On my first full day in Israel in August 2014, I got into the passenger seat of my brother Gabi’s tan Buick sedan and we started heading south along a broad highway, with the transparent, azure water of the Mediterranean on our right. At sixty-four, Gabi’s once bronze-colored hair had thinned and grayed, but he was fit and healthy, and ebullient on this day, thrilled to show me around his home turf. We were headed to see our mother’s oldest and dearest friends, Gretti and Shmulik Berger, in the city of Ashqelon, near Israel’s southern border with Gaza. Principal of his own small law firm with a busy practice in real estate transactions, Gabi was relatively free to hang out because it was the annual two-week holiday in the Israeli court system.
Under the cease-fire declared just two days before I left Okinawa, Israel had withdrawn its troops from Gaza, while Hamas had mostly restrained its fighters and other groups from launching missiles; still, the situation remained very tense. Ashqelon was well within range of Hamas’s projectiles, but we drove in that direction without too much worry. If the rocket fire restarted, Gabi explained, he would receive a text message on his phone. Meanwhile, he took calls from his office and from various clients on the car’s speakerphone while I gazed out the window, watching the busy towns on the coast give way to a sunbaked desert of sand and scrub on one side and the Mediterranean on the other.
About an hour after we left Tel Aviv, he pulled the car off the highway and turned away from the sea onto a side road. After two more turns, we stopped in front of a farmhouse with a workshop attached. A few Asian workers in triangular hats and cloths tied around their necks paused, tools in their hands, and greeted us politely. Gabi nodded at them and then gestured at what seemed to be a small office or toolshed perched atop the workshop itself.
“That was the first place we lived after we left the kibbutz,” Gabi said, referring to my parents’ decision to quit Ma’agan, the kibbutz on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, far to the north, where they’d been living since they arrived in Israel. Natives of Budapest, Hungary, my parents survived the Shoah as teenagers. My mother was in the infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz and a work camp for nearly a year, while my father, chased through the streets by Hungarian affiliates of the Nazis, was forced into the city’s ghetto until the Soviet liberation in the winter of 1944–1945. In the war’s aftermath, having decided independently that the Jews needed their own state to endure as a people, they each joined a zionist-socialist youth organization called Habonim, which is where they met and fell in love. They stayed active in the organization even after it was declared illegal by Hungary’s new Communist regime, and later my father helped my mother slip across the Hungarian border, along with many other Jews, before fleeing himself.
When they arrived in Israel in 1949, just a few months after the War of Independence had ended, they changed their names from Vera and Andre to Chana and Avri, and selected Kibbutz Ma’agan for its affiliation with Habonim. They spent their first months happily living in a tent on the beach, while my father drove a tractor in the kibbutz’s orange groves and my mother worked both in the kitchen and caring for the community’s growing number of toddlers. They married in a field in the kibbutz, both taking the last name Michaeli, and Gabi was born shortly thereafter.
They soon found the kibbutz’s rules and procedures grating, however. Collective living meant sacrificing even minor luxuries while governance was often a tedious, politically fraught negotiation. When my mother’s aunt in Hungary sent her a package of clothing and other household items, the kibbutz members met and decided to distribute the contents according to need as well as seniority. The aunt’s dresses, appropriate for maternity wear, were given to the many pregnant women, while a crisp white tablecloth was given to the older kibbutz members who sat at their own table in the dining hall. Also per the kibbutz’s program, Gabi spent his first years playing, eating, and sleeping in the children’s house, which he hated, darting across the kibbutz compound to reach our parents’ cabin at any opportunity.
They stayed on the kibbutz for four years, long enough for my father to get an exemption from additional military duties. Because the kibbutz was very close to the Syrian border, living there was considered a kind of frontline service, and he was issued a uniform and assigned the rank of private, although he never had to go to boot camp and received only rudimentary training himself. They were ready to go by the time my father’s term was up, and when a prosperous fruit farmer passing through the kibbutz offered my father a job as a mechanic on his orchard in the south, a position that came with housing, they decided to take it. Their new makeshift home, actually a converted toolshed, was cramped and hot in the summer, cold in the winter, but Gabi was a preschooler and they were still in their early twenties, satisfied to be independent, without any regrets at leaving behind the movement that had brought them to the country in the first place.
