The ruthless Sun of the East

by Anna Trushkina (Ukraine)

I didn't expect to find Israel

Being Jewish is not scary if you were born in the right place at the right time. My ancestors were out of luck. My grandpa was born in a concentration camp – a place of unheard prayers. The place that could not be forgotten, where the creaking planks are soaked in the blood of people who came out of Egypt, where the rats feed on its flesh. The place of execution of people that once considered itself to be chosen. When I was five, he showed me his tattoos. I did not understand what they mean. I was born 53 years later in Ukraine – the country of golden wheat and difficult fate, the birthplace of borscht and Chernobyl. I became the only one from my family who returned home. On July 13, 2019, I took the fight Odessa – Tel Aviv. I flew from the country of one war to the country of another, knowing everything about it and not knowing anything. What is to me this small triangle in the Middle East, the promised land, land of stone deserts, Bedouin tents and wooden kibbutz, the centre of three seas, the kaleidoscope of olives, dates and figs, where bombs explode at nights and candles are lit on saturdays? On the ground beneath my feet burned the invisible footprints of hundreds and thousands of pilgrims who walked my way hundreds and thousands of years in a row. We arrive there in the morning until the sun rose over the horizon and began to bake. The inscription in a language I did not know. The Military Cemetery, Mount Herzel. Mountain of Memory. David is wearing an orange kippa, bright as an autumn fire, completely inappropriate among the even rows of identical gray-stone graves. We stop near one of the graves. Name, date of birth, date of death. An almost-erased dash smear between. Something very common and infinitely distant. “His name was John. Simple American name. We also came here, talking about everything.” Now it would begin to rain, cold and nasty, but the ruthless sun of the East shines above us, hot as a fried falafel. “He did not return home to the States. He enrolled in the army as a recruit and was sent to the technical department. A year later, he asked to go to the tank troops.” Clouds floating in the sky, white as manna from heaven. There is a war going on hundreds of kilometres from us. As David speaks, the war takes place right here. “In December 2018 he was sent to patrol the border.” David does not say what happened next. It is not needed. This story has no happy end – we are standing on the grave of a guy who found his home and left it almost immediately. “He had no one here – no friends, no family. Those with whom he fought side by side left with him. Before the funeral, parents wrote about it on Facebook. They asked for at least someone to come. I came.” The wind flutters two flags – the United States and Israel. Stars, as white as the sun of the East, are about to sprinkle from each one. “When I arrived, I could not enter the cemetery. It was full. Several thousand people from all over Israel.” David is silent, but I already know what he will say next. "As if all the Israeli people went out to say goodbye to him." I take off flight Tel Aviv – Odessa in three days. I am flying away. I will leave as the poor dweller of Haifa and the devout woman from Safed, a teenage boy from Tel Aviv and the fallen in the battle for Jerusalem. I will leave as the representative of non-existing country at the 1947 UN Summit and the Jew who returned to home that is no longer there. I will leave as an American teenager whose bones lie in a cemetery near Jerusalem. I will fly away and leave here something that belongs to me. And I will definitely be back. Many hundreds of years ago, my ancestors thought the same when leaving the Israeli desert. I can only promise them that this time everything will be different.