the Irgun and they were terrorists.

 Zionism developed into a formal movement in 1896 following the publication of Theodor Herzl's pamphlet, "The Zionist State." While there was plenty of antisemitism in Europe driving that movement, it was no different from all other forms of "nationalist" movements that were cropping up all over Europe. And elsewhere around the world. These nationalist aspirations accelerated in the wake of World War I (including many former colonies in Southeast Asia and across the African Continent).  Nationalism has its roots in the French Revolution, but basically it advocates for the creation of nations based on ethnicity. Ethnic Slavs, ethnic Germans (so-called “Aryans”), ethnic Magyars. It is closely related to the pseudo-science popular at the same time, called Eugenics. Eugenics also justified segregation in the U.S.  (curiously, the University of Virginia was a central hotbed of "Eugenics" and has a frightful history of conducting and supporting it as a "science").

 Here is the rub. Jewish Zionist aspirations did not succeed as others seemed to do at that time. Instead, the Holocaust happened - as we know all too well. The trauma was real, and it remains with us - passed down through the generations since. But a Jewish Holocaust is not happening NOW. Not to the Jews anyway. There is no existential threat to the State of Israel. Do people get killed? Yes. Horribly, tragically. However, the current existential threat is to the PALESTINIANS. Ethnic cleansing has been going on for decades. Israel did not just start firing missiles into Gaza on October 8th. For years Israeli rockets have come in response to rockets fired OUT of Gaza. Until recently, the missiles coming out of Gaza have been very crude, unguided weapons that land pretty much anywhere and often hit no target at all.  The ratio of Jews to Palestinians killed since 2000 is OVERWHELMINGLY more Palestinian that Jewish. See also: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208380/

  Israel has been firing high tech guided missiles into Gaza as if shooting fish in a barrel for decades.

 Much of what we have read or heard about events on October 7^th are shrouded in the “fog of war” – on both sides. The Hamas attacks are monstrous. Ghastly. Hearing of the hostage taking we are filled with horror and terror, our trauma response on full display. However, accurate or not, I note that both Haaretz and Yidiot Achronot (two major Israeli daily news papers) reported that some of the bodies recovered at the music festival or nearby are in fact Palestinians burnt beyond recognition and only identified by DNA. Also, both Israeli papers are reporting that Israeli helicopters arriving on the scene indiscriminately fired rockets into the crowd and themselves are responsible for some portion of the casualties. It’s monstrous. All of it. But I do not accept at face value everything I see, read or hear.

 Almost everyone believes this problem is intractable. So complicated! So much history! HUNDREDS of years of conflict! All of that is an excuse to justify the status quo. But we have NOT preserved the status quo. Palestinians have continued to be displaced. Israel is now taking the recent Hamas attack as a carte blanche to “finish the job of annihilating Palestinians once and for all.” (a phrased used by leaders of the Knesset and American supporters alike).  Under the guise of "defense" -- they are turning Gaza into nothing but dust and rubble. They’ve massacred 10s of thousands in the last several weeks, among them some 4000 children, and mostly civilians. Simultaneously they are taking the opportunity to allow Jewish Settlers to run rampant in the West Bank. There they are terrorizing what remains of Palestinian cities and agricultural villages “inducing” their departure. And this morning I am reading of attacks in Lebanon and Syria as well. See also: https://www.nytimes.com/.../west-bank-settlers

 Hamas does NOT control the West Bank (the Palestinian Authority does, which grew out of Yassir Arafat’s PLO). Efforts to "eradicate Hamas" from the West Bank are a fiction and have no relation to the attacks against Israel on October 7. Are there radical Muslims on the West Bank? Yes of course.  Little known fact: there is also a very large number of Palestinian Christians. Bethlehem is mostly populated by Christian Palestinians. It is in the heart of the West Bank.  Nazareth also has a sizable Christian population (which should come as no surprise to anyone).

