How the Generational Trauma Gets Passed

Or: How to raise a resilient kid?

I wrote this piece to process the trauma of evacuating my child from a war zone. [Note: Israel had not yet retaliated at this point. The only thing that had happened was a horrific attack on people we knew.]

I already knew you can’t write about Israel like any other country — I’d spent my writing career purposefully avoiding my Jewishness and connection to Israel — but thought I could couch it by writing the piece as an AMERICAN parent applying AMERICAN parenting techniques.

When my regular editors said they loved the piece but had to pass, I figured it was because the piece was a little weird. I rewrote the opening and tried a parenting editor, who delivered the news I already knew, but didn’t want to hear: we’re not publishing anything that mentions Israel.

I thought about how I could write this story without mentioning Israel. Not possible. I thought about how if I’d evacuated my 17-year-old from a war in literally ANY OTHER COUNTRY [Cool story about getting your kid out of Ukraine! So funny when you tried deep listening and understanding while the sirens were going off in Brazil!] this piece would have run.

This piece’s rejection was my first indication that something was wrong with the media, America, Jews and Israel. Of course, when I finished writing this and went on social media to see my colleagues celebrating the people who killed Jewish women by shooting nails into their vaginas, I knew something was really rotten. More on that later.

Thanks for reading.

- Hana

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SATURDAY

When I wake, the air in the house is wrong. In the kitchen, my husband is staring at his phone. He tells me there was a bombing in Israel.

We did not originally think we were “gap year in Israel” people. I need to start there, because this is a story about Israel, and not Bermuda or France. My son wanted to become fluent in French, and gain some life experience before college. We wanted him to have a job. One thing led to another and now he was in Tel Aviv, building a farming robot at an Israeli tech firm and learning Hebrew.

We call our son in Tel Aviv, who reports that he and his roommates slept through the first missile siren at 6:30AM. Eventually an apartment-mate came into their room and yelled at them to get into the bomb shelter. “I don’t care, they can shoot me,” someone yelled back. (Remember being a teenager and being that tired?) 

At that moment we feel reasonably calm. Israel can be a dangerous place, bombs happen, life goes on. My son is mostly annoyed that the evening’s Bruno Mars concert has been canceled. 

Meanwhile, back in America the newspaper headlines scream that Israel has declared war on Hamas. Texts start coming in from friends asking if my son is okay. When I say we have no immediate plans to bring our son home, my friends are aghast. He is happy there, I explain. He is living his best life. Isn’t that the goal?

Just a few weeks earlier my son had celebrated Rosh Hashana with our Israeli family, then been invited back for Sukkot. My cousin texted me a photo a century in the making: my son with two generations of Rosenbergs, together for Sukkot for the first time in close to 100 years. Dinner one night had been stuffed peppers –– the national dish of Hungary. I remembered the dish from our family trip to Hungary in 1991, and the deep disappointment I felt upon being presented with a delicacy only to discover it involved peppers. Decades after Nazi-occupied Hungary tried to kill them, in a different country, speaking a different language, my relatives still ate this dish, peppers and all.

My son tells me he saw a missile explode from his apartment window, destroyed mid-air by the Iron Dome. He says they are safe except when the Iron Dome fails. The only problem is that he lives not far from the airport, which is a target. Today the Iron Dome missed a rocket, and it damaged a runway. 

SUNDAY

My son’s gap year program arranges a Zoom to address parents’ concerns. They have run this program for twenty years, they tell us. They’ve run it through the Second Intifada in the early 2000s and they’ll run it now. Some parents are reassured. Others have already booked their kids on flights home. There is a collective understanding that these people are wimpy and privileged. 

Stay off of American media, the program tells us. You won’t learn about the real situation, and it’s just going to terrify you. I download the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post, and begin reading both. To cover my bases, I continue to read the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

The difference in reporting gives me a new understanding of the phrase “fog of war.” Based on conflicting headlines, my husband and I conclude with a degree of zero certainty that only the southern part of Israel is being bombed. Tel Aviv is not in the southern pat. For today, our son will stay in Israel.

MONDAY

My American Rosenberg cousin texts me – he’s a Holocaust survivor too, and knows my son is in Israel. What’s the news? He asks. I tell him my son has decided to stay for now, and is volunteering his time packing relief boxes to send to the border.

