I was born and spent the first three years of my life in Sphat, a 3,500 year old town in northern Israel, in the mountains high above the Galilee Valley, where one can walk among the clouds. Jesus spent years in this region and Sphat is also an important center for Kabbalah, esoteric Jewish mysticism. My family came to Israel between the late 1950s and early 1970s from the Soviet bloc countries of Poland, Ukraine and Russia.
Such few memories remain from early childhood, yet they are incredibly lucid. In most, I am hanging out with my dad. We used to watch from a distance as kids were going down a “slide.” My brain assigns the label “slide,” but looking at old photos, I realize it is a large concrete structure that kids improvised into a slide.
In early childhood, adults are terrifying giants. Men are especially terrifying. Men have greater potential for grievous violence and children instinctively know that. To children, objects appear ludicrously leviathan because we are lilliputian. This concrete slide, perceived as elephantine, was only about 7 feet tall. Decades later, for the first time it occurs to me: why were kids sliding down a coarse, hard slide? That must have been uncommonly uncomfortable, especially while wearing shorts.
I remember gathering wild mushrooms with my dad in the dark, hot, humid woods near our house in Sphat. At that age, I did not know that some mushrooms are poisonous. But dad knew and he told me which ones to pick from the moist, rich dirt. More importantly, he knew which ones not to touch. After we came home, mom made the foraged mushrooms into a delicious Ukrainian creamy mushroom-dill soup.
We moved to the U.S. when I was almost four years old, so that dad could get his PhD at MIT. When I was at my first school, I often got scolded because I could not speak English. The other kids would defame me, falsely accusing me of some misbehavior. One day, one of the kids pushed and hit me and I retaliated. When the teacher noticed, the other child skillfully pleaded his case, but my defense was all in Russian, and my brain was incapable of translating it into English. I was put in time-out while the other child was free to continue playing. I was frustrated. I could not express myself. I could not stand up for myself.
Later, that night, my parents put me on the phone to talk to my grandmother Henrietta, who spoke Russian to me and lived in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv. I told her everyone at my school is good at English. I must become good at English like them. I instinctively knew that if I could speak English perfectly everything would be better.