Intro to Letters from a Lifetime Ago

I’m clearing out—getting ready to downsize.

In doing so, I discovered letters and postcards I had sent to my parents from our sabbatical year in Israel, 1972-1973.  For some reason my mother saved them all.

It was a perfect year to be there, just before the Yom Kippur war, when everything looked sunny—and was sunny for the most part.  Israel was still the dream, not the nightmare it’s become under Netanyahu and his party of fanatics.

I was young, with children five and four in the gan (one kindergarten/one nursery school in English parlance.). I got a part-time job in the economics department at Tel Aviv University, while my husband was allegedly researching and teaching in the electrical engineering department.

This wasn’t my first time visiting Israel.  I had been there right after the Six Day War, the summer after my marriage.  But this was the first extended stay, the first time I actually lived in another country.  But I wasn’t adrift.

We were surrounded by family and friends, old and new.  Going over the letters, I thought why not just jot down anything interesting in them.  Because, let’s face it, day-to-day happenings aren’t really that exciting.  Except maybe in Israel, where the custom was to listen to the news every hour on the hour because nothing was static.  I suppose, after the somnolence of Midwest America, that’s why I came to love this new country.

We rented a place in Ramat Aviv, a cottagim, as they called it, on Rehov Karni.  Now it’s called “Old Ramat Aviv.”  Then everything was newly built, the university wasn’t the powerhouse it became later, and I was delighted, frustrated, enthralled by my new life.

Stay tuned for summaries of a life remembered posting weekly.