Israel Odyssey: A Memoir

By P. David Hornik

A deeply personal account of an American Jew’s relocation to the Holy Land from “one of Israel’s best-informed and most astute journalists” (Chicago Jewish Star).
 
What makes a young American Jew who was never encouraged to move to Israel—whether by individuals or in an organizational framework—suddenly decide to do so at age twenty-eight? How does a young American Jewish family, with little background in Hebrew, make its way in a new, highly distinct culture with no more than a shallow resemblance to America’s?
 
This memoir traces the unlikely emergence in its author of a fascination, a passionate concern, and an identification with Israel that left him no choice but to relocate there. On the one hand, his parents were Austrian Jewish refugees from Nazism; on the other, the family moved to what was then a rural area of New York State where almost no other Jews lived—resulting in a richly complex, albeit confusing and difficult, identity to navigate. Israel Odyssey opens a window on modern Israel as seen by an immigrant both deeply patriotic but, at the same time, carrying cultural baggage from across the ocean. P. David Hornik’s highly personal story is his quest for inner peace and fulfillment amid the pressures, strife, and special vitality of the old-new Land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504096751

Book preview

PART I

DEEP IN AMERICA

1

WHERE IT ALL STARTED: A SUBURBAN IDYLL

The reborn state of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. I was born in 1954. We were contemporaries, just about. However, it took time for our paths to curve toward each other and converge.

I was born in New York City to parents who each, in 1938, as teenagers in their separate families, came to the city as Austrian Jewish refugees. They had seen the German Nazi invasion of Austria—specifically of Vienna, where they lived—in March 1938, and Austria’s instant and willing transformation into part of Nazi Germany. They had seen Austrian antisemitic mobs in the streets; decades later my father described the phenomenon in a written reminiscence that he showed us.

All this—not entirely through conscious channels—became part of who I was. It happened before Israel became part of who I was.

When I was four we moved, three hours north by car, to the outskirts of Albany. When I was ten we moved from there to Clifton Park, then a largely rural township closer to Schenectady than Albany.

With that second move in particular, we became a demographic anomaly. At that time, most American Jews lived near other American Jews in places that were urban, or at least more urban than Clifton Park. In Clifton Park, however, we were one of only a tiny number of Jewish families. Harboring that background of Vienna, the Nazis, and flight, I spent the junior high and high school years in an almost totally non-Jewish environment.

The first house, the one outside of Albany, was in Loudonville, currently described online as a hamlet in the town of Colonie, in Albany County. We were on Southgate Road, which I remember well, and which—the Internet confirms—still exists. Two-story houses with nice, medium-sized yards; a peaceful and pleasant place, families pursuing ambitions in pre–Vietnam War days.

Almost across the street from us, down a short stretch of road, was my school, Southgate Elementary. Out of a class of maybe seventy-five, I was the star pupil, known as Peter (I gave my then–middle name, David, pride of place years later, when I moved to the Jewish state). Compared to Clifton Park, there was a strong Jewish contingent; in my class I had two Jewish buddies, Martin Silverman and Dave Slawsky, and I remember two others I wasn’t particularly friends with, a boy named David Peck and a girl named Judy Goldschmid.

And in fifth grade (my last year there) our teacher, Mr. Hourigan, had an assistant, a trainee, a pretty young thing with short dark hair named Miss Cohen. One day early in that school year, I approached her to tell her that the following day, Rosh Hashanah, was a Jewish holiday, and I could not come to school because I was Jewish.

I did not know Cohen was a Jewish name, and when she smiled and said, I know, I am too, it was for me a jarring and wonderful moment.

But how could I have been ignorant of something like Cohen being a Jewish name? The answer is that my parents were secular Jews distant from traditional Jewish culture. So, for the most part, were their parents (all still living in New York City then, except my mother’s father, who had died there in 1961). On the family tree one has to go back at least to the great-grandparent level—if not further—to find Jews who may have been definable as religious in the sense of observant of Judaism.

They were all, in other words, part of the phenomenon of emancipation, the widespread secularization of European Jewry and effort to integrate into the surrounding societies. A few of these forebears of mine converted to Christianity; almost all adopted or were given non-Jewish first names and most also changed their surnames to sound less Jewish. This, of course, was in the end cruelly rebuffed by Europe and ended catastrophically.