 Hamas operates out of Gaza, not the West Bank. Important to understand that Hamas is the elected government of Gaza (not the West Bank) since 2006. A democratically conducted election complete with international election observers, including some from Jimmy Carter’s “Carter Center.”   What many do not know is that Hamas – like the Irish national movement - is made up of two wings. Much like the Irish political movement, there is a terrorist IRA-like wing and a separate social/political wing. And Hamas’ military wing are brutal terrorists. The social/political wing of Hamas built schools, hospitals, orphanages, and many other beneficial welfare programs. THAT is who Gazan’s elected in 2006. They won 35% of the available parliamentary seats. Enough for a controlling interest in their government but by no means an overwhelming majority.  The military wing has held all of Gaza hostage ever since. No subsequent elections have ever been held. Worse - and little known outside Israel –Netanyahu and his Likud partners – funded and supported Hamas. This is well documented and was reported in the Jerusalem Post in 2019. See: https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-to-hamas-part-of-strategy-to-keep-palestinians-divided-583082

 Israeli violence and purposeful displacement in the West Bank (not Gaza) is in no way, shape or form any form of “defense” yet it has accelerated since October 7^th. That is ethnic cleansing and it's a war crime above, beyond and entirely separate from the blockade of Gaza, and the targeting of hospitals and other civilian sites in Gaza. That is opportunism. “Jewish settlers” are doing it under the protection, watchful and very complacent gaze of the Israeli military. And the U.S. government.

 It is not Jewish existence that is threatened. It is Palestinians’ existence at peril.

 So. All that said, one must ask: what is the solution?  I don’t think it is nearly as complicated as most others do. It may be because I do not get bogged down in historical and religious claims. A large part of which is fiction and mythology. Even if one buys all of that, it is possible to set all that aside and go from where we are today.

 I tend to think in analogies. It helps me to understand things. Here is my analogy.

 This entire situation is like a super-sized case of domestic violence. Domestic Violence is chaotic, but it does not spring up a vacuum. It bubbles along, hidden from the neighbors view behind lace curtains – a brutal prison masquerading as a happy home. It is only revealed to outsiders when a crisis occurs. When things spiral out of control. When such a crisis breaks out, law enforcement is called in. Talk to any first-responder and they will tell you that DV calls are the most terrifying and dangerous - for everyone.

 When the police arrive, they cannot broker "peace" between a violent brute standing over his battered and powerless wife. No. USUALLY someone has to be removed from the situation. Someone gets to spend a night in jail and the spouse is whisked off to a secret shelter. In other words, the parties are SEPARATED until the power differential can be equalized. Then and only then can one properly work toward protecting the interests of both parties.

 That's what has to happen. The U.S. is NOT a proper party to intervene because we are the ones who arm and finance Israel. We have kept our thumb heavily on the scale of power thereby multiplying the differential by an order of magnitude. There is no way Palestinians can trust or rely upon the U.S. to guarantee their safety long enough to broker any kind of settlement. That cannot work. That is the very definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  But they MUST be separated, and the shooting stopped. The land grabbing stopped. It will probably require a robust multi-national police force.  That is how Jimmy Carter got Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David to forge the first peace agreement. The shooting stopped. Importantly, Carter threatened to cut off ALL financial and military support to Israel in order to get Begin to come to the table at all. Many people do not know that or have forgotten. It was a KEY factor in the success of the Camp David Accords. Sadat for his part risked his life to make it happen.  Shutting off the U.S. tap is the only thing that seems to shift the imbalance of power.  

 SO they get separated. NOW what? Well, I think the analogy goes further. We MUST acknowledge the effect trauma -including intergenerational trauma - has had on all of us.

 This is where I get into trouble with many Jewish and Christian people with whom I’ve shared my thoughts. I postulate that the abused have become the abusers.

 The trauma of the Holocaust still exists. It still exists in me.  Trauma informed therapy shows that failure to deal with the underlying trauma means that the trauma RESPONSE will persist. What we know about the trauma of domestic violence is that the abused victim --- without intervention – can (often does?) become the abuser. In that way I am NOT shocked that the survivors and offspring of the Warsaw Ghetto and survivors of concentration camps have themselves created their own modern-day equivalents in Gaza and the West Bank.  Some may find it shocking to know that Israel has a deeply hidden culture that fetishizes Nazism in pornography. It’s shocking but I’ve seen it myself. (Don’t ask!)

