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.