Brief Happy Reunions, and a Shadow

I tore myself away from the farm for four days—two of them on Amtrak—for a trip to the SF Bay Area, because Anat was in town. She and I first met in 1979, when I became lovers with her mother, Ruth, an Israeli woman studying for her PhD at U.C. Berkeley. I was 35, and Anat was four. (I wrote about her, and her aspirations to become an artist, in a previous post.) The last time I saw her, at least 20 years ago, she was doing graduate work in art in New York. This summer she had a job teaching in Ojai, California, and then took a couple of weeks in northern California before returning to Israel.

Hard to believe she’s 50 now! We met again in Berkeley, for an afternoon and evening with her wife Shimrit and their three children. You can imagine our joy! Not to mention a sushi lunch, ice cream for dessert, and a walk around Lake Anza in Tilden Park. (But how come she’s so much taller than me now?)

Of course I’ve been nervous about her and the rest of the family, given the situation back home—and worried about where she stood politically these days. I was much relieved when she said, with disgust, that because the Netanyahu government suppresses the news, it took two years for many Israelis to learn about the starvation in Gaza. I shouldn’t have been worried. She’s Ruth’s kid.

Even more joy: while in the Bay Area I stayed with Yehudit, my best friend from high school. (I wrote about her in my memoir, We Set the Night on Fire. Alas, I don’t have a photo of her–need to get one.) After a hike at Inspiration Point (also in Tilden Park), we went to dinner at Tutu’s in Lafayette, because they have gluten-free bread, which she can eat, and because they have outdoor seating and I have to avoid crowds indoors because of Covid vulnerability.

Lafayette is a prosperous town in very prosperous, and very white, Contra Costa County, with an average income twice that of other parts of California. We were sitting in that restaurant on that hot summer afternoon, wait staff bustling about, among all of those well dressed people eating and drinking, and a woman behind Yehudit complained, “I had a very hard day.”

Yehudit and I looked at each other. One word had gone through both our minds at the same time: Gaza.

Today the people I know have enough to eat. But one in seven Americans suffers from what they now call “food insecurity.” And the shadow of famine in Gaza—and South Sudan, Haiti, and 20 other countries—is always at my back.