 By now several generations of both Jews AND Palestinians are egregiously traumatized. Repeatedly and horrifically. The trauma response – brutal violence - will continue until they can be separated and allowed to deal with the underlying  trauma - not the land. When the trauma response is arrested, the power differential evened out, then, and only then can the peace process begin. Just as it does in divorce. Property settled. Custody and support set forth in a binding agreement.

 I have so much more to say. But that's enough for now. What we need is not merely a pause or even a cease fire. What we need is a HALT and robustly enforced de-escalation. NOW. And immediate disarmament of both parties with a guarantee of safety - to both sides. There can be NO successful negotiation until there is a level playing field. The power differential makes that impossible and always has. There is no basis for trust for American negotiators by Palestinians. As long as the U.S. is arming Israel, and financing everything else - no amount of "humanitarian aid" to Palestinians has any meaning whatsoever. “Humanitarian aid” in the present circumstances is like beating a child half to death with an iron rod while he is tied to a chair, the brutality pausing just long enough to give the child a sip of water to revive him, only to continue the beating. It's insanity to expect any other outcome but more radicalization, more brutality and violence.

 Brutality begets brutality. And the present situation only further radicalizes both sides. Israel is not defeating or eradicating terrorism. It is encouraging it. On both sides. In the name of “god.” And we are helping them.  It must stop.

No more. Not in my name. Not. In. My. Name.

 

A Rapturous Return

 On St. Patrick’s Day, they say everyone is Irish.

 I come by my Irish honestly.  I’m not sure precisely which strands of the other 50% of my DNA are the Irish ones, but all of my mother’s family descend from Celts. Irish, Scots, Welsh.
 Seated around that table at Thanksgiving, they were all there. In the flesh. Grandma and Grandpa Jones (a classic Welsh name). My mother’s 3 siblings, Richard, Peggy and Bob are there too. Their wives and children.  Early on, the previous generation is there too – Great Grandma Barker. Great Grandma Jones. Great Aunt Ruth (my grandfather’s sister).
 

We were the living model for “The Wonder Years” growing up in suburban Maryland, just outside Washington DC. Riding our bikes, tooling around on roller skates. Playing kickball in the street. Chasing lightning bugs on summer nights. Idyllic.  Mom the quintessential housewife, dad the successful, self-made business man. Two cars in the driveway. Manicured lawn.
 

On holidays, five wee Gelbmans at the children’s table, sometimes with cousins Rick and Randy. Actually, we four, Susie, Anna, Me, (who’s initials together, according to my dad, spelled out “SAD”) later joined by Michael, and much later, baby Peter.  Pete was not at that children’s table much. He was an “accident.” Born ten years after me. He has no recollections of our Wonder Years.
 

At the grown-ups table Aunt Peggy is funny, silly and with startling, bright red hair. The remnant of the Irish in us, it appears once or twice in every generation. They are all there, the Celts. Right there in the room, in the flesh. They are not ghosts gathered in the far corners of my mind. They are not much of interest to me then. Richard, Peggy and Bob are still alive though my mother has passed.

 Meanwhile, Little Heinele has grown up. The small European refugee boy grew up and never wished to be the kike from Europe.  He became the all-American boy in Flatbush New York, playing stickball in the street. Hot dogs. Apple pie. Chevrolet. 

 

 

After his mother remarried and his stepfather adopted him, he joined Louie at the firehouse in Anacostia. He would never finish high school, instead joining the navy at 17.
 While still in the Navy, in those idyllic 1950’s, while on leave in Miami, he meets Phyllis, then known as” Jonesy. On a blind date set up by an older Gelbman cousin, Jonesy and “Hank” meet in a bar at the beach. He is handsome, outgoing, and fun. She is shy but stylish with a cigarette in her graceful hand on her knee and drink in her other hand.  She is on vacation with her classmate from nursing school.  He makes her laugh.

