Who I might have been?

In response to this week's prompt on Sunday Scribblings
http://sundayscribblings.blogspot.com/

We took a plane at about six in the morning. It was huge and it felt like a big, plastic toy. The windowglass felt like plastic, as well and I made fingerprints and big oval splotches with my breath all over it, while I stood on my knees. A bell clanked softly and my mother tugged on the belt of my outfit. I sat quietly and straight up and then the plane lifted. Everything on the ground looked like dots. I swore I could pick out my Uncle Marty from among them, but I could not. I just thought I should've been able to.

My parents divorce had just finally ended, and no sooner had it done so than we packed our bags and got on a plane to Israel. Israel, 1973. Israel before there was a Jerusalem Plaza, a Tel-Aviv Hilton. When we arrived in Tel-Aviv, it felt much like Brooklyn, except the public pool was much bigger. My great-aunt lived in an attached house on a street of similar houses. Like my grandmother, who had just moved from a similar house, she spent her day in one of several housedresses, and the one she greeted us in was purple with beautiful white, violet and red flowers printed all over it. Unlike my grandmother, she did not use a cane and every morning, she went swimming either in the ocean or in a public pool. Fortunately for me, the public pool sold floaties so that we could go with her sometimes. At five, I was a slip of rubbery joints, with a periscope for a head and almost no voice, always in some sort of polyester jumpsuit. My mother was fond of these, and I owned several of the same ones in different colors. I felt like candy in a wrapper and preferred a shirt I could tear from my shorts and stain liberally. Like my outfits, my bathing suits were always one piece, usually with a skirt. Since I felt and believed I was, at least, part boy, this was especially disturbing. I learned, after a while, that if I didn't look at what I was wearing, then I didn't know what I was wearing. It didn't matter either that I didn't talk much (although I had learned some Hebrew in Kindergarten). Every kid I met did perfectly well to communicate through water-splashes, or in the case of my cousin, an exchange of Pez toys.

It was June when we took that flight and late September when we returned, missing the Yom Kippur War by a few days. In three months, we stayed with six different relatives, all of them in different parts of the country. At Kibbutz Yotvatah, which was founded by my mother's cousin (and son of the great aunt we stayed with) I ran from the "Children's House" where all of the kids slept, ate and grew up together, raised in part by the entire community. I couldn't handle sleeping in a room with so many other kids. Or, the fact that I couldn't choose what and when I wanted to eat. Nor could my mother do well in a world without access to hair dye.

At the end of our stay, however, my mother was offered a job as a reservation clerk at El Al, handling reservations in French --- indeed, we met many French tourists in our time in Israel as my mother is fluent and speaks very little Hebrew. It was a French immigrant named Rachel who helped her to get the job at El Al. Like my mother, she had come to Israel after a bad divorce to start a new life. And like my mother, she found the hardness of the place difficult -- both had come to depend on a circle of friends and on the familiarity of their neighborhoods as comforts. A developing country with a culture that prides itself on independence, it wasn't an especially welcoming place to someone who felt at a loss without subways. In time, she learned the bus schedules, and learnd the Hebrew word for cab, "Sharut," but she felt constantly on edge. In NY, she had been a civil servant on her way to a pension, whose mother lived downstairs. Forgetting the issue of war and terrorism, the country didn't offer the kind of security she was looking for, and we were both sometimes astonished by the poverty. At one time, we saw an entire family begging in Jerusalem. You'd think I'd be used to it coming from NY, but it disturbed me to see someone my own age begging for food. We went home not out of fear of terrorists, but because we didn't then have the guts to stake our claims in what felt like something very new.

Those of you who have been to Israel, say, in the 1990's, know, of course, that Tel-Aviv has more theaters than NYC, Jerusalem has several major hotels and that the economy is still a roller coaster. Given what I know, here's a guess at what I might have been, had we stayed.

Most likely, we would have moved in with my great uncle, Aaron, whose children were college age and who had a spare room. Aaron, who still lives in a suburb of Tel-Aviv, was the foreman of a construction crew which included Arabs and Jews. He came to Israel in his early teens after surviving Auschwitz. He was one of five of eleven siblings to survive the holocaust. Lucky for him, he had an early growth spurt and was nearly six feet tall at twelve years old, so the Nazi's didn't realize how young he was. Aaron has immense patience and he was able to get me to stop being afraid of the giant and beautiful butterflies who frequented his terrace. I was really quite small, and the butterflies seemed almost to be the size of my face. Their purples and oranges shocked me. Aaron's crew members had given him a set of wooden musical instruments as a welcoming present for me, and I tried hard to play the pan pipes, but never could. The flute and small drum, however, were close friends, and I played them softly before I went to bed every night.

Once my mother had saved enough money, we would've moved back to Tel-Aviv. My mother would've learned Hebrew at the local Ulpan school for immigrants. A staunch zionist, she'd've volunteered for the army. At thirty-three, she was in good physical condition and could climb large hills in sandals with five-inch heels. If that's not testimony to leg strength, then I don't know what is. Since she is good at learning languages, she might've been assigned to some kind of intelligence unit, or like my cousin, to working in a radar station -- she has excellent skills in navigation and very fast reflexes. As for the hair dye, she'd've let it go, I think. As it was, a blonde in Israel almost felt unnatural. In her natural shade, she might've appeared to be Arab or the half-Sephardic, half-Eastern European Jew that she is. She is dark, with Cher-like cheekbones.

In the early 70's, a single mother was an anomaly in NY. She found it hard to make friends. In Israel, perhaps she and Rachel would've gotten close, at least. In her late thirties, my mother developed mental illness which might have been alleviated, somewhat, by having a close friend and perhaps, a community of fellow immigrants.

The continued fighting, however, would've embittered her somewhat. At the same time, my family in Israel is largely socialist. They are eager for peace and two-state recognition. One thing, however: my mother's favorite cousin, a Ph.D. in Horticulture working on Kibbutz Yotvatah, was blown up as he turned on his car. He survived as a quadraplegic for a few years, but that broke my mother's heart. I don't know if being in the army and living through combat would've made her more bloodthirsty. It should be noted that his two brothers were also killed in battle. My great aunt outlived all her sons, dying only recently, in her early 100's. She was very interested in peace treaties.

What would've happened to me:
As a kid, no one knew I had Asperger's Syndrome. My fine motor skills were poor, but I was very academically strong. As my mother became ill, I began to act out. In NY, I was given a lot of liberty, first by a progressive Hebrew school, then a specialized high school. I don't know if I would've found an academic program in which to hide.

Like my cousin, I think I also would've been assigned to a radar station. I'm good at puzzles and codes so that might've also come in handy. Hopefully, I would've been lucky enough to grow up with both Arabs and Jews and would've been active in the peace movement.

Given the opportunity to enter into an immediate structure away from home, at an early age, I probably would've stayed in the army and never have gone on to study theater. Right now, I might be in jail, protesting the war in Lebanon, or I might be drawing the plans for the bombing.
If I were doing the latter, it would be as much out of the same fear for my survival that kept us from moving to Israel -- and having done so, I would have overcome that fear, hopefully. My mother and I came back from Israel, she went back to the Civil Service, and, despite much aggravation, neither of us has ever taken a major risk in our lives. Ironically, having risked something, I might be more inclined to speak my mind and take action than I am now.