travelers by Aharon Levy finalist in the 500-word memoir contest estimated reading time: 2:38
67 OPIUM
†
Here’s how it works in my family: as soon as you can, you get away from everyone else. My great-great-grandfather walked from Lithuania to Jerusalem when he was twelve, untangling himself from a dozen siblings with their own destinations. He traveled with his grandfather, who promised that all he wanted to do was die in the Holy Land, and who proved true to his word by dying upon arrival. His son, my great-grandfather, mumbled something about career opportunities and left Turkish Palestine for South Africa in 1913. He returned in 1923, claiming something about the combatant-nationals detention center where he said he’d been held, although the war had ended five years earlier. Within a few weeks, his oldest son was on a steamship to New York, where he changed his last name from the English-enough Pearl to the confusingly Hebrew Margalit. The same year, a great-uncle escaped his intended bride by donning a black dress and wig and riding an oxcart to the Haifa docks and out into the world. My father left his parents to their six p.m. whiskey and crackers in the Catskills for a diplomatic career. My mother took what she could from my grandmother’s apartment, an apartment decorated with busts of Freud where one would expect mementos of the late Margalit, and joined my father in Korea, Tanzania, Romania.