 

My mother would tell me that my father married her – of all things – because she was clean.  My mother and dad both were very fastidious. Mom obsessively so. I presumed it was the result of those years as a nurse. I later learned that Mom was already pregnant with my eldest sister when they married. She told us that herself as a cautionary tale when the time came to tell us about “the birds and the bees.”
 

The all-American boy, formerly known as Heinele, has become “Hank.” He has married into what he believes is an all American Goyisher family – the Jones Family. The wedding photos reveal that neither set of parents were very happy about this development. Grandma Gelbman wears a black dress.  

Both Grandma and my mother are now “Phyllis Gelbman.”   Grandma will remarry again and finally, much later in her seventies, become Grandma Finklestein.  

Fela Bloch, Jakub, Rita and Heinrich Rosenberg have all faded - lost in the past.

By contrast, the Jones family has been in the U.S. for several generations. Grandpa Jones, born David Walter Jones has a deep bass voice, likely from a strong strand of Welsh DNA. He plays the mandolin and sings in the church choir. He also sings us many silly nursery rhymes and children’s songs.
 

Grandma Jones, a mousy little wisp of a woman with iron grey hair when I meet her, was born Novella Wanda Hess. Despite her German family name, the Scottish strand of my DNA comes through her. Great Grandma Barker was my mother’s Grandma – born Elizabeth Peters.

My middle name, Weston, comes from Great Grandma Jones. She was born Florence Weston Kelley.

Weston was her mother, Harriet Weston. She married James Kilkelly, or Kelly as he became later in America. His father, Patrick Kilkelly crossed the pond from County Galway.  There is my Irish.  I have a photo of him too. In the slouched hat and rumpled uniform of the Union Army, part of the  5th Pennsylvania Volunteers in 1861.
 

These are not ghosts to me. They are living breathing people many of whom I knew in my youth. They sat at our Thanksgiving table. I have little interest in them until much, much later.
 

Curiously, the genetic strand of my DNA that carries the alcoholism gene I inherited comes not from the Irish. It was passed through my Grandma Jones by her father, Charles Hess. He is a ghost to me. Like the other half of my DNA, he is ghostly, shrouded in mist, standing on a bridge where he is last seen in my Grandmother’s childhood, she abandoned there long ago. I would learn about him only much later in my life. Like the other ghosts, unseen, unspoken, a dark secret.  A secret I would carry, a story I’ve told many, many times in the rooms of recovery over the last 30 years and not a part of the one I’m currently writing. Like many children of alcoholics, my grandmother didn’t let booze cross her lips. Indeed after a brief flirtation with her stockings rolled down in flapper fashion, she enlisted as one of Carrie Nation’s hatchet bearing soldiers in the Temperance movement’s Home Defender's Army.
 

Phyllis Ruth Jones, or Jonesy, as her classmates would call her, was born in 1930, She was a child of the Depression and World War Two. Complete with Victory Garden. She would attend High School near

Pittsburgh and go off to Nursing School in Philadelphia (where she would reconnect with Hank sometime after their first blind date in the smokey bar at the beach in Miami.  
 

Before Hank comes on the seen again, Jonesy dates another boy. In her burgeoning womanhood, she and he take a wild ride in her car. They are in an accident the details of which were obscure. The boy is killed. Jonesy has a badly shattered ankle that will hobble her for the remainder of her life. Rehabbing her ankle, she returns as an RN on the floors of the hospital. She does a rotation in a psychiatric hospital where the doctors encourage her to remain in service because she exhibits a talent for caring for the mentally ill. She declines and goes on to become an RN and an anesthetist in the operating room.

 Jonesy is as far from her Baptist upbringing as Hank is from his Judaism when they meet. 1950’s America allows them to intermarry and begin raising a family without benefit of the blessing of either.
 

One by one, the Gelbman girls – babies Sue, Anna and Doris (SAD) – appear in quick succession. By the time I turned up, Jonesy had reverted to Phyllis again. The girls are but 18 months apart. She is tired from nursing, worn out by diapers, wet beds, picking up the toys, doing the laundry, preparing the meals where the milk regularly gets spilled. PTA. Field trips on noisy buses full of rowdy children.
 

