The next morning at school Ariella held up a big picture of a tree and said, “If we compared our families to this tree, who would be the roots? The trunk? The branches? The flowers?”
If a tree symbolized my family, I thought, then the roots would be Grandma in Katzrin and Grandpa in America. I looked at the picture Ariella was holding. The roots were thick ropes stretching deep into the earth. If the roots are the grandparents, I thought, then the trunk must be the parents, and the flowers are the children. But I didn’t raise my hand. I knew that if I did, thirty-seven pairs of unfriendly eyes would turn toward me.
A bubbly, blue-eyed girl named Shira raised her hand, pointed at the roots, and said, “Those symbolize grandparents.”
“Very good!” said Ariella, “Like a tree, a family grows from its roots, the family ancestors. Over the next few weeks we will examine our own roots and each one of you will prepare your very own family tree. I want each one of you to start thinking about how to draw your own family tree. Talk to your parents, your aunts and uncles, and grandparents! Ask them to tell you about where your families are from.”
Then Ariella handed out copies of the president’s family tree. Under each name, there was a description of where and when that person was born. I stared at the diagram in front of me and wondered how exactly I was supposed to get through this assignment.
That very afternoon, I worked on my family tree. I started with Grandpa Dave in America. Grandpa Dave is wiry and tall and has wild, bushy white hair. He likes us to call him Dave instead of Grandpa. He always sends us presents on our birthdays and for Hanukkah, but because he lives so far away, I’ve only met him four times in my entire life. The last time I saw him was two years ago, right after Grandma Rose died, and he was very sad.
I try to remember Grandma Rose. I can almost see her surrounded by all her grandchildren, dishing out freshly made cupcakes. I can’t quite picture her face, but I can hear her hoarse voice calling me “Shayna maidel, my beautiful girl.” All the furniture in their house was covered in lace doilies, and when I was a baby, my favorite blanket was a pink-and-white knitted afghan that Grandma Rose sent me.
My thoughts wandered to my grandma in Katzrin. I saw her every day for almost my whole life until we moved here. Ever since I could remember, I spent hours at her house, every day. She’s lived there for years; she settled there just after she arrived in Israel.
Grandma escaped from Ethiopia during the civil war with a group of young people, including my grandfather. I never met my mom’s father because he was killed by robbers on that journey, long before I was born. He was a real hero. Grandma told me that to get from Ethiopia to the Sudan, they had to cross a jungle to avoid the soldiers patrolling the border. The group had hired a guide, but he tricked them and led them straight into an ambush. The robbers attacked them and took everything, but when they tried to kidnap the women, my grandfather and the other men in the group protected them. There was a terrible fight, and the women escaped into the darkness.
Grandma hid in the bushes for two days, afraid to come out, waiting for the men to come back. On the third day the women left their hiding places and returned to the scene of the fight. They found my grandpa, dead. He was only twenty-three years old. There’s a picture of Grandpa on the wall in Grandma’s house.
Grandma told me that when they set out for Israel, they left my two-year-old mother with Grandma’s parents in the village. She said that in Ethiopia it was common for grandparents to raise their grandchildren, since most women married and had children when they were still very young. Grandma was only fifteen when my mom was born. When she left Ethiopia, they believed the planes would come soon and take all the Jews to Israel. But when Grandma finally arrived in Israel alone after a dangerous two-year journey, she discovered that things were more complicated than she’d expected. She told me how in the mornings she studied Hebrew and at night she wept for the daughter she missed so much.
When she remembered those times, Grandma used to cry, saying that had she known that her husband would die and that it would take seven years to be reunited with her only daughter, she never would have left Ethiopia. When I was younger and spent all my time at Grandma’s house, Ima used to say that I was making up for all the lost time between them. I loved listening to Grandma’s stories and often confided in her too. Now I missed her terribly.