Turkey was
not much better. This time they may have
been persecuted by a different aggressor but the reason remained the same. They were Jews. I learned through my
sister-in-law, Sylvia, that she remembers her dad talking about the day of his
Bar Mitzvah which occurred shortly after
the family moved to Turkey. He recalled
that following his Bar Mitzvah he was carried on the shoulders of the men through
the streets, a long standing tradition.
Eventually
the family migrated to Palestine by ship carrying British passports. I don't know the circumstance of how the
passports were obtained, probably illegally. Jews were not welcome there as
well. Their new enemies were the
Arabs. The British government, no
friend of the Jews, did not want the
hassle of dealing with the politics of the region. They provided weak
protection to the settlers.
As more
Jews from Europe fled to Palestine, anger against them grew and they formed
groups to protect themselves. One well
known group was the Haganah. It was a
Jewish paramilitary organization, in what was the British Mandate of Palestine
from 1920 to 1948. Believing that they
could not rely on the British for protection from local Arab gangs, the Jewish
leadership created the Haganah to protect Jewish farms and kibbutzim during the
1920's. Following the 1929 Palestine
riots, the Haganah's role changed dramatically.
It became a larger organization acquiring foreign arms and going from an
untrained militia to a capable underground army.
The
yellowed document I wrote about earlier revealed the applicant as Eliezer
Gurevitch formerly Asher Segal which may have been an alias that he had once
used. My sister-in-law filled in the
missing pieces of the puzzle, a story my husband knew little of. I had an opportunity to share as well because
I had always heard that my father-in-law was from the Republic of Georgia.
I learned
that my father-in-law worked for the Haganah.
He secreted guns in the luggage compartment of Palestinian tour buses
while doubling as a driver for a Palestinian touring company. He and his cousin did this risky work until
it became too dangerous. His mother
borrowed money to pay for a visa and and roundtrip passage to the United
States. He sailed to New York harbor
arranging to meet with his American family who had emigrated to Buffalo, New
York. During his brief stay in Buffalo,
family in Cleveland, Ohio introduced him to four unmarried sisters. He had a choice of marrying any one of
them! Their father judiciously allowed
his daughters the right to refuse a proposal if any one of them had strong
feelings against the suitor. He reminds
me of Tevye from " Fiddler on the Roof who allowed two of his daughters to
marry for love. Unheard of during the
early years of the twentieth century. He
chose my mother-in-law, Edna, because she laughed at his jokes and had a good
sense of humor. She expressed her desire
to marry the handsome young man. After a
two week courtship, they married. He was twenty-four and she thirty-five. She was advised by her sisters not to talk
about her age. She never told him that
she was eleven year's older but he knew how old her siblings were and that she
was the oldest of six. Years before he
died, my father-in-law took my husband and me into his confidence and said,
"Mama doesn't know that I know how old she is. That is to remain our secret." Only after his death did she learn. She did
not apply for Social Security when it was possible for her to do so because she
didn't want her husband to know that their marriage had begun with a lie. She
ruefully told the family, " He should have told me that he knew. I could have collected Social Security ten
years earlier!"
Three
weeks after marrying Elias, his visa expired and he reluctantly returned to
Palestine. During the spring of 1931, he
learned that he was going to become a father.
Baby Sylvia was born on January 21, 1932. Her dad was able to return to the states a
week before her birth. much to everyone's relief.
To the
average onlooker my father-in-law's life must have seemed monotonous. He
worked seven days a week during the early years of their marriage
operating a gas station and had little
time and money for fun and leisure. On national holidays he managed to pile
Sylvia and six small children from the neighborhood into his coupe and head for
Euclid Beach Park on Lake Erie. He
bought tickets for all the children to go on the rides and treated them to ice cream. He treasured those moments as did his daughter, Sylvia.
Life was
hard for the Gurev family and millions of other young couples starting out as
the Great Depression deepened until the advent of World War Two. The newlyweds moved into Edna's parents'
home. Seven adults shared a three
bedroom house. The sisters-in-law slept
on an enclosed back porch which was freezing in the winter. When Sylvia no
longer slept in a crib, she slept in the dining room on a cot. She got no rest until the adults went to
bed. She never called her dad
"daddy" until she was twelve probably because she rarely saw him as
he went to work before she awakened and worked until 10:30 at night.
Sylvia
remembers her father as honest, brave, polite and proud. He was fluent in six languages, had an
excellent education since his father worked for the czar for the first twelve
years of his life but circumstances including the effect of measles prevented
him from getting a a job that required his
intellect. He loved being around children
and telling whoppers. His imagination
allowed him to roam far and wide risking life and limb in death defying
escapes. In his late sixties, he and my
mother-in-law took a long dreamed for trip to Israel meeting relatives in Tel
Aviv and touring the country. They
somehow managed to walk up the crude steps at Masada to pay homage to those
martyrs who died there long ago.
My
father-in-law shortened his name some years later to Elias Gurev, a name I
personally prefer because spelling my last name to those who don't know me
would no doubt be more problematic than it already is.
Elias was
not one to be bitter over all the family had lost during his younger
years. His joy came from his family and
customers he befriended at his local gas station. He told his daughter, Sylvia, that he had
felt some momentary disappointment when the doctor told him he had a daughter
but he could swap her for a boy if he remained unhappy. They both had a good laugh knowing that once
Sylvia nestled is her daddy's arms, he would never let her go.
They went
from one child to having Harold six year's later and my husband, Jerry, four
years after Harold's birth. Jerry's
birth was remarkable in that his mother was forty five when he belted out his
first lusty cry.
Elias's
tales will linger for as long as his children and grandchildren keep them
alive.
Copyright 2014 by Sandra Gurev
