For a special grandma on Mother’s Day

ENCINITAS, California –I don’t remember much about war in Israel.

I remember the orange trees, the thick breezes, my friends who had arrived from all over the world, and my grandmother, a stout, sturdy woman named Yona.

I remember feeling warm and special, talking to her for hours on end, on her porch on the second floor of the apartment building she owned at the corner of Weizmann and Jerusalem Streets in a little town called Kfar Saba, which means “Village of the Grandfathers.”

I remember that the town was founded in 1903 by some farmers who were looking for a new place to grow some grapefruit trees, a few miles west of another, larger town called Petach Tikva. They found good soil where Kfar Saba grew up, just a mile or two from the Samarian Mountains and next to an Arab hamlet called Qalqilya.

Her name “Yona,” means “the dove,” and she came to the land of Israel from Romania, when she was three years old. She had a thin nose, long gray and white braided hair, and wore heavy-laced shoes. She was short but sturdy. Her wrinkles ran together across her cheeks and forehead and around her clear blue eyes and looked like the Hebrew calligraphy on a sheaf of the Torah scroll.

Yona kept all of our family pictures under a glass that fit perfectly over the dining room table. If there wasn’t a tablecloth, I would eat my lunch of vegetarian meatballs, cucumber and tomato salad, chickpeas, olives, pita bread, and hot tea while staring down at grayish photographs of my departed grandfather, my parents, my cousins, my uncles, aunts, and other people—some of whom were riding on camels and others who wore army shorts, pullover sweaters, and helmets.

My parents and I lived in her apartment for a long period of time because my father had lost his job as a mechanical engineer. He had tried to open Israel’s first potato chips factory with an uncle of mine, but that failed, too. He was often sad and gloomy. Once, when I came into the room, he was crying into my mother’s arms. It made me very sad and confused and I didn’t know what to do. Later, as always, I spent special time on the porch with my grandmother and she explained to me why my father had been crying and what he felt.

“He doesn’t know who he is right now,” she told me.

“Who he is?” I asked? “He’s my daddy.” I didn’t understand. Maybe I should have realized that a mom or a dad who were no longer able to work at the job they were used to doing, for whatever reason, would feel like a person without a name. But I just didn’t grasp that then.

My grandmother suggested to me that I invite my father for a walk and simply talk. I liked her idea because I felt some kind of responsibility for my father’s tears and wanted to make sure that he still loved me—just as he always said he did.

Then, while the sun was low, I climbed up the apartment building’s narrow stairwell to the roof to help Yona take in the laundry.

I loved doing this with her because I could see the Samarian Mountains clearly from the clay rooftop as well as the minarets and stone houses of nearby Qalqilya, the Arab town nearby. The clouds were puffy and looked to me like God’s many faces.

I also loved to smell the dry sheets flapping in the breeze before helping my grandmother to fold them. The sheets and the towels were sweet and luscious, scented by a kind of mild Israeli soap that I have never breathed in anywhere since.

Folding the laundry on the rooftop of my grandmother’s apartment building in the simple village cleansed my soul and made me feel alive. My grandmother sang little songs to herself and I felt she was happy, too.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer who is based in Encinitas, California.  You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.

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