In 1923, Joseph Baum sent his son Edwin to Palestine for a year after Edwin graduated high school. In those days, lots of New York kids skipped grades and graduated young. Edwin was only sixteen. Joseph himself had dreamed of Palestine — the Land of Israel for four thousand years — but he had already been through one immigration. Edwin packed his steamer trunk in Brooklyn and boarded a ship alone. Several weeks later he was lowered from the ship in a basket, into a small boat that took him ashore to Jaffa.
Joseph thought Edwin would like the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, the first modern high school in Palestine. But Edwin hated it. He was used to his school in Brooklyn where students expressed their own opinions. He was also known to skip school and go to the movies. Neither opinions nor movies were possible in this Germanic gymnasium, where students stood up when the teacher entered the room. Edwin was miserable and ran away. The principal cabled Joseph that his son was missing, and the school couldn’t be responsible.
In many Israeli stories — both fictional and true — there is a sabra woman from the time of the Second Aliyah. She is usually tall, with flaming red hair, outspoken and brave. She is secular and wears shorts, and she rides a horse. It’s likely that these real and imagined characters were modeled on Revital, the mother of Edwin’s Palestinian girlfriend Shuli. Revital was all these things and was well known in her day. Like her mother, Shuli was a daring young woman who fell in love immediately with Edwin when he showed up in their small town of Rehovot, on the run from the gymnasium. Edwin fell in love with Shuli and with the life of her family and the town. He learned to speak Hebrew, ride a horse, and shoot a gun to guard the village. No one knew where he was except the people in Rehovot. Edwin didn’t write to his family in Brooklyn.
Joseph trusted his son and felt Edwin was probably all right. But he asked his wife Charlotte and teenage daughter Flora to sail immediately to Palestine to find Edwin. When they arrived, Edwin was there to greet them in the little boat after they were lowered from the ship in the basket. Joseph said it was all right for Edwin to stay in Rehovot because he was learning Hebrew and had become part of the village life.
The romance between Shuli and Edwin didn’t survive his return to America and his years in college. He married Eve, who had dark hair but was also outspoken and brave.
Twenty years after Shuli and Edwin’s teenage romance, Shuli visited New York and decided to look him up. She called his number. He picked up the phone and said hello.
Hello, Edwin, Shuli said simply, without identifying herself.
Hello, Shuli, he said, without missing a beat.
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2022
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