on in life thru college, graduate school, and being in the workplace I found that most people who had prejudices against Blacks and Jews never lived in neighborhoods with Blacks and Jews nor did they go to school or work with many people who were different than they were. The people they had negative stereotypes about were the people they knew very little about. It seems so simple minded and plain stupid but unfortunately that seems to be the way of the world. We dislike those we know the least about and harbor negative opinions about them. This may make many people ignorant but if so it sometimes seems that the majority of people have one thing in common they dislike those that in reality they know little or nothing about.
When I was a little boy growing up in Philly I never misbehaved, at least not by the rough standards of today, but by the standards of the 1950’s, I had my fair share of problems with a few teachers who would catch me in the act of doing something they disapproved of and make me stand outside the classroom for the entire class. One day, when I was about eight years old one of my fellow students passed me a note. I opened the note and it read “have you ever had intercourse?” I was rather naive back then, rather bookish looking with thick glasses and I kept reading the note wondering what intercourse was. I thought to myself, “well, there’s the appetizer, the main course, and the dessert, but what is intercourse?” Not wanting to appear that I did not know what my fellow classmate asked me about I decided to write back and wrote “yes, many times.” At the precise moment I reached over to hand my classmate the note my teacher suddenly appeared next to my desk, intercepted the note, and once again I was made to stand outside the classroom and missed my class. This routinely happened when I was talking in class and I always seemed to be the one who got caught. One day, when I was in the fifth grade, while all the students were taking an exam another student fired a rubberband at me. Looking up I was able to see who it was, and not to be outdone, I picked up the rubberband, but unfortunately due to my total lack of agility and physical prowess fired the rubberband but instead of hitting the student it went up in the air and landed right in front of my teacher who was sitting at her desk as we were taking the exam. She immediately looked up and saw me, but instead of making me stand outside the classroom she allowed me to finish the test and then told me not to do it again. I realized at a young age that there was simply no future in my acting up in class because I was the one who would always get caught and incur the wrath of my teacher. Beginning with the sixth grade I cleaned up my act and had good grades in behaviour from then on. I was reformed.
My teachers in elementary school all seemed to be quite old, and I guess when you’re eight or nine years old everyone seems old but the school I attended did seem to have teachers that appeared to be in their mid to late fifties. It wasn’t until the ninth grade that I had a young teacher in her twenties and I thought I must have died and made it to heaven. My favorite teacher was an African American biology teacher that I had when I was in the tenth grade at Germantown High School in Philadelphia. I did well in that class but struggled throughout elementary and high school with math. My mom was rather disappointed when I told her (after I was in my forties) that when my test scores for my math exams were so poor and I had to get my parents signature on the test that I forged her name. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being punished by my parents, but instead was that I felt ashamed and did not want to embarrass them.
After college my two sisters became very interested in Israel. My parents were not religious, and the extent of our observance growing up was to attend synagogue on Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur and observe Passover for eight days. However, when it came to Israel, my family, and those of our friends, were fervent supporters. I was born in 1950, five years after the end of World War II, five years after the world learned the true extent of the Holocaust when six million Jews were murdered, of which one million were children, and two years before I was born the State of Israel was proclaimed. In those days everyone supported Israel and the miracle the Israelis created of making flowers and trees grow in the barren desert as they worked to build a country from the ashes of the Holocaust. In 1967, after the Six Day War, my eldest sister went to Israel for one year, met her future husband, and got married in 1969. They lived in America for three years, in New York, where my sister was an elementary school teacher, and then returned permanently to Israel in September of 1972. A few years later my other sister went to Israel for one year to see if she would like it, and decided to permanently reside there as well. She married in 1984, to another former Philadelphian she had known during college who had also later moved to Israel. Like so many Americans who moved to Israel my sisters were more zealous and more fervent in their support of Israel than even some Israelis were. Oftentimes when someone converts to a different religion they become far more observant and knowledgeable and even dogmatic about that religion than people who were born into it. Moving to a different country for religious and ideological reasons has the same effect. My sisters did not live in settlements but their political views regarding Israel were absolute. My oldest sister married an observant man and from the time they got married in 1969 always seemed to resent the fact that I was non-observant. My other sister married a rabbi, and with both sisters, for more than thirty years I felt like the black sheep of the family. I was not religious and had no desire to become religious, and as part of the Vietnam generation I did not adhere to the “my country right or wrong” attitude some people did. I believed that in a democracy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing or questioning your own government. It does not make you less of a patriot, but makes you more of one. However, to my sisters, especially the eldest, questioning or criticizing anything the government of Israel did made you suspect as a Jew, and even mentioning a two State solution back then incurred accusations of self hatred and being anti-Israel and even accusations of being anti-semitic.
I learned not to discuss politics with my family in Israel. While I respected their religious adherence and beliefs and never felt I had the right to question their level of observance, to my eldest sister, being non-observant, and having no desire to move to Israel, were more than enough reasons to treat me as though I was not a good enough and decent enough Jew, and that my sister was ashamed I was part of her family. It did not matter to her that my level of observance was not that much different than our parents but somehow it gave her reasons to denigrate me and criticize my lack of adherence to Jewish customs, rituals, and holidays. Although my feeling was that the way my sister and her husband and their children observed Judaism and lived their lives was none of my business, I was constantly ridiculed for my lack of observance. My sister was a very judgmental person. When wealthy family friends would visit Israel and spend a night or two at my sisters home inevitably I always heard my sister comment on the shoddy gift they brought her and her family. For someone who claimed to be so observant and knowledgeable about her faith, she somehow forgot that in Judaism having a guest in your home is an honor, and whether or not the guest brings you a gift should never matter.
I wondered why my parents were calling me in the late morning on a Tuesday when they always called me on Friday evenings and like so many other times where you remember exactly what you were doing and where you were when you heard some terrible news I would remember this day forever. My dad spoke first and told me that he and my mom learned the day before that he had acute myeloid leukemia. My mom then got on the phone and spoke with me as well in a calm, but decidedly sad voice. I did not learn at the time what my parents already knew, that my dad was originally given six to eight months to live. He was buried exactly eleven months from the day they learned he had leukemia. I remember calling my sisters and the sister I thought would be the most emotional held back tears and sounded solemn but clear headed while the sister I thought would handle the news most stoically was not able to hold back her tears. My parents lives, and my life were about to change forever. I didn’t know it then but the call I received from my parents that day was about to set events in motion that would change my life forever.
CHAPTER THREE
In the middle of January I got a new job as a salesrep for a software company from New York that had regional offices in McLean, Virginia. The territory was parts of southern Virginia as well as northeastern Pennsylvania, and although it excluded Philadelphia it enabled me to see my parents about every two weeks. My dad went thru a rough period during the next eleven months when he was in and out of the hospital getting chemotherapy treatments which often left him quite sick. I remember