When little Michael comes along, the much anticipated first son, Phyllis is at a low ebb. She does not come home from the hospital right away. Grandma Jones arrives to care for the girls.

 I don’t know how long Mom remained in the hospital. I was just four. My mother told us (many years later) that she suffered from Post Partum Depression.  I would figure out – only relatively recently from some missing facts she disclosed in her old age and my own experience observing her fight the demons only she could see – that she suffered from Post Partum Psychosis.
 

Mom would discharge from the psychiatric ward with a common remedy. Jesus.
 

This was not our first experience with Jesus. Mom, early on, decided that the children should have some religious upbringing. That is how it happened that I was baptized at a Lutheran Church. Calvary Lutheran Church on Georgia Avenue in Silver Sprint. I remember it well. Not the baptism. The church was just down the road from Holy Cross Hospital where my tonsils were extracted, and my broken wrist set.
 

Dad, ambivalent to any thought of religion, spent his Sundays in the basement, which he finished with fiberboard paneling and installed both pool and ping pong tables. On Sunday nights, his idea of preparing a meal was to pop us a big bowl of popcorn while we sat in front of the tv, absorbed in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom followed by the Wonderful World of Disney. At the Magic Kingdom.
 

Mom’s ecstatic epiphany did not end there.
 

She became increasingly disenchanted with the organized churches she bounced into and out of over the next few years. She would stumble on a charismatic community of evangelicals. She was often away from home – at prayer meetings, gathering with her new friends. They the wives of equally pagan men u on whom the “Mad Men” might have been modeled – each of the Daddies going off to work in the company Buick, decked in their grey flannel suits.  The wives in living rooms discussing salvation and studying the bible. Praying for salvation for their husbands.  With the kids at their feet.
 

The Kennedys and Martin Luther King are dead. The sixties are upon us (which were really the Seventies).  The Jewish Cousins Club in New York – a fleeting presence in my life  at bar mitzvahs have grown into Hippies. Cousin Andrea has departed for India where she marries her Yogi. Marc is tooling around Manhattan in a sporty, convertible MG his hair now well below his shoulders under a top hat and wearing a cape.

 Ever more absent at home, Mom joins the burgeoning Jesus Movement. This is the rocks on which the marriage nearly founders.  Dad comes home to find no dinner on the table. The kids are not lined up to greet him at the door in adoration. There are fights into the night, many over money, but the angry shouts reaching the bedrooms above are muffled and we cannot make out the words.
 

Fed up, Hank leaves home. I have no idea how long they were apart. It was probably a matter of weeks at most. He came home from work to find a note from my mother, “I’ve taken the kids…”  He did not read the rest. The rest said, “…Christmas shopping.”  The note said, “I’ve taken the kids Christmas shopping.”  I remember his homecoming, Christmas Day 1969. He arrived bearing enormous stuffed animals which joined the rest of the loot under the Christmas Tree.

 Nothing was more important to Dad than his family. He had nothing otherwise. He had no Mommy or Daddy to model parenthood upon. His mother was absent in the early days of their arrival in New York, she struggled to learn English while working in a raincoat factory in the Lower East Side. She later served frothy steins of beer in the Catskills while little Heinele went off to a foster home. He would learn his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah by rote from a record in the home of his Catholic foster parents. He would not step foot in a Synagogue again for many, many years.
 

Now, imagining he has failed as a parent and a husband, my mother comes home to  find him on his knees, tears streaming down his face in the library. Before him is a tattered copy of the book “The Cross and the Switchblade” then popular book by David Wilkerson about the redemption of New York teen gangsters into the loving arms of Salvation.  It is the redemption he seeks.
 

To this day, I am convinced that my father came to Jesus only to save his marriage. I will never know what Salvation really meant to him.
 

Joined together in Jesus, things spiral out of control in the Gelbman home. Behind the neat curtains and carefully mowed lawn, things become ever more chaotic.
 

Fun Dad is gone. Replaced by “spare the rod spoil the child” dad. I will not dwell there now.
 

