I'm a typical American boy

How does a good Jewish boy end up this way?

In the nearly immortal words of Phil Ochs:

“I’m just a typical American boy from a typical American town I believe in God and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down And when it came my time to serve I knew better dead than red…”

Whatever happened here?

Me? I’m the son of a World War II veteran officer, grandson of two U.S. World War I veterans. Rejected from Navy ROTC at Penn because of color blindness, I’m marching lef’ right, lef’ right lef’ in Army ROTC on the NYU campus in front of the heckling anti Vietnam War protesters in 1966. Was I not to serve our country? But get shipped over to some war which wasn’t ours? Rat in a trap! Damnation! which Way? Left or Right?

Groping around the bottom of this dark hole, I unexpectedly discovered that somebody had lowered down a rope, without knowing where it lead – only up.

Summer of 1967 and I’m a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz in the midst of a people still in a daze after having single handedly defeated five overwhelming enemy armies set out to massacre them. My biggest shock was discovering I was one of a people coming home after 2,000 years awash on stormy the seas of exile, being thrown ashore, pale, exhausted, yet miraculously, alive and revitalizing. Three more years at NYU taught me that I was neither in favor nor against the war in Vietnam. I was a Jew. In the Electical Engineering faculty, they called it tristate, disconnected from the rest of the circuit.

Saturday night 15 Tammuz 5630 (July 18, 1970), four days before my 22nd birthday, Lod airport with a duffel bag on my shoulder, never to return. Fast forward: Founding member of a young kibbutz, paratrooper, marriage, Yom Kippur War, veteran settler, real time software engineer, family. More tales on the way.

Well here’s the picture as of now:

No, that’s not not me on the left. That’s my smarter, better looking “little” brother Larry and his wife Ruhama, whose three children, Amichai (21), Atara (19) and Adi (15) aren’t there. Navah (20) wasn’t there either. Ephrat “plugged her in” to the picture.

Front row is the Wiess family: Our oldest grandson, Yedidiya (age 10, holding ball) and his four sisters, Hodaya (7) between Netta whose holding little Talya, her husband Elon, holding Re’uti (4) and Racheli (5) on the right. Navah is “plugged in” between Yedidiyah and Netta.

The younger Bar Geva family, Chaim, holding Omer and his wife Noa, holding Ori (3) are behind them.

I’m hiding in the back like usual, peeking between my wife Avital and Ephrat (24).

Our “rebel” Shmuel (17), our “chossid” David (16) and Elazar (27) are back there with me.