In our family—then my parents, me, and my sister Vivian, two years older than me, also joined in 1961 by my younger sister, Jessica—this meagerness of Jewish culture somehow coexisted with a staunch Jewish identity based largely on trauma. We almost never went to synagogue, even on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur; but going to school or work on those days was totally proscribed. We did celebrate Chanukah (actually a minor Jewish holiday) as a sort of Christmas equivalent, but bringing a Christmas tree into the house—as some American Jews were then already doing—would have been unthinkable.

It was a Jewishness that was vague and opaque, yet strong and real because it was essentially a wound.

But apart from that Jewish and European darkness in the background (and there was more to it than that, as I’ll get to later), for me the years at Southgate Road were mainly sunny.

If I had one sizable problem, it was school: it drove me crazy with boredom. When we had to do work at our desks, it was easy for me and I finished it before anyone else; then sat there fidgeting and going mad from the pointless plodding of time.

But in third grade, my parents and the teacher consulted and came up with a solution. I could bring my current personal notebook to school, and when I finished the schoolwork, instead of just sitting there, I could write in it. It made it a hell of a lot better.

I always had a personal notebook from the age of six; from then to the age of twelve, when I made many changes in my life, about twenty of these notebooks accumulated (I still have only a couple of them). I wrote fiction in them—what could be called short stories, usually about twenty pages long in an almost illegible scrawl. With the same pen, on some of the pages I scrawled illustrations with captions.

The stories were predominantly Westerns, and when they weren’t, they were war stories about American soldiers fighting the Germans in World War II, or stories about American pioneers fighting Indians in places like Kentucky; later another genre appeared, stories about imaginary great baseball players and their heroism on the playing field. In other words, the common motif was men in conflict or competition with each other, preferably killing each other with guns, or at least defeating each other in strenuous contests.

I wrote these stories without a trace of self-consciousness, attention to their quality, or concern about whether anyone would read them. I did give them to my mother to read, and she—to her great credit, one has to get older to realize—really did seem to read them, terrible handwriting and all, and would give me a comment or two. But I would have written them even if I had known for sure that no one at all would read them. I loved Westerns on TV, in the movies, and in books, and making up some of my own was a joyous, instinctual activity.

And along with my writing, there was reading—voracious reading. Various kinds of fiction for kids (especially dealing with American wars and pioneering) or not so much for kids, like James Fenimore Cooper; Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Tarzan writer; or Zane Grey, the prolific Western writer. A book of stories from the Hebrew Bible for kids that I found enthralling. Howard Fast on the Maccabean Revolt (My Glorious Brothers) and on the American Revolution (April Morning). Books about my two most beloved sports, baseball and basketball—especially their history; I loved learning about their earliest beginnings and how they had developed. A subscription to Sport magazine (I considered it much richer than Sports Illustrated). And on Sunday mornings, when my father brought the huge, fat New York Times to the screen porch, I would snatch the sports section and spend a couple of hours reading it in bliss.

And there was chess. It was my father—a psychologist and very intense intellectual—who introduced me to it at age six. He was a high-level amateur, but by the time I was seven, I was near his level and could sometimes beat him. He took me with him to compete at the Albany Chess Club, where, the only kid, I held my own. But I not only loved to play; the history of this game, too, fascinated me, and I had maybe twenty chess books (some on loan from my father) that gave the background of a great player or a tournament and then offered games in notation, which I played out on my board in a state of pure absorption.

And not only that. I also made up great games; at the top of a notebook page I would write, say, Lasker White and Capablanca Black, then play a game with myself and note down the moves as if Lasker and Capablanca were making them, and even add some commentary. I still have a couple of those notebooks, too.

It was part of why school made me so antsy—I was dying to get home and do the things I really wanted to do. And on top of the writing, the reading, the chess, I also managed to watch favorite TV shows and to go outside and play with friends—a lot. Looking back, I don’t see how I had time for it all. Those were good years at Southgate Road.

And there was music, too. My parents—like not a few Viennese Jews—were lovers of classical music. My earliest memories of the hi-fi—a beloved fixture—and of hearing classical music are from Southgate Road. The hi-fi was in the living room, downstairs, and my parents, particularly my father, played records of great 18th- and 19th-century instrumental (never vocal) music on it—Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Dvořák, Brahms. Both Vivian and I were mesmerized; sometimes we could hear it at night from our adjacent upstairs rooms as we were supposedly going to sleep. I was most struck by Glenn Gould playing Bach and by Dvořák’s New World Symphony, which seemed to me a sort of glorious Western in music. The New World was one of two records (the other, a nonclassical one, I’ll get to later) that I would request to listen to alone in the living room, if for whatever reason no one else was there.

