THE DISCOVERY
Aviad Ben Izhak
Dalia leaned back in her designer’s chair at her posh office. She was tempted to raise her legs and lay them on the table, trying to take a short break from a crazy day, but she didn’t dare. The phone kept ringing, indifferent to her state of mind. The ringtone was “Lu Yehi”, the song that held a special place in her heart since that evening at the kibbutz in 1973. The melody made her heart sing every time anew.
She arrived at the kibbutz as a young volunteer, leaving behind a fiancée, a loving family and her first year in the university, and came to volunteer in Israel for a month or two. She just couldn’t stay in the US when thousands of Israelis got killed and injured in the war. The first time she heard the song was when a young man, Udi, hummed it when he sat in front of her and tried to make a pass at her. A young paratrooper in dusted uniform and worn-out shoes, blonde with blue eyes. He was the typical kibbutz boy as described by the Jewish Agency, she smiled to herself.
“After seeing so many blonde guys in the US, you seem fake,” she defied with an arrogant smile, which she regrated immediately. There was sadness in his eyes, something burdened him and turned his blue eyes into a dark shade of grey. This sadness, his inability to smile wholeheartedly, touched her and magnetized her. Months later, others will tell her what he went through in Sinai in this bloody war. He tried to explain the lyrics and said something about “the Israeli Let It Be”, but his vocabulary fell short. But Udi didn’t give up and recruited all the people in the dining room to translate the song for her. At the end of the evening, he wrote the lyrics in Hebrew and English on a napkin carrying the name of the kibbutz on its back. The napkin was covered with chocolate stains, a memory from the cake served in the dining room that evening. That evening changed her life. The short-time volunteering turned into immigrating to Israel, her acquaintance with Udi quickly turned into marriage, they had three children, her American accent almost disappeared and her law office at the center of Tel Aviv flourished.
Her eyes wandered to the right, to the framed napkin with the lyrics of the song placed on the table, next to the cradle of the smartphone. It kept ringing with the melody that made her smile. She took one last sip from the tiny delicate espresso cup and finally answered. She wondered what kind of a surprise is waiting on the other side. Her vast experience taught her there’s no end to surprises. She made a successful career out of these surprises. Her eyes went back to the wall, above the phone cradle, to the picture of the family she created with Udi and his extended family, to which she felt she completely belongs.
On the other side of the line, there was a distant family member from the US. What does he want? she thought to herself.
He discovered by chance the original surname of their grandfather and thanks to that, relatives in Israel. He was extremely excited. “The elder couple, Moshe and Hannah Rosenbloom, reside in Rehovot,” I think. She held the phone so tight it almost broke. “And they have children, Menachem and Tova.”
She held her breath, while deep down inside she cursed furiously. “The brother from England, the bl… missing brother,” she murmured, unable to pronounce the word.
“What are you talking about?” asked the man on the other side.
Omer, her eldest, was born five months after the wedding. “A wedding accelerator” they used to call him. The joy of the birth of a first son quickly turned into worries over a medical issue the best doctors couldn’t solve. The family went into a whirlpool. After months of long trips from the far-away kibbutz to endless tests and treatments all over the country, they had no choice but to leave the kibbutz and move to the center. It ended up with a professor at the Hadassah hospital, a world-known specialist.
“You are related,” he informed Udi and her. “The problem with Omer originates from a tight genetic kinship, too tight. With your next child, will take care of this in advance,” he smiled under his mustache, “the next pregnancy will be supervised closely, but you need not worry,” he concluded.
Where do they get this nerve?
Do they suckle it with their breast milk?
All Israelis are the same, she thought to herself. It could be Moshe from the grocery store or a world-renowned professor from Hadassah. They will immediately talk to you straight forward, with such nerve. I wasn’t even thinking about having another child and this professor talks about it as if it was a done deal. He already knows we’re going to have another child. Thank God he didn’t dictate how many children I’m going to have. Maybe he would like to be appointed as my womb guard, or even my marriage counselor.
Dalia and Udi invested greatly in this issue, questioning all grandparents, but couldn’t understand how a man born on a kibbutz in the Galilee can be next of kin to a new immigrant from the US. They found relatives that perished in the Holocaust, mapped out the entire family and checked every possibility that came up, to no avail. There was one relative they couldn’t locate, one of the brothers of Udi’s grandfather. He immigrated to England and vanished into thin air.
The genetic kinship remained a mystery for almost 20 years.
***
One phone call made the lawyer realize her grandfather was a fugitive that changed his surname to start a new life. And more importantly, her grandfather and her husband’s grandfather were siblings.
The author
The author - Aviad Ben Izhak (Lieutenant-Colonel), former commander of the Military Computer Science School (Mamram).
Specialist in creating genealogies and locating family members and roots. Seasoned in creating genealogies that include thousands of people.
Aviad is the founder of Yedaat – Genealogy and Family Trees.
All rights reserved to the author – names of products and companies are independent registered trademarks!