Gabi and I gazed at the shed for a few minutes before getting back in the car and driving to a nearby park, a few grassy knolls cooled by a grove of cypress and pine around a monument to an important battle in the 1948 war that followed Israel’s founding. We stopped the car, got out, and I read the inscription on a memorial: Here an ill-equipped militia held off the advance of Egyptian tanks and troops for enough days to give the fledgling Israeli army time to establish a defensive line.
Gabi, though, was looking toward the clearing on the other side of the park. “It appears war isn’t just history here,” he said, pointing at a squad of soldiers in fatigues and berets a few yards away gathered around a large, camouflage-colored cube mounted on a wheeled, mechanized cart.
“The Iron Dome,” he said, referring to the anti-missile system Israel had deployed only a few days earlier to fire interceptor missiles at Hamas’s projectiles before they reached the ground. “That hill’s got a good view on the whole area.”
There were dozens of Iron Dome batteries like this one placed in strategic locations around the country, all of them connected through a highly sophisticated central command that attempted to compute the trajectory of Hamas’s ordnance. It was a highly effective defense, if not a perfect screen, and a few rockets inevitably made their way through.
“I guess they don’t have much confidence in the truce,” Gabi added.
We got back into the Buick to drive on toward Ashqelon, where my parents moved in 1955, after three years on the farm. My father ultimately found a better-paying job on an American-owned oil rig in the Mediterranean while my mother got a part-time position as an assistant teacher in a public school established to absorb Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of whom were arriving in Israel at the time. They bought half of a two-family house in a neighborhood of Ashqelon called Afridar, where Gabi immediately found a group of friends nearby. Without children of their own, Gretti and Shmulik fawned on Gabi as a surrogate nephew, and he visited often, not just because they lived conveniently close to the public beach.
Gabi pulled the car into Gretti and Shmulik’s driveway and stopped before an iron gate with a heavy latch, whereupon Gretti emerged from the house, grinning broadly above her frock of patterned cotton. She teased us loudly for having aged dramatically—Gabi for having lost nearly all of his hair and me for getting “so fat.” With still more affectionate insults, she conveyed us into their little living room, where Shmulik was waiting in his easy chair, feet up on an ottoman, reading spectacles perched on his nose, that day’s newspaper folded in his lap. Before I could even ask Shmulik about his health, Gretti had foisted a familiar tin container into my hands, which I opened greedily to find a little stash of her cookies, a treat I had enjoyed ever since I first began visiting Ashqelon as a toddler.
I peered inside and made a show of frowning and saying, “That’s all I get?”
I popped one into my mouth, and the cookie immediately dissolved on my tongue into a sandy consistency with a deep, buttery, slightly smoky flavor. “If this doesn’t last the whole trip, I’ll just have to come back and get more.”
Gretti cackled with delight before changing the subject. She wanted to show us something, she said, beckoning us to follow her. Through the bungalow’s back door, where there had once been a small garden, we now found ourselves in front of a concrete blockhouse with a heavy, metal door. Gretti produced a key that snapped into the door’s lock with a satisfying click and led us inside.
Tidy and decorated nicely, if sparingly, the blockhouse’s interior had a table and chaise longue as well as a few other chairs. One corner held a few brightly colored weights, ropes, and pulleys: Shmulik’s exercise equipment, which he used with his physical therapists.
As the bombardments from Gaza had grown more frequent, Gretti explained, the municipal authorities ordered them to build the shelter, even granting them the funds for construction. In the past, when they were younger, they could have used the concrete bunker at the end of the block, but at this age, the authorities determined they needed something even closer. Nevertheless, Gretti had resisted their appeals for a long time, even dismissing the threat of poison gas, which military analysts warned might be contained within Hamas’s missiles.
“If I get hit with a rocket, I get hit,” she recalled telling the local officials who came to visit, with characteristic defiance. “Hitler wasn’t able to kill me. Why should Hamas?”