Sometime before this, Phyllis made a pilgrimage to the “The Holy Land” – twice. She has long since left the confines of the traditional church. She has fallen in with a Charismatic Christian movement led by Derek Prince who teaches “Discipleship.”  You can read about Derek Prince and his ministry – google him. I believe it morphed in today's "Dominionsm." 
 

In the Seventies, the Jesus Movement was at a fever pitch. Mom and Dad in the thick of it. They dabbled with Messianic Judaism and other strands of ecstatic Christianity.  Prayer in Tongues. Slain and Singing in the Spirit. Prophecy. Divination of Dreams. Everything but the vipers. Eventually, our home became a magnet for this ministry with my parents at the center, guided by cassette tapes distributed by Derek Prince and other ministers of discipleship. (Don Basham, Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson – I met them all).  They would lead eager pilgrims to Jerusalem and baptize them in the River Jordan.

 People from around the world begin to travel to our home to worship with my parents. Mom received the “gift of discernment.”  The discernment of evil spirits. Demons that came into our home from around the globe. Washing one another’s feet, humbling themselves in the Lord, the Spirit of Jesus would descend upon them. Mom would cast out the evil spirits in a cacophony of weeping and wailing. Exhortations to “Come out! Come out! In the Name of Jesus!” -- demonic screams echoing across the ravine by our house well into the wee hours of the morning, vomit spewed across the living room where  they would collapse, washed by the blood of Jesus white as the driven snow.

 I was 12. I was terrified. Yet I was also in the thick of things. Prayed in tongues. Prophesied. Delivered of the Demon of Rebellion several times. (you can see how successful that was). Full immersion baptism (on several occasions).  I knew it wasn’t real. It was a cult. In a cult you conform, or you too are cast out. Banished. Screaming and howling.

In the world outside, the Women’s Movement and the Vietnam War raged. Bras were burning and so where Buddhist monks.  Mom cancelled our subscriptions to Look and Life Magazines. The photo spreads were too ghastly for children.

 There was no room in Discipleship for Feminism. Gloria Steinem had no words for my mother. Paradoxically, women also had no place in leadership of the Discipleship either. Patriarchy was the fundamental tenent. Women must be "covered" by their husbands and submit. There was no room for a woman claiming a ministry within its circle. Eventually at odds with the entire movement, Mom was excommunicated from the Body of Christ.  Still a zealous believer. 

Somewhere along the line she had been drawn to a book that would guide her for the remainder of her life. In addition to the writings of the Apostle Paul.

 Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth” is based on prophesies from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. It draws from “dispensationalism” to predict the second coming of Jesus. In it, he asserts that Jesus' return will be within one generation (40 years) of the rebirth of the state of Israel (1948), and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple – all imminent. In order for this prophecy to be fulfilled, all the Jews must return to rebuild Zion and the 3rd Temple.  “All the Jews…”  to include my father of course.

 And so began our journey toward “Aliyah.”  Aliyah is a term used when a bar mitzvah boy ascends to the Torah and becomes a man. It is also the term used for immigration to Israel. The “Return” to which we had a Right. One “goes up” to Jerusalem.
 
In between, there were short visits from the Jewish Cousin Club . My big cuz, Andrea, would appear one day with her Yogi, Tom. They rolled up in a beat up VW bus, with their young daughter, she with tousled golden curls and freckled cheeks, bouncing in the back. Smoking clove cigarettes and eating millet they were on their way to return to their off the grid cabin in British Columbia. I would not see Andrea again for a good many years.   Her younger brother Marc zoomed up in his little MG convertible with his his buddy Louie. They would visit us a few times – taken with the magic and mystery of the nightmare I was living. Marc too I would not reconnect with for many years.
 
Meanwhile the Gelbman’s slowly rose - making our Aliyah in early 1979.  We left shortly after I graduated from High School, just 18 years old.  I moved in and out of the cult in those years. Eventually I would break away and return briefly to the U.S.  I was sure they were all crazy. But so was I. Back I would go with no faith at all that Jesus would descend from the Mt. of Olives to save me.
 
