A Friend from Poland asked me to answer a question about pessimism concerning the future, and I replied immediately:

During the years of terrorist attacks on the streets of Tel Aviv, when my son was struggling with his newly opened café, there was a sign on the door:  “Here there are bombs every other day” – we had one yesterday.”  I would go there often, and meet whoever was brave enough to join me.  One day I watched a bomb squad dismember a suspicious object next to where I had been sitting before they moved me away.  Another day I was reading the paper there and discovered that a woman in my dance class had been blown up the night before while waiting for a bus.  It was clear that nothing could every return to a semblance of peace.

One day I was sitting at a sidewalk table with my mother-in-law, Sarah, who was very old and in a wheelchair.  “I can’t remember a moment when it was so bad in tell Aviv,” she sighed, and then, suddenly, she remembered, “Oh wait , it was when we were expecting Rommel to invade any minute.”

This was a chapter in the history of Tel Aviv I had never heard of before, and Sarah wasn’t interested in expanding on the subject, so I later asked my sister-in-law, Muma, who was old enough to remember World War II.  “Yes, those were the days when my father, her husband, and my uncle were building a bridge in Raqqa, Syria for the British to escape when the Nazis invaded. Mother was alone with the children, and she would wear rocks in her pockets so that when it happened she could walk with us into the sea and drown.”

Sarah, who had gone from Palestine to Germany and returned home with a doctorate in psychology in 1934, knew about bad times.  But the only time I ever heard her mention the past was that day in the café. 

Sometimes now when I think of the terrible things going on in the world I remember that chaos around Sarah and me, as we sipped our coffee, the way we have survived terrible times, and the way we learn to live past them and enjoyed wonderful times since then