The Postscript That is the State of Israel

May 31, 2018 Michael Olesker

In this summer of Israel’s 70th anniversary, the news is, shall we say, mixed. So what else is new? From safe American shores, we watch the enduring Middle East conflicts with a mixture of love, exasperation and citizenship of the spirit.

That’s extended family over there, isn’t it? And they touch our hearts even when they sometimes make them ache. Never mind working things out with their Arab neighbors — will the Israelis ever work things out among themselves?

Of course not — any more than we in America ever will. Like Americans, the Israelis live their lives at the top of their vocal cords, boisterous, kvetchy, contentious, and God forbid a single human emotion should ever go unexpressed.

As the Good Book says, two Jews, three opinions.

Is it what we expected? Half a century ago — 49 years, but let’s not quibble — in “Israel: The Reality,” Cornell Capa wrote, “Israel is the crudest and hardest place one can live today. It is also a place where one hears the young singing at night, and even the old ones talk about the future.”

What a sweet picture to hold in our heads, made more profound because Israel was born just as the Jews seemed to have run out of all future.

So here we are, 70 summers since the blossoming of statehood, and I find myself thinking of my late friend, Leo Bretholz. In the midst of Hitler’s genocide — which took the lives of Bretholz’s mother, his two young sisters and more than a dozen other relatives — young Leo fled across Europe and dreamed of Israel. He didn’t get there.

But an uncle named Jacob made it, and the uncle became part of the salvation of the Jewish people.

I learned this story 20 years ago when Leo and I were working on his memoir, “Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe,” about his remarkable series of escapes from the Nazis.

It was an evening in the summer of 1998, which was Israel’s 50th anniversary, and Leo and I met with the legendary British historian Sir Martin Gilbert.

Across his lifetime, Gilbert wrote 70 books. He was Winston Churchill’s official biographer. He also wrote a few volumes on the Holocaust, one of which included a brief account of Leo’s wartime escapes. Gilbert was visiting the United States to mark publication of his latest book, “Israel,” and in Baltimore he had a chance to catch up with Leo.

The evening was rainy, and the three of us huddled around a table. Gilbert remembered a raw English night a few years earlier and a phone call from a Holocaust survivor asking him to his home. “You want me to come now?” Gilbert asked.

“Yes, now,” the man said.

When Gilbert arrived, the man offered a toast to life. A baby had been born, and a mathematical milestone noted. In his family, the man declared, there were now more children born since the war than relatives lost to the Nazi death camps.

That’s when Leo mentioned his Uncle Jacob. He pulled from his pocket a photograph he’d received from Israel that very day from Jacob, his mother’s brother.

Jacob was one of the lucky ones. Early in the war, he escaped to Israel before the final barbed wire came down. The newly arrived photograph showed Uncle Jacob and 25 or 30 of his descendants gathered around him, all smiling and alive only because, half a century earlier, Uncle Jacob made it safely out of Europe.

“Imagine this,” Leo said, “6 million times.”

Israel is the Holocaust’s postscript. It’s the miracle borne out of a desperate people’s hunger to survive and borne out of the world’s belated acknowledgment that entire governments turned the other way in the midst of mass slaughter of innocents.

It is, in its mere existence, every Jew’s implicit shout to the world’s haters: You did your worst, but we do our best.

And 70 years later, here we are.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.