what is happening now

 My house is about forty kilometers north of Gaza and thirty kilometers south of Jerusalem. In the terms of our small country, it is far from Gaza and close to Jerusalem. I can't sleep at night and already know how to distinguish between the echoes of the shelling in Gaza and the explosions of the rockets from Gaza that are sent here and stop near the Iron Dome. The house shakes anyway.All the TV stations here talk in terms of the Holocaust when they try to describe the scale of the horror that took place on Saturday in the border and at the nature party where 260 young people were murdered. In the settlements,  in the families with their small children were murdered. There are parents, children and grandchildren who are still looking for their family member.The feeling is that something more difficult and longer awaits us in the coming days. People were asked to stock up on water and food as scary as it sounds and belongs to other times. I will update more later and sorry that I don't personally answer comments.

what is happening here

 I don't know if I will go into all the details about what is happening here. I don't know what the news stations in your places are reporting, but without a doubt what you see from here you don't see there.

On Saturday morning at six thirty I woke up to an alarm. I don't have a protected place and I'm just standing in the small hallway of my small house that won't withstand even a rocket fragment. This happened several more times during the day. All day and night I heard loud explosions and saw the fireballs of the Iron Dome. The TV is on and tells me where there is an alarm at any given time.

TThey entered houses and shot at families there. They took captive small children and demented old women with their Nepali caregivers. People are still besieged in their homes and waiting for rescue.

I still haven't heard the alarms here this morning. I calm myself by cooking vegetable soup. I watch on TV unhappy and painful parents whose child who was at a nature party was kidnapped to Gaza with several dozen other boys and girls who were at the party. Those who were not kidnapped or managed to escape were shot.

If I succeed I will upload a picture from the night before from spending time at a restaurant with my granddaughter and the rest of the family in honor of my birthday which was the night before. 

Untitled

I'm afraid that when I really want to write here again, I won't  remember the technique of uploading the posts, so this is an attempt.

Life around here is so complex and charged with difficult energies, but everyday life is really fine. I guess when there is some sort of existential threat again I will come back and write because there is nothing like blogland as a comforting environment on hard days.
 

kitten

 She didn't go to school today because the puppy she found has to be fed every three hours. And yes, she has grown a lot and like all thirteen  year old  girls, the gel polish on her nails is very expertly done.

things i learn

Every now and then we go on a short shopping trip. She is already older and very focused on what she wants. Many times it is still the same store where she buys materials for her artwork that she loves so much. In the store we were in earlier, she had a hair mask and a make-up pencil. Her world is so different from mine when I was her age.

When I asked her how she knows what's going on in the world if there are no newspapers at home and no news on TV, she replied that everything is on Tik Tok. A short test showed me that she was indeed right. She also convinced me to follow the royal family's Instagram, which I did.

 

Ukraine

My grandfather was born in Odessa. I do not know when he came to Germany, I found his father's death certificate in Berlin so I guess the whole family moved from Odessa to Berlin at some point.

In 1933 he was forced to leave his life in Berlin and came here with my grandmother and my mother who was six then.

Four years later he was murdered by Arabs in the orchard where he worked. I did not know him and I do not feel a special connection to Ukraine.

But I feel a lot of compassion and sorrow for the fate of the Ukrainians.

I understand that I belong to a large tribe whose post-trauma is already part of its DNA.

When a great national trouble occurs in the world it is hard for me to ignore and I find myself experiencing it through all means of communication and introspection and I need to learn the smallest details.

I'm sure I'm no better than others who say that as long as they can not do anything about it they prefer to turn off the news and clean the shelves of the fridge or watch nature movies.

But I also remember how in times of existential anxiety here a few kind words from people I have never met and probably never will have helped me. You know who you are. There is something so empowering in a few words in such difficult hours.

So do not ignore, try to do something small, in a word, in thought in whatever way you choose.

Roots

I found some such small postcards in a family document box that my brother gave me after my father passed away. They were written in 1940 by my grandmother's sister and sent from the small village in what was then Poland and today it is Belarus.

My grandmother immigrated here with her husband and my father who was two years old in 1927. She was a dentist, studied dentistry in Warsaw in the years when women were barely admitted to universities and continued to be brave and special in the years that followed.

She passed away when I was 16 and I had never heard of her sisters staying there. A year after these postcards were written the sisters, (apparently there were five sisters with families and small children), were no more alive. The small villages from which these postcards were sent were burned and destroyed with all the families who were there.

The postcards were written in Hebrew letters and the language is Yiddish. I learned German from my second grandmother so I could understand a little of what was written.

I wanted to know more and asked for help in one of the wonderful Facebook groups where there are people from all over the world who help translate everything in any language. An amazing guy from Belarus, who knows Yiddish even though he is not Jewish, translated the postcards for me.

Unfortunately the sisters from Belarus do not tell a story, they write in every letter that there is no need to worry about them, they are fine and have enough food and clothes. They do not tell of the difficult situation they had probably already been exposed to because a year later none of them had survive

But it gives me a tip of the iceberg, I have names of people, names of small villages, most of which no longer exist because most of their population was Jewish and they were burned and destroyed.

I keep researching and looking for who these people were that I knew nothing about but they will always remain a part of my family heritage. Unfortunately, there is no one to ask.

I think there is a deep and understandable connection to the fact that all my genealogical searches and that of so many people I see that started precisely in the year of the virus that has been here and all over the world, it is not just the free time that everyone suddenly had. It's something deeper related to existential anxiety, to the feeling that everything is so fragile and temporary. Family roots are something that binds you and gives you a sense of belonging, and in times of existential anxiety it may be the place to escape. Even if your family history is not the happiest thing in the world.