In the end, of course, she acquiesced, and now that they had the blockhouse, Gretti admitted to using it whenever an attack was launched, her defiant attitude notwithstanding. Every time Hamas fired its rockets, the military sent text messages to the cell phones of everyone in the projected strike area, giving the residents of Ashqelon approximately forty-five seconds to get into a shelter. Hamas’s missiles were underpowered and poorly aimed, and many were brought down by the Iron Dome, but a few Ashqelon residents had been killed and maimed.
I turned my attention to a framed photograph Gretti had mounted on one concrete wall, a portrait of her on the cover of a Hungarian magazine from the early 1940s, just before the war engulfed Hungary as it already had the rest of Europe. The photo showed her in her midteens, with wavy blond hair, clear blue eyes, and high cheekbones, posing wistfully in a lush grove of tall reeds at the Balaton, a lake in central Hungary that was the summer respite for many families in Budapest. Though there are more spectacular bodies of water in Europe, the Balaton was Hungary’s own, the site of first love for generations of city dwellers. Whenever our parents and their Hungarian friends spoke of the Balaton, there was romance in their voices, and longing, too.
Gretti saw me looking at the photo and immediately snapped into the same pose as if she were that teenager once more, prompting Gabi and me to snicker.
“What’s wrong?” she challenged us. “Do I look so different?”
Gretti had inherited her looks from her mother, who, though born a Christian, had converted to Judaism after she married Gretti’s father, a staff biologist for a brewery. They lived in a fashionable neighborhood on the Buda side of the Danube, and in the dire months after April 1944, her father was arrested and sent to a military work camp. Gretti, her sister, and her mother stayed on in Budapest, walking the streets undisturbed because of their Aryan appearances. Still, they expected to be taken any day. Miraculously, they were unscathed by the Soviet army’s siege in the winter, and Gretti’s father returned home uninjured, so that the family resumed their lives more or less as they had been before being interrupted by the war.
Gretti rejoined her class in the Jewish high school, which had been more than halved by the Nazis, and met my mother there. The two girls were cordial, but as my mother lived on the Pest side of the Danube, they never became much more than acquaintances. After graduation, Gretti joined a zionist youth group, one that was less inclined than the group my parents joined to defy the Soviets by organizing mass escapes. She left Hungary for Paris, at first, along with her family. There, she worked briefly for the Chanel company before moving on to Pamplona, Spain, where her father had been hired by a brewery. She came to Israel only a few years later, defying her family’s wishes to try her luck in the unstable, undeveloped new nation.
In 1953, she ran into my mother by chance at the Tel Aviv bus station, with three-year-old Gabi in tow—my mother being recognizable for her exceptional height and for her thick, dark curls—and they struck up a lively conversation. Shortly after that encounter, Gretti came twice to visit them in Ashqelon, and during these conversations, my mother suggested that she meet a friend called Ravak. Gretti’s Hebrew still being rudimentary, she didn’t understand that Ravak meant “bachelor.” When my mother and father went to visit Gretti in Tel Aviv a short while later, they brought “Ravak,” their friend Shmulik Berger. It was love at first sight, and the two were married a few weeks later.
Shmulik was not from Budapest, but a little town in rural Hungary called Lula that was often the butt of jokes, as in “That’s still fashionable in Lula.” His father had a small shoe factory in the village that made shoes to order and cheap sandals without footbeds for peasants who usually went barefoot but needed something for the rocky roads between muddy fields. Hewing to family tradition, Shmulik earned a degree in shoemaking, his final exam being to make one shoe from beginning to end.
“I kept that shoe for many years, even though it didn’t have a match,” he told me when I interviewed him about his experiences during the war.
Shmulik was taken to a military work unit, where conditions were often terrible and the officers cruel, but he survived without incident and came home after the war. Only he was alone now, his whole family having been taken to concentration camps and murdered. Never a dedicated zionist previously, he decided then and there to go to Israel.
“I had no one,” he explained, “so I decided to come.”
When Shmulik’s ship arrived a few months late...
