Israel, in increments

by Jess Gill | 2006-2009

2006 - Birthright    
We wandered the streets of Tel Aviv, left to our own devices. All I knew was this was the city where my father had been born, my grandmother had been born, and my great-grandfather built the first Temple from sand. The stories of their one-room apartment was myth, as I meandered along the boardwalk and took in the fiber optic lights as they danced from color to color. The Tel Aviv I saw that night was the one advertised in travel guides, of hotels along the Mediterranean and beach chairs and a boardwalk that spanned miles. We drank beer at a beachfront bar, content to be Americans in Israel.

    2009 - Homecoming
This time, we started in Yafo. We meandered over the Rainbow Bridge, past the Clock Tower, as my father wished my grandparents had been able to come along with us to share their own memories of the Tower. We had left them behind with promises of pictures and videos, as though that would allow them to recapture fifty years past when all they knew and cared about was Israel. And suddenly, that one-room apartment was in front of us, the door held open wide by a great-uncle I had never met. The room in which my great grandparents raised their seven children now stood across from a hotel tower, three blocks from the Mediterranean. I was beginning to see my Israeli roots.

2006 - Birthright    
My group was introduced to Israel by way of history and war. We spoke of Israel in the biblical sense, in the mythical sense, with politics and culture governing our cause. Some of us were there to explore, others were there to explore each other. I wanted to know the country of my father's childhood. But without him, I could only layer his stories over the city around me as though his life were a transparent drawing board for me to shade in.

    2009 - Homecoming
His excitement was palpable. The once dirt streets were now paved with cobblestone, as he remembered how he and other local children used to play four square, running whenever a car came. He remembered the roof he climbed, the groups he led to the beach for a day of soccer and tag, and this time, the past was right in front of me. Not only could I see it - I could touch it. I could touch the four walls of the synagogue my great-grandfather built, now held as a historic landmark. I could reach the backyard in which my grandmother and her mother before her hung up the wash, while children chased each other around. For the first time, I could reach out and touch my own history.

2006 - Birthright    
He showed up in the lobby of the hotel our group was staying at. I had met him once before, when I was thirteen or fourteen and he came to America with his daughter and youngest son. "He looks so much like Safvta," I thought, even though I knew they were five children apart. The mannerisms were the same, the constant concern for my welfare recognizable, and my relaxation in being with one of my family, my great-uncle, in a country that should be mine was immediate. Thousands of miles away and the same bonds that connected me to my grandmother connected me to him.

    2009 - Homecoming
We stayed with him this time. There were no hotels - instead, there were family photos, homemade cooking, stories of growing up with my father who was only ten years younger than him. There was laughter as we saw this whole other side to my family and we learned how some of my grandmother's habits are genetic to him and his brother. The uncle I had met for the first time, I learned, was my great-grandfather's son. Whereas my two other uncles and my grandmother belonged to my great-grandmother. Those seven children I had always heard about had grown into men and women with their own families, and I was beginning to see just how it all tied back to me.

2006 - Birthright    
Our last day there was a challenge to see how long we could withstand Israel. We woke at 3 in the morning inside our Bedouin shell to climb Masada in time for the sunrise. We swam in the Dead Sea, we hiked Ein Gedi, we ran ourselves into the ground so that our flight home would be comparable bliss despite many of us having to make do with limited shower resources and having covered ourselves in sand and dust and dirt and camels and food and hookah and sunrise. That last morning there, as the sun welcomed us, invited us to stay even though we were about to leave, I recognized why this land called out to so many.

    2009 - Homecoming
Our last night there was a celebration of Tel Aviv, of the city that had finally reconciled itself in my mind as the land of my family. We walked past street performers, danced to their exuberant music, laughed at the story of my grandmother feeding my aunt bread just to get her to walk around the city. My father posed by a statue he used to climb as a child as we snapped pictures, all the while murmuring about how we wished my grandparents had been able to withstand the twelve hour flight back to their homeland. I was changed this time. My pores breathed the country, breathed its humanity and culture and happiness and all of its turmoil and history. I breathed the story of my father's family as they built their way up from immigrants to commanders in the Israeli military, the sadness and the triumphs and the jobs my grandfather worked to support his wife and three children while he waited for an American visa, so that we might create our own history, one that is weightless and ecstatic and spans continents so that we might continue telling our story, so that I might one day be able to sit here, and write here, and see the story of my life etched in walls and cobblestone and the wide shimmering Mediterranean Sea.

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