“Why Israel?” I answered. “Because you taught me to love Israel. You taught me to love Jews
As I was saying goodbye to my father recently at the end of a short trip to the United States, he asked me why I had chosen to live in Germany.
But I don’t live in Germany. I live in Eretz Yisrael.
A few days earlier, when I had visited him in the hospital after a minor medical procedure, he mentioned how nice it was that Yossel, his cousin, had driven him there. But Yossel, a childhood companion in Poland whom he had seen exactly once in the intervening 60 years, died about 15 years ago.
Such are the challenges of living with a parent with Alzheimer’s. In this case, I thought the mix-up was poignant. His mind was obviously elsewhere, back in the DP camp in Germany after the war, where he and Yossel had hustled cigarettes for a few extra coins, before Yossel and his family got on the boat to pre-state Israel and my father and his family sailed to New York.
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