On Forests and Grief

Loss, life and my mother's Zionist dream

Dec 09, 2024

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

pathway between green trees — Photo by David Bruyndonckx on Unsplash

I’m glad my mother is dead. I realize that sounds harsh, but I mean it. She died living out her Zionist dream, in a home that she loved in Migdal HaEmek. Her biggest regret was that her children and grandchildren lived so far away. She would visit each of the four of us no-longer-kids for a week each year. But she was as happy as she ever could be—my mother was never truly a happy woman—with my father’s paintings and her garden surrounding her.

She was the Zionist daughter of a Zionist mother. My grandmother—Sabta—left her family home on the Polish-Russian border in the 1920s to settle in the Galilee. Soon after, she contracted malaria and fled the mosquito-laden swamps for the US, marrying an American serviceman and bringing up her three children on a chicken farm in South Jersey.

My mom was raised on Sabta’s dream of an independent Jewish state. She fervently shared my grandmother’s Socialist Zionist aspirations: that the Jews would finally have a homeland, where they could sit at the table of nations and be treated as equal.

Yes, I’m sincerely glad my mother is dead, so she doesn’t have to see how unequally Israel is being treated at that table of nations.

As soon as Israeli independence was declared, Sabta left her husband and their farm to live in the outskirts of Jerusalem. There she grew figs and oranges, living in a three-room home with thick stone walls and arched windows. My mom tried to follow with my father and my older sister, then an infant. But my father, a chemical engineer with two PhDs, could not find work in that still undeveloped country, and the family returned to the States.

It wasn’t until 1973 that my mother would finally realize her dream of living in Israel. I was 15—not the best year to be uprooted. Yet I’ll never forget the happiness illuminating her face the first night we arrived and sat down to dinner in a Be’er Sheva ulpan.

My mother’s politics were forged in the crucible of the Holocaust, where she lost half of her mother’s large family. We used to joke that she was to the right of Ariel Sharon. My liberal husband was more aligned with Peace Now, and he and my mother would hold pitched battles, full of passion (and some venom). She was delighted when Menachem Begin was elected. I can only imagine how she would feel about Netanyahu. But she loved Israel with all her heart.

My mother did miss one thing about life in the States. Not the conveniences—she was happy to adopt a simpler lifestyle. But she, like my sabta, was a gardener, and grew figs and oranges on her small plot of land. She would plan her trips to us for autumn, so she could see the trees change color. She often said that she missed that more than anything else.

She longed to see fall foliage closer to home—somewhere she wouldn’t have to get on a plane to enjoy. Being the planner and doer that she was, she began researching what trees might actually be able to grow in the northern tip of the country. She enlisted the help of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, an organization she had joined when she first moved. And somehow, thanks to her fierce lobbying, the Sarah Kreps Fall Foliage Forest was planted in her honor, far up north.

With the north of the country under constant attack, there’s no knowing what has happened to her forest. A cousin of mine decided to check in with the Jewish National Fund, which in charge of all tree-planting in Israel, and heard back: “The situation there right now is very unstable, and the forest located in an area that is now closed for citizens. Only army is allowed.”

I can only imagine how my mother would feel, imagining those trees undoubtedly coming under rocket fire, burning to ash. And while this is such a small thing when considering everything else—how devastated she, like all of Israel, would have been on October 7; how she would have mourned every single soldier who has fallen defending the country; how the constant trips to the safe room would have taken their toll—she would have been 100 years old this year—those lost trees would have quietly broken her heart. Because what she wanted, more than anything else, was to create life in the country she loved. As the next fervent Zionist in that line of women, my heart breaks in her memory.

On Being Jewish Now

On Forests and Grief

Loss, life and my mother's Zionist dream

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