A memory: one day Vivian and I, aged nine and seven, step into the living room together from outside, probably coming home from school. But a large new object is in it. Although both of my parents were probably there, I remember particularly my father standing next to it, with a Well, have a look at this expression. It was a piano.

Vivian took to it the way I took to scrawling Westerns in a notebook; she started right away with lessons and practicing, and today is a classical pianist and a teacher of piano and chamber music. Lessons were lined up for me, too, with the same teacher Vivian had. Yet for all my love of the music, I found practicing the piano, learning pieces from a score, unbearably tedious and irksome and quit after a few weeks. A year or two after that, out of a sense of guilt, I took up the cello via the school, taking lessons from its music teacher and playing in its orchestra. But though I continued that until tenth grade in Shenendehowa, the school in Clifton Park, it was always reluctantly and with as little time put into practicing as possible. It was only when I was seventeen that, finally, I found out where my musical proclivity really lay—playing blues, songs, and rudimentary jazz by ear on the piano.

My sister Jessica was born with a thatch of carrot-colored hair that evoked amazement and mirth from everyone. I’m aware of only one other redhead in the family, a brother of my maternal grandmother named Sigi who survived the war, went on living in Vienna, and came to visit once in New York.

Jessica soon showed stunning precocity with words and is today a poet and an editor. But still before her verbal exploits began, I became enchanted with how my mother, when Jessica was a few months old, would position her in her booster seat on the kitchen table and feed her water with a spoon, applesauce with a spoon, and milk with a bottle. The mother-baby interaction, Jessica’s cooing and babbling and smiling, was something to behold. I was told later that, with Vivian and me both in school full-time, my mother felt lonely in the house and that was why she wanted a third child.

It was while we were still at Southgate, I don’t know just when, that my mother, who previously had worked as a lab technician, started taking night courses at nearby Siena College. By the time we were in Clifton Park, she taught science in a junior high; then became a guidance counselor, probably in the same school; then principal of a school for delinquent girls; then principal of a small, elite, private elementary school for girls. She also blossomed later as a very good amateur painter, loved music, and was a superb decorator of her own homes, turning them into palaces of beauty; above all, however, she was a people person. She could overdo it, crowding me with curiosity and concerns and advice. Most of all, I felt that she didn’t grasp my need as a boy-child to establish some space and competence of my own.

But this, of course, is the way of the world—something or other wrong with the picture.

So far I’ve sketched Southgate as a place where, the dark Jewish traumas and wound in the background, I flourished in a mainly American (and European) cultural environment, my aptitudes sprouting. There was in those years, though, a single, dramatic infusion of positive, Jewish cultural content.

It did not come, at least not directly, from the Jewish religion. We wandered into a synagogue or two in those years; I have only vague memories of it. One may have been Conservative, the other Reform. I even went to Sunday school for a while—Sunday-morning classes on Jewish subjects, mostly religious, under the auspices of a synagogue. It left little impression and seemed to me superfluous, dull, and sterile.

My mother’s birthday was on June 6, and in 1960 or 1961, on June 6—a verdant time of year—my father gave her a birthday present of Folk Songs of Israel, a record by Theodore Bikel.

Bikel, too, was born in Vienna, and in 1938, his family, too, fled—but not to America; instead, they chose to join the prestate Jewish community in the old-new land. Bikel lived there for eight years, enough to absorb sabra Hebrew and the often feisty, high-spirited Israeli songs that were already being written and sung.

I believe I can still recall the moment when I heard the first notes of the first track on the album, Dodi Li. I was transfixed. If I had ever heard Hebrew before, it was rote recitation in synagogue. But it wasn’t only the idea that Jews, in a faraway land, a land that was their own, sang in such a strikingly exotic, non-European language. It was also the songs and what many of them conveyed: a brash, in-your-face élan, an unmistakable tang of joie de vivre.

For me, until then, Jews had been a predominantly urban people—my family, my aunts’ families (one of which lived nearby in Albany), my immigrant grandparents in New York City speaking German and heavily accented English. As for Jewishness, it had been mainly a matter of hushed-up traumas, guilt, vague moral imperatives floating somewhere that one never fulfilled. These songs, though—typically in a minor key yet zesty and upbeat—sounded pure and spontaneous, and put very different images in my head…dancers whirling around a campfire, idyllic glens with flutes piping, rugged pioneers trekking through deserts. I was sensing a different reality, self-sustaining, vibrant, and generative, and it appealed to me deeply.

But it wasn’t