I would ultimately spend 7 years in Israel. Fully assimilated into Jewish Israeli life.

One by one, each of my family would “Yored” – go down from the land of Milk and Honey back to the land of Milk and Money.  The last to leave, I would probably be there still had it not been for my job which me to London (where I spent another couple of years). I have no cultural references to pop culture of the 1980's as it was in the U.S. in those years.
 
In the end, I would become completely estranged from my family. Well, not the end. But for a very long time I continued to wander in the desert apart from my tribe.  I would eventually travel to some 35 countries around the world.   But it would take a very long time before I found myself and reconciled with my parents. I would never truly reconcile with my siblings and despite every effort, even now I am in communication only with one of my brothers. The rest are still scarred and steeped in the trauma of religious ecstasy, we are largely estranged still.
 
On his deathbed, my father would suddenly begin to second guess his salvation. He was tortured by the idea that it might all have been a myth.   His was an existential crisis - the failure of faith at the end of his life. Full of doubt and fear he died a painful death from a gastric bleed following decades of swallowing his own trauma and eating his gut away with painful ulcerative colitis. It was a lifelong condition he’d been faith healed -  delivered from - in 1969. Or so we were told.
 
My mother, resolutely faithful to the end, prayed for my salvation until her dying day. She was  deeply concerned that we would not meet again in Heaven if I did not come to Jesus.  In her final years she wished only to be together with my father again. She was certain he would be waiting for her in Heaven. She died in 2019 at age 89. She passed peacefully in her sleep at one with her God.
 
I too was at peace with both of them. Fully reconciled. They are buried side by side on a mountain-top in Southwest Virginia. Right next to Grandma Finkelstein who died in 1996 well into her nineties.
 
Years before their deaths, when doing their estate planning, Mom and Dad wrote to each of us asking what of their belongings each of us might want.  The only thing I asked for were the family photographs. There wasn’t much else of interest. All the family heirlooms – the cribs, the first grade drawings, family silver, the baby books and such had all long since been lost or abandoned in the moves back and forth overseas.
 
Mom held on to many of the family photo albums until she died. My sister Anna had hoarded the rest.  After a bit of a tussle, I sprang them loose and they arrived on my doorstep in a 2’ x 2’ x 2’ cardboard carton a few weeks after Mom died.  I poured over them.  I eventually had them all digitized but in the process, I looked at each and every one of them.  Young, foreign-looking Heinele in short pants.

Baby Phyllis in in her Easter best riding a trike. 

Hank in his Navy Blues. Jonesy in her nurse’s training uniform. A skinny young married couple honeymooning in Ocean City. Grinning proud parents with their first-born child. Children kneeling beneath the Christmas tree - a tree all dressed in up  glittery metallic 1960’s tinsel. Gawky teenagers in Levis and ill fitting flannel shirts. High School portraits, the kids now as young marrieds the grandchildren bouncing on grandpa’s knee.  They are all there. The Grandpas – David and Jakub. Both Grandmas - Fela and Novella. All the Aunts and Uncles. My Cousins – New York and Pittsburgh branches. In the flesh, not ghosts. Not dreams nor nightmares. Some in faded black and white. Others in vivid Kodachrome color. They all Returned to me. Faded but still glossy, healthy and whole. Returned home.
 
POSTSCRIPT: While sorting the hundreds and hundreds of photos, I had an epiphany of my own. As I studied the woman who was my mother, I saw her for the very first time not as my mother. I saw her emerge as the woman she was. Flawed and fabulous both. A daughter. A student. A nurse. A wife. A visionary. Psychotic and Sane.  Among the photos, I also found some journals she kept. Travel journals. Her thoughts, and worries. Her notes from her bible studies over many years. Her prayers.  The common thread through all of it was love. Love for her god. Her children. Most of all for her husband. She was deeply in love with my Dad. It flows through every line on each and every page.  Though I don’t have his words, I have his deeds and I know that he deeply loved her – and each of us – in Return. He gave his entire life for us. They both did. And that too flows in my veins.