My cousin says he always knew my son was special. He reads my son’s decision to stay in Israel as Jewish pride, and swells with his own Jewish pride. I am not sure how much of my son’s decision to stay is Jewish pride, and how much of it is that he loves his job, has made friends from around the world, and is starting to pick up Hebrew. Also, the gap year program has presented “Packing Relief Boxes” as a fun activity to do while they wait for everyone’s internship and language classes to resume.

Most of my son’s apartment-mates are temporarily leaving Tel Aviv. He’s been invited to move north of the city with a friend. I ask my Israeli cousin if she thinks this is the correct course of action. She agrees, offering up her nicely appointed suburban house with accompanying bomb shelter, but she suspects my son might be happier with people his own age. He’ll also be out of missile range, she adds. 

I wonder when being out of missile range became the standard for gap year housing.

TUESDAY

As I get out of bed, I prepare myself for the news that a bombing in Tel Aviv has killed everyone in the gap year program. None of the six news apps I now check over morning coffee are reporting this. 

I attempt to go on with my day as though my first born isn’t in a war zone. That evening when I speak with my son, I can hear his initial adrenaline high starting to dissipate. He’s dialing into work remotely, stuck in the exurbs, living with a family that isn’t his. News reports about the initial attack are crystalizing now, painting a picture so horrible none of us can stand to look at it. On the phone, my son starts to cry. 

WEDNESDAY

I wake up and check flights from Tel Aviv to New York. They are still readily available for purchase. My son says he can only stay one more night in his friend’s house. He doesn’t want to go back to Tel Aviv — all of his roommates have left. Some have left the city, some have left the country. 

I remember that I am getting my information from a 17-year-old, who two weeks ago asked for help resolving an argument between roommates about the proper use of a dish rack. He is not equipped to be making risk calculations.

According to Israeli media and the apps that track incoming missiles, the northern part of the country is also now being bombed. Half the people running the program disappear, called into service by the IDF. The program says nothing.

I start taking long walks deep in the Prospect Park Ravine. On one of these walks, a voice says to me, “GET HIM OUT.” I come home and tell my husband.

“I’ve been hearing the voice too,” he says. 

“Is it my father?” I ask. “Is it your father?” 

Both are recently deceased, and either one might have called and demanded such an action. Somehow it seems plausible that someone’s dead father spoke to me in Prospect Park.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But people don’t realize that he doesn’t want to leave.”

THURSDAY

My son is not yet dead. I wake in the morning, turn to my husband and say, “I cannot live like this anymore. This is not a gap year, this is a war. Lived experience with war was not on the list of things he wanted to do this year.”

Because he is a teenager, my son thinks this is going to be over soon and everything will go back to normal. I think about all the times I’ve thought that – those first two weeks of Covid lockdown, those first few weeks after 9/11 – and how there was never a return to normal. Normal was gone. All that remained was now.

My son’s friends from Spanish-speaking countries now have a plan to stay together in Barcelona. Can he join them? My son sounds exhausted, frayed, and like he desperately needs a parent. I realize I’ll need to meet him in Barcelona, so I start hunting for tickets from both New York and Tel Aviv to Barcelona.

It’s noon and I am still in my pajamas. We’ve spent three hours in an airline e-commerce doom spiral, booking flights only to have them disappear at the final step. My husband hits “purchase” on the ticket to Barcelona, and the site promptly crashes. When we come back online, the ticket is gone. No one is going to Barcelona.

A friend who used to work at the State Department send me a press release: the federal government will be evacuating all US citizens. I put my son’s name on the evacuation list, picturing him hanging onto a helicopter door like he’s being airlifted out of Saigon in 1975.

My husband and I enlist my sister-in-law to help find a ticket — any ticket — out of Israel. The three of us message each other as all flights on American carriers vanish, leaving only the budget carriers willing to risk taking off during a war, flights that require a change in an Arab country, and the Israeli carrier El Al. I figure that of all the airlines, the one with experience taking off in an active war zone is El Al. We begin working to grab an El Al flight to anywhere. 

For a brief moment we’ve found a flight to Paris. I have family in Paris – Hungarian survivors from a different side of my family. They were nice to me when, as a teenager in the late 80s, my family lived briefly in Paris. But I hadn’t spoken to the family in decades.

I type in my French cousin’s name into Google. The first result is his Holocaust testimony. The second result is a memoir he wrote in French about being imprisoned in Auschwitz at age 16. I hadn’t known he’d been in Auschwitz. As a teenager I’d never given much thought to why I had cousins in Paris who spoke French with a Hungarian accent.

