Part Three: Resolutions
Prologue: Michelle, Summer, 1995
To me, Israel was a land that was filled with resolutions.
My uncle wanted to distill in me a love, or at least an understanding, of Israeli politics, but I could not really stomach it. I tuned him out as he began on one of his tirades about the Palestinian issue, or foreign opinions of the country, or even internal affairs. I had known my aunt, Deborah, to have been run dry for her passion for these worldly events; she had looked run down, almost every time I saw her, as if the only involvement with the Women’s Movement she could now muster would be to look back wistfully and remember with fondness those days before your idealistic dreams were shattered. No, at 13, subscribing myself blindly to the politics of this great land of milk and honey just was not for me.
Instead, I looked outward when Doran talked. We were walking through the old streets of Jerusalem once. We were passing by an Arab trinket stand. Two men, one with darker skin and wearing what looked to me like traditional Arab attire—consisting of a long tunic and loosely fitting pants, was bartering with a man who looked to be more like a tourist—he was fair skinned, and fair haired, wearing shorts and a tank top as well as a camera and sunglasses lopped around his neck. They were bartering—perhaps they were speaking the same language, or perhaps they were speaking in a mesh of both Arabic and Hebrew; it was all going by too fast for me to understand. Finally, as my uncle, Doran, pulled me around the next corner, I saw the Arab man give the other man an elaborate, wooden chess set and the tourist like man, nodding, reached into his pants pocket for his wallet and took out a few bills in order to hand them over to his fellow.
The entire display reminded me of something from the day before—when my uncle, Doran, and I were hiking up to the Masada—an ancient fortress, which stood against the Romans a thousand years ago. It was a famous sign for fighting for one’s freedom—or so my uncle told me—because rather than being taken over by the Roman Empire after fighting valiantly, each individual ancient Jewish citizen agreed to take his or her life. When the Roman cavalry finally broke through, they therefore found no one to conquer. And since that time, Jews have been making a pilgrimage to that site to remember those ancestors who would not, under any circumstances, forfeit what they believed in.
And I am not saying that such words do not meld in to a touching story. But what I remember most about Masada is passing by groups of people who were also hiking to the top at 4:30 in the morning. The sun was just beginning to rise, slowly turning the sky into a dark, rich blue color. We were all eager to get to the top and see the sun rise touch the tops of the surrounding mountains around the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. You could almost hear the flush sound of air whooshing through the open spaces between flexing muscles and loose clothing. People panted with exertion and striding along next to my uncle’s army pace (he told me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth,) I saw the stragglers begin to fall behind as the rest of us pushed relentlessly forward.
Two of the people who held on until the bitter end before falling to the side of the ancient, dirt path was an elderly couple. The sky had changed now; turning from deep blue to vibrant red. We all felt the anticipation of the climb culminating in this final step, and beyond this final ridge… before we could witness it first hand, the sun glinting atop the water and the mountains and the ancient city structures of Masada. It was the very fruit of our labors, created, as if solely for us in this time. And yet, this elderly couple, who so obviously wanted to see this marvel as much as the rest of us did, was finally, in the very last moment, falling to the wayside.
I wanted to stop, and yet I was too set in my rhythm to stop and I ultimately did not stop. My hand was laying precariously close to my uncle’s, ready to grasp it if need be I needed to be dragged the rest of the way up. I twisted my head, guilt filling my stomach as more and more people passed wordlessly by the two of them, without even giving them the courtesy of a second glance. My vision dimmed; I was not even sure that I could enjoy the sunrise properly anymore.
And then suddenly, out of the masses, a young woman emerged. She was wearing a bright orange bandana with which to tie back her voluminous hair, and she had a couple of water bottles strapped to the hiking back, which was secured to her waist. Smiling at the elderly couple kindly, she unsnapped a couple from her collection and handed them over to the twosome’s hands. My uncle yanked on my own arm at that point, and I faced forward, taking the last step onto the flat ground of the high fortress of Masada, the sun about to make it’s grand and colorful entrance, flushing the sky bright with light. The crowd “oohed” and “awwed” in delight and wonder, as if this very sight, in this very place, took them back to the biblical phrase, or the biblical time, that first day so long ago, when G-d apparently decreed “let there be light.”
“Look, Miki,” my uncle Doran said fondly, adapting my aunt, Reina’s nickname for me as his eyes searched the heavens. “Is this not beautiful?”
My own eyes traveled backwards, as I turned my head to the side and witnessed the young women slowly helping the elderly couple up that final ridge. “Yes,” I answered my uncle, none too simply. “Yes, it is.”
I saw these moments as resolutions myself. Surely the woman along the side of the ancient mountain trail desired to see the very first rays of the sunset, just as the elderly couple she helped probably had to swallow their pride in order to accept her help in the first place. The Arab vendor in the Old City of Jerusalem likely got less of a sale than he originally wanted, and the touristy looking man likely spent more than a shekl of what he originally wanted to pay. Life in the land of Israel was a series of resolutions on virtually every plane. I am sure that my uncle, Doran, would have been thrilled to further this metaphor with me on the subject of contemporary Israeli politics. I suppose I was equating my little, specific examples with something much more global—the way the founding of Israel was a resolution within itself, a way, perhaps, for Europe to feel less guilty about the unstopped murder of six million of it’s own, just because they subscribed to a different faith. In that way, perhaps Israel belonged more to my grandmother, Gerdie Schrieber Davidson, who had never expressed any interest to step foot there, so far as I know, than any of the—Zionists or Kibbutzniks or sabras or any other Jews. It was not that I was expecting others to agree with me—I did not even fully agree with myself. I mean to say that, in witnessing those small acts of resolution during my visit to Israel, I was reminded of the global picture, and how exactly it was that my family fit in to it.
At the moment, I was the puzzle piece, which linked all of my family together, more so than any country—even The United States of America, to say nothing of Germany or Israel, could be. My mother liked to bemuse herself with the presumption that since I am legally underage, I have no idea what is going on amongst the family, or what the power plays consist of would be a more accurate way in which to phrase things. I knew that my mother was using me as—her representative of sorts with her younger sister, Reina. I knew she had done this to me before—urging me to spend afternoons alone with her older sister, Deborah, whenever those rare occasions would arise when one of us would actually visit the other. The difference between Donna and Deborah and Donna and Reina, however, was the span of several hundred miles and a much more antagonistic severing of relations.
But once again, there was a more cosmic difference in the state of affairs, which engulfed the Davidson or former Davidson, as it may be, family in the summer of 1995. Though none of us mentioned it aloud—at least to each other, so far as I was aware of—we could all feel the pull to a culminating event in our familial lore. This autumn, it was coming across ten years since our matriarch, Gerdie Schrieber Davidson, passed on from this earth, and left her three daughters, consisting of my mother and two aunts, as orphans scavenging in order to make good lives for themselves.
Ten years later, they were almost completely torn assunder. And now, apparently, it was my job to make sure that Gerdie’s legacy of offspring might be repaired in any small little way.
And I was willing to accept this. I hounded my aunt, Reina, as gently as I could, attempting to cajole her into finally making amends with my aunt, Deborah, and especially with my mother. I, too, wanted my grandmother’s obvious dream for a cohesive family unit to finally fall in to place after all of these years. But what I did not realize at the time was that it was not only their lives and pasts that would be tested, but it would be mine as well.
