Nusseibeh’s words resonate with a strange familiarity for me,
the son of an Israeli Jew who, following his own father, sought refuge from the
Palestinian-Israeli civil war of the 1930’s and 40’s on the pacific shores of
America. When the time came, he and his
brother hitched a freight train from Tel Aviv to Alexandria, Egypt. On June 13,
1946, the New York Times reported
my father’s arrival, through Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, after a 10-day
journey by ship from Alexandria: “Two
brothers, 9 and 15 years old, both natives of Palestine, whose mother died last
month, three days before she was to leave Egypt with them for this country,
were reunited here yesterday with their father, a United States citizen, whom
they had not seen in seven years [just before the outbreak of the Second World
War]. Ephraim Remba, the father of Moshe
and Oded, who was born in Poland and now is a Los Angeles merchant, flew here from the West Coast, and was
dramatically reunited with them on the ship’s promenade deck soon after the Vulcania arrived. He
embraced them for several minutes. All were visibly moved by the meeting. Mrs. Mathilda Remba, the mother of the
boys, died of a heart attack” in Ra’anana, near Tel
Aviv, at the age of 37. Along
with my father, Oded, his brother and other
passengers, the ship carried 361 war brides, “Italian girls who boarded the
ship at Naples.” (New York Times, June 13,
1946). The Times article
has been reproduced on the web by Chris Zitti, the
grandson of Giovanni Vitti, who had served in Italy
during the Second World War, and was reunited with his Italian wife when the Vulcania brought my father and the war brides to New York
following the war. The original 1946 article is viewable at http://www.cnr.edu/home/GRS/dnair/family.html
Three
decades later, the New York Times reported my father’s untimely death,
also from a heart attack, at the age of 47.
I had been living in Jerusalem
with a Palestinian-Israeli couple, Nabil and Miriam Marshood, like me, students at Hebrew University. The call informing me of my
father's passing in New
York came without
warning. The following year, 1978, I
returned to the U.S., and settled in Chicago. I would return to New York from time to time to visit my mother, who had sold
the family home in pastoral New Jersey to strike out as a working woman in the gritty glare
of New York City. On every
visit East, it became my custom to visit the World Trade Center. Heart racing, I would ride to
the sky, buy a drink in the top-floor Windows on the World cafe, and look
longingly out at the vast and glittering expanse of New Jersey, hoping somehow
to bring myself closer to home, the home I had lost, to my father who was no
longer. I always left with the same
ache I arrived with. Yet I persisted in
returning to the tower’s summit each year; often the gnawing emptiness was
greater on returning to sea level than before each ascent.
On
one visit, accompanied by my brother, I drove out to Cranford, the bucolic New
Jersey town where we had passed our youth, and visited our boyhood home, the
last place I had seen my father. The
town hadn’t changed much, nor had the house, though the new owners had adorned
the yard with well-kept gardens. But
this time I left seized with a searing epiphany: I could never go back, no matter how often I
returned, no matter how long I gazed from the urban mountaintop at the panorama
where my childhood had unfolded. From that
moment, I resolved that I would feel closest to my father if I found my own new
joys and sorrows, instead of straining to recapture a remembrance of things
past. I resolved that Carole and I
would make our own family, and create a new home where I could tend to the
growth of my own children, my own garden, as my father had seen to ours. And I pledged to continue what my father had
started, to help build justice and peace between Israelis and Arabs, one brick
at a time, the cause to which he had devoted his life.
I had lost touch with Nabil and Miriam, my erstwhile Jerusalem flat-mates.
Last year, in early September, I returned for my annual pilgrimage to
the Big Apple, where my mother was about to undergo surgery for cancer. I knew our stay would not be short; I would
not leave until I knew Mom was well on her way to recovery. In the weeks before the trip, I happened
upon a letter to the editor on Israeli-Palestinian peace in the New York
Times from one Nabil Marshood. The writer, it seemed, lived in the suburbs
of northern New
Jersey. I tracked down Nabil,
and informed him of our impending visit, arranging for Carole and me to spend
an afternoon with him and Miriam at their home. He was as excited as I to rekindle our
friendship. Twenty-three years later, my
Palestinian-Israeli friends had become American citizens. They had
recapitulated my father’s immigrant experience, even settling a few towns away
from the place where we had planted our own roots.
Our reunion, over a
sumptuous Middle Eastern feast arrayed on the Marshood
patio, was sweet. Nabil
too has devoted himself, as my father and I have, to Palestinian-Israeli
reconciliation. We traded articles, and
spoke gently of politics, realizing that we shared a common, if not identical
perspective. Most of their families
remained in the villages of their birth, Miriam’s near Jerusalem in Beit Safafa, Nabil’s in the Galilee village of Kfar Mazra. They spoke
wistfully of home, and of the hardships of loved ones, but with no regrets.
Their lives, and those of their now-grown children, were immeasurably richer than
ever before. From their house, we drove
a few towns due north, to spend the evening with my oldest childhood friend
from my New Jersey years, who had followed me to Jerusalem in the mid-seventies. Joel had returned East
to take up a post as an epidemiologist in the New York City Department of
Health where, under a federally-funded program overseen by Mayor Guiliani, he worked to combat the spread of infectious
disease. On a balmy evening in early September, we traded shop talk, I, of
recent efforts to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace in Chicago, Joel of the
rigors of preparing for the day when biological weapons might be unleashed by
terrorists on the largest city in America.
The
next morning, we bid farewell to New York City. As we left
upper Manhattan and approached LaGuardia Airport, I was struck by the fact that from nearly anywhere in the city one
could see the upper floors and broadcast antennas of the World Trade Center towers looming imperiously. I
had not visited them in some years; but they were my last visual image as the
taxi left the city. A few days later,
back home in Chicago, we awoke to another image of the twin towers. In those terrible moments, I knew it was the
last vision of the great towers I would see.
How lucky was I to have made my peace with the New Jersey vistas I had so longingly spied from their
summit. Soon after, I phoned Joel. As the first plane struck, on his way to
work in his nearby office, he had just arrived in the subway station beneath
the World Trade Center. “We needed to
evacuate our headquarters, which is situated about seven blocks north of Ground
Zero. Tough challenge to coordinate activities with communications down and the
city's command center, the Emergency Operations Center in 7 WTC, destroyed. We’re
anticipating the worst,”
he warned. When I called a few weeks later, Joel had little time
to talk. The drills were over. The time had come. The epidemiologists of New York City had become its life-line,
and ours too.
I
can’t go home, and I can’t go back to the towers. But soon after our return from New York our
daughter was born, Talia Orit—in
Hebrew, the light of God shines bright with hope, to encourage a new
generation—and I will fulfill the pledge I made to myself and my father, whose
Hebrew name, Oded, means encouragement,
optimism. I will look forward, and like
Lot, never look back.
Perhaps I will glance, but no longer dwell in memory’s abyss. I honor the past, but have overcome its
siren call. I pray that the long-suffering
refugees from Palestine will discover the sublime but saving truth which
others among us have been granted the grace to find. For in their peace we are bound to find
ours.