The flight to Paris disappears. I save the Holocaust tab to deal with at a later time, and go back to searching for a flight out of Tel Aviv. My sister-in-law comes up victorious, and books a 3AM flight out of Ben Gurion to Luton Airport, in London.

It is midnight in Israel. We instruct our son to go back to his apartment in Tel Aviv, pack up his belongings, and go to the airport. Then we get to work on booking a flight out of London. The only connecting flight to New York that doesn’t cost a million dollars leaves from Gatwick, an airport on the other side of London from Luton. Somehow we have to get my son — who has not slept in at least 24 hours, is leaving a war zone with an apartment’s worth of luggage, and has never been to London — to navigate a complex flight connection on his own.  

I message a friend in London. We haven’t spoken in 8 years. Could she pick up my son, drive him to the opposite side of London, and deposit him at Gatwick? It is late at night in London, but she messages me back immediately. She lives near Gatwick, and is more than happy to help. 

I’d better get some sleep now so I can pick up your son, she writes. Don’t you worry.

A Brooklyn friend checks in on me. I tell her about my son’s flight, which is taking off in a few hours from an active war zone, and the difficult transfer that will happen in London around 4AM our time. A moment later she texts that she has two friends in London who will be on standby in case my London friend can’t make it. 

FRIDAY

I track my son’s flight on an app, watching it taking off amidst the looping rolls of a plane identified as a US government plane, and another identified inexplicably as a Polish military plane. 

At 4AM my son texts to say he is in a long passport control line. My London friend messages that she’s at Arrivals, and as the only Asian woman should be pretty easy to find. I text her a picture of my son, taken six weeks earlier at the airport as he headed to his flight to Tel Aviv. 

I imagine two little dots on either side of an airport map, one in danger moving toward one who lives in safety. Eventually, they find each other. Safe from bombs and with a parent proxy in the driver’s seat, my son falls asleep. My Brooklyn friend texts, asking if my son made his connecting flight. She has three little kids, but she set an alarm for the middle of the night to make sure my son is okay.

Later, when I ask my London friend if I can send her something as a thank you, she tells me her family has been persecuted by the Chinese government for years. She understands what it means to flee, and to rely on the kindness of strangers. Pay it forward, she writes.

My Brooklyn friend who set her alarm for 4AM is not Jewish, nor is she a refugee. “She’s just good people,” I tell my husband. 

He nods. “She would hide us if she had to.” 

“Oh,” I ask. “Are we playing that game?”

Would They Hide Us? is a twisted game Jews play, which sometimes yields interesting truths about one’s friends and neighbors. 

I have activated an international network of people I didn’t even know I had to help get my son home – refugees, family, other Jews and allies – and we can’t help take that discovery to its logical conclusion. What other times might we need to rely on a network to get out of somewhere quickly? Are these also the people who will hide us?

In the morning, the gap year program sends out an exclamation point filled email with pictures of teenagers cleaning a bomb shelter in Jerusalem – just another fun day in a year filled with fascinating experiences! It will be another week before the program admits that what we are living through is not normal. Sixty kids are still in the country. The other 200 are waiting to go back. Some left clothing and food in their apartments. Of the kids who remain, many have close family in Israel. Some have funerals to attend. Some have relatives being called up into the IDF.

We also hear from the State Department. My son has been offered a spot on a ship leaving from Haifa and sailing to Cyprus. He must make his way to Haifa by tomorrow morning, Israel time. It is not lost on me that this is the exact inverse of the voyage portrayed in the book and film EXODUS, where exhausted Holocaust survivors make their way to British-controlled Palestine.

Later that day, my husband and I pick our son up at JFK. He goes boneless in my arms, in a way I haven’t felt since he was a little kid. His gap year plans are in tatters. People are dead. An Israeli friend messages him later that he is going to six funerals this week. 

Later my husband and I will discuss how our son has never been good with transitions. When he came home from summer camp he used to sulk in his room for days. Is this the same thing, or is transitioning from war different?

That evening, we hear the wail of an ambulance siren outside our house.

“It’s nice to know that ambulance is going to a regular emergency, and not to a bomb site,” my son says.

“This is why you needed to come home,” I tell him. 

We don’t know the war at home has just begun. 

That night, my Israeli cousin messages me a picture of Berlin’s Brandenburg gate lit with a blue and white Jewish star.

“I have hope,” I respond.

“Hope = hatikva,” she writes back. “This is the narrative of our people throughout history.”

This, I understand, is how the generational trauma gets passed. Yes, there is deep sadness, rage and despair. But there is also always hope. For there to be another generation, there has to be.