Don't Tell Me I Can't Do It! (3 page)

Choosing to leave Israel, my newfound ancestral homeland, was definitely an unexpected bend in the road of my life. Still, even as I made the choice, I knew there was a clear purpose for doing so. I intended to pursue a lifelong dream that had begun long before I had even arrived in the Jewish homeland—a dream that only seemed possible abroad.

Back at the camp in Mogilev, things had been so
very cramped for our family and for countless others forced to live in tiny makeshift quarters. With so many people in such close proximity to one another, an army of lice made an endless feast of our emaciated flesh. I’ll never forget the misery. They were everywhere. Our hair was constantly full of them. Fortunately, they were the “good” lice—the kind that don’t carry typhoid. (This was no small blessing. A typhoid epidemic raged through Mogilev, leaving people dead in the streets, but we were miraculously spared. As with our ancestors in Egypt, the Angel of Death passed over us, and we survived.)

Hunting for the little bloodsuckers was one of my favorite tasks, oddly enough. I distinctly remember the noise they made—a little pop—whenever I squeezed a louse to death between two fingernails. The smell was awful, though. We deloused ourselves regularly, washing our hair in gasoline in a desperate attempt to keep the lice from multiplying. To this day, I can never put gas in my car without the odor reminding me of that. There was this one old woman whose face is forever branded in my memory. She had lost her whole family
and was wailing in such terror and pain. I remember thinking, “My gosh, I would like to be able to help her. I wish I could make her feel better.”

The memory of that wailing elderly woman’s contorted features kindled in me a deep desire to enter one of the helping professions later on, when I was living in Israel. At that time, it seemed apparent that the best way to help other people was to become a medical doctor, but there was no medical school in Tel Aviv. The nearest one was a full-time institution in Jerusalem, and my family simply lacked the funds for me to go. Arriving in Los Angeles, seeing firsthand the many possibilities for making my professional dream a reality, I found the lure of staying irresistible. Like a tiger after its first taste of blood, I wanted more. So, as captain of my life, I navigated the storm of my thoughts and decided to anchor my future in the “land of the free.”

I agonized for a long time over my treasonous decision, though. I had nightmares. For years, I refused to become a US citizen, even after getting married and having children. It was very difficult for me to
finally surrender my guilt-ridden thoughts, but I came to believe that not all Jews do belong in Israel. I had come to see that Israel is stronger as a result of those, like me, who choose to avail themselves of the advantages of living in the Diaspora (outside the land of Israel), who keep a watchful, protective eye on her even if from a distance.

It was definitely an unexpected leg of my journey, but today I’m thankful that I had the courage to receive it and the determination to realize it. I never did become a medical doctor, but here in America I did find a way to enter the helping profession as a counseling psychologist. My career has brought me tremendous joy as I’ve taken a very active role in helping clients put back together the shattered pieces of their personal lives. In Mogilev, I couldn’t have envisioned that my desire to help that old woman and others like her would be realized in a future across the Atlantic, but I’m grateful that I never let my pride stand in the way of capitalizing on the opportunity destiny put before me. It was far from easy for me to live through those days, but when I look back over that whole process today, it seems remarkably beshert.

Perhaps that’s because I wasn’t as different from my new American neighbors as I originally expected to be. Jewish tradition teaches us to faithfully practice
tzedakah
(charity), to share of our abundance and to reach out to those less fortunate than ourselves. In America, I discovered a spirit of volunteerism that resonates deeply with this aspect of my heritage.
Americans may insist on doing things according to their own peculiar whims and on their own personalized schedules, but they also show a remarkable desire to spend their time serving one another in ways that are meaningful to them as individuals. I like that, because I truly believe that giving
is
receiving. There’s a natural high—almost like a drug—that comes from giving of ourselves for the benefit of others, a euphoria amplified by the voluntary nature of compassionate service. Embracing this facet of my new place in the Diaspora has certainly eased the transition.

