Wandering Jewess and Her Two Granddaughters

Half a year has passed since the beginning of the war in Israel, which erupted on the 7th of October, 2023. Everything has turned upside down for us Israelis. Everything has changed – more so than in the preceding eighty years, since the Holocaust.

Some of the survivors of the Nova music festival massacre have committed suicide, haunted day and night by the scenes of the butchery perpetrated by Hamas. Other survivors have been forcibly hospitalized in psychiatric wards to ensure that they won’t kill themselves. Every evening on Israeli television, they broadcast funerals of fallen soldiers, interviews with young military widows who gave birth to their babies after their husbands had been murdered, weeping grandmothers and grandfathers who have lost two or three of their grandchildren in terrorist attacks, or in the war, or in the shelling of the north and south of Israel. Several fathers who lost their sons on the battlefield later killed themselves on their graves. The son of one of my colleagues, a young man, lost both his legs in the war, but at least he is alive. The atmosphere in Israel is heavy, bordering on unbearable. People anticipate a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which will mark the beginning of the Third World War.

My daughter and her husband are now looking to rent another apartment, to move from the one they are renting now in the north of Israel. They are looking for an apartment with a bomb shelter, but such apartments are unavailable, and when one comes on the market, the rental price is twice than one without a bomb shelter. People are preparing for a long and difficult war: stocking up on dry goods, bottled water, electric generators, battery operated televisions. People pack small suitcases – documents, medicine, cash – in case they are forced to flee.

I have already run away. Five months after the war started, I cashed out my Israeli pension fund, persuaded my daughter to let me take her two older girls, and left with them for New York.

Before we left, my daughter told me, “Mom, I would come away with you and take the baby, but I can’t leave my husband behind. I’m so scared.”

I said, “Today, every Israeli family I know is split. Some of the family leave for overseas and some stay in Israel. This is war. We must try to save those whom we can save.”

At night, I lie in a large double bed in a hotel in New York. I am on one side of the bed, in the middle sleeps my three-year-old granddaughter, the second of the three girls, and on the other side, the five-year-old, the eldest. I especially hate mornings at the hotel. The little one wakes up and straight away starts crying and complaining: “Mamush, Papush!…” And I think to myself, It’s a good thing she’s not yelling in Yiddish, ‘‘Mame, Tate!’’. If she shouted in Yiddish, she would bring up associations with the Holocaust and make me even more depressed.

Each morning the older one tells me, “Grandma, I’m angry at you because you took me away from my parents!” I once tried to explain, “There is a war in Israel…” “What’s a war?” she asked, and I said: “Beatings…” Horrified, she asked: “Who do they hit, my parents?” I said, “No, no, not your parents, other people…” and there the conversation ended. But here in New York, there are no sirens at night, there are no bombs falling on our heads, and no Hamas armies positioned along our borders ready to invade the country, slaughter us, and burn our children.

The majority of my friends are over sixty and in poor health. They are mostly taking care of family members, especially their grandchildren. They are weary, poor, intellectuals – like me. As is bound to happen in any war, my previous friendships – people with whom, before the war, I shared common personal interests – have crumbled away. New friendships are now being formed, and they are driven by a single interest: basic physical survival.

My ex calls me at night, surreptitiously, so as not to wake his new wife. We talk only about politics because this is the most important thing in the world. My heart is on fire. He says, “I believe God will protect Israel; we are His people. In the Psalms it is written: ‘He Who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.’” I reply, “Yeah, right, six million Jews in Europe thought the same. Each of these Jews prayed to God and believed in God as they entered the gas chamber.” He asks, “Do you really think the Jewish people will be destroyed?” I say, “No, the Jewish people will not be destroyed. The Jewish people were not destroyed even in the Holocaust. But the State of Israel will be destroyed.” Then I say, “I think that, in the end, America will strike a peace deal with Iran behind Israel’s back, at our expense.” He says, “That’s a possibility. Americans are naïve. They believe that, if they give the Arabs and Iran whatever they want, then the Arabs and Iran will calm down and give up their idea of conquering the world. Americans don’t understand that by appeasing the Arabs and Iran, they will only whet their appetite.” I say, “Americans are not naïve, but they are weak. They don’t have the capabilities to deal with the Arab countries and Iran. They must make peace with them – they have no other choice. America will sell us out.” My conversations with my ex remind me how prisoners in Nazi extermination camps made wagers among themselves which of their starving mates would die first.

My lawyer, a man in his fifties, called me in New York. He is exempt from reserve duty on account of his age. Now he has been recruited for civil defense to protect his town. He said: “My wife’s parents have had their Romanian citizenship restored and convinced my wife to apply as well, so she can get out of Israel with our two daughters. They are now in Cyprus, waiting for their citizenship papers to be processed. What am I supposed to do? I am not entitled to Romanian citizenship just because my wife is Romanian.” I told him: “Right now, Cyprus is not a solution. Lots of Arabs are fleeing from Gaza to Cyprus via Egypt. Cyprus is swarming with Arabs. And you… you can’t give up your family. Join them in Romania on a student visa.” For a long moment he was silent. Then, suddenly, he flew into a rage and started shouting at me, “No! This is where I was born and this is where I will die!” and slammed the phone down on me.

A colleague of mine, an elderly music lecturer, kept her calm at the beginning of the war. A few days ago she called me, weeping and complaining bitterly: “We have always been a small and persecuted people, and now history is repeating itself.” I yelled at her: “Stop being emotional!! Do something!! In Israel they are now selling special bars to lock the bomb-shelter door. If you have one, even if Hamas is in your house, they can only force the bomb-shelter door using an anti-tank missile. Ordinary rifle bullets or grenades will not work!” My friend is an emotional woman but smart. She stopped crying and said, “I love you!”

Recently, in the first half of March, more than a week before Purim, the Israeli Military Rabbinate passed a ruling that the Book of Esther can be read without a blessing. This decision was made for the benefit of religious soldiers, who are worried that they will be unable to fulfill the commandment of reading the Megillah if they are killed or seriously wounded in the battlefield. The soldiers are preparing for death and want to observe as many commandments as possible while they are still alive.

Here, in a New York synagogue on a Saturday morning, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman asked me how I was doing. I told her, “All day long I am glued to the screen, following news from Israel. It is a catastrophe and tragedy what’s happening there!”

The woman said, “Why would you want do that? Just forget about Israel!”

I didn’t answer her but thought to myself, It’s easy for you to talk: you’ve lived all your life here in New York. And I… my whole life is in Israel. If she doesn’t get it, what can I possibly say to her?

And so here I am, in a New York hotel at night, unable to fall asleep in a large double bed. Thoughts run through my mind. We came to New York on tourist visas, which are valid for three months. The first month is almost over. In two months, we will have to leave. Where will we go? To Canada? Mexico? To some other country for another three months?

I remember a well-known photograph from the time of the Second World War. An elderly Jewish woman with a hunched back, who can barely stand on her feet, is walking along a road, holding in her arms two tiny children, and another small child is trailing behind. I recall this picture and say to myself: Oh no, I’m not there yet. And I console myself further: I am not as old as her, and I have only two little girls on my hands. And I have some money, and for now at least we are in a hotel…” But right away I ask myself: “Is this how the Wandering Jew felt – the character that the Europeans made up? Am I also a kind of Wandering Jew? A Wandering Jewess with her two granddaughters?”