Of course, not everything has gone swimmingly. Having to close down Miller Psychological Centers in 1994 comes to mind. Like so many mental health practices receiving private insurance fees in exchange for their services, our once-successful chain of counseling centers was forced to shut down by the industry’s shift to managed health care. Things looked very bleak for us, but, as always, my defense mechanisms came to my rescue. It is what it is, I thought. Life is unpredictable. Ups and downs, twists and turns of our destiny just happen. I had a choice: I could either
receive this new bend in the road with grace as I had with the decision to leave Israel, or I could bemoan the way destiny was taking me down yet another unfamiliar path. My husband, Jerry, thought I should probably just quit and fold my tent, but I said, “No way! I’m not about to cave in to the pressure of the changing tide of private mental health services.” I decided to cut our losses and refocus on the one part of our practice that was still viable: the nonprofit addiction counseling program we had begun years earlier in an effort to meet a wider range of client needs. We downsized, and I made my substance abuse coordinator the new program director, while I remained the administrative CEO. The arrangement worked well for both of us, enabling us to continue building on what we had left. Once more the tide began to rise. We were hanging in there! There was hope. There’s always hope.

Don’t tell me it can’t be done!

Like me, Jerry’s mother was intrigued by the occult. Shortly after our wedding, she told us about the Reverend Badger, a medium in the Santa Monica area who conducted séances. We decided to check him out. The man would go into a trance and then move through the room from one person to another, bringing messages from the “Above” as they were relayed to him by his departed sister in the spirit world.

I was impressed. On the night we visited him, he stopped in front of a woman and said, “You have a daughter, and she rides horses. Make sure that on Sunday the eighth she doesn’t get on a horse—to avoid an accident waiting to happen.” The woman he was addressing had been nodding her head in obvious agreement.

Stopping in front of Jerry, the Reverend Badger said, “She can finally rest in peace. She and the baby are happy. You have finally found somebody to live your life with.” Jerry’s mouth dropped open. His first
wife had died suddenly of complications from pregnancy, only nine months into their marriage. They had purchased a house and were looking forward to their first child. Everything had been so wonderful for them. Then one day she was rushed to the hospital and died before Jerry could even get there. He was devastated, and though the tragedy occurred several years before we met, he was far from over it when we first met. The medium’s message that day must have given some peace to his troubled soul, helping him recognize and receive the new life path destiny was tracing for him in our marriage.

When my turn came, the Reverend Badger was even more specific. “I smell the aroma of stuffed cabbage,” he said. (It was something Dita had taught me to cook, one of the very few things I knew how to cook at all, and so we ate a lot of stuffed cabbage.) “I see a warm home,” Badger continued. “By the end of the year you will have an addition to your family.” I was pregnant at the time with Diana but didn’t know it yet.

I could never have imagined what a winding path I would have to travel to reach that point in my life— living in the United States; comfortably married to a handsome, admirable man; and preparing to set out for still more unfamiliar territory as a new parent. Even then, I could not imagine the winding path that still
lay before me. But thanks to a simple belief that had sustained me through the bends in my life up until that point, I could face the uncertainty of my future with grace and determination.

T
he war ended in Mogilev in 1944 with the noisy arrival of the Russians. People were exulting in the streets, but for our family, liberation only brought new terror. My father had managed to survive some of the grossest abuses perpetrated on our people by working for the Germans, who found his ability to speak both German and Romanian useful. He used to come home very late at night, having worked at the German headquarters all day long, to the tiny quarters where we huddled together awaiting news of his fate.

A specific part of the town had been designated as a holding camp for Jews scheduled to be transferred
to the gas chambers for the “Final Solution” as soon as possible. The rest of us were crammed into small homes either belonging to peasants who had been forced to vacate their properties or to local Jewish inhabitants who were forced to take us in. My family was eventually assigned to a tiny room in a house that belonged to a mother and her adult daughter. These two women were understandably disgruntled over being forced to share their home with us, and they were not at all sympathetic about my father’s conscription to work for their oppressors. When the Russians liberated the camp, they told the soldiers that Papa had collaborated with the Germans, and my father was promptly arrested and forced to spend several weeks in a Russian jail.