by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)
Back behind the school, under a corrugated
tin awning, propping ourselves up against
the half-filled bike rack, the late spring days
already too hot for most to ride bikes to school,
A.V. and I practice singing Hatikvah off
a transliterated sheet.
We had carefully chosen the place, distant
from the hubbub of our lunchtime recess.
For the other kids — A.V. was in fifth grade,
me in fourth — would likely have razzed us
practicing a Hebrew song. We two were the only
Jews in the school, and we kept it on the QT.
We lived on egg ranches with parents
who did not fit the mold of either farmers nor
So Cal rural residents in the 1950’s. My folks,
Manhattanites, came post-war to California, my
mother to escape the cold, my father dutiful.
A.V.’s folks, on the other hand, had the more
dramatic story. His mother, elegant and French,
his father, a Litvak, off to Zion, then to fight in Spain,
barely surviving and repatriated to the Proletarian
Homeland, later air-dropped into Poland.
The two met in, and survived, Auschwitz. And ended
up in the San Gabriel Valley (LA’s other one!).
Raising chickens and two kids, and, like my
folks in the ’50’s, keeping their politics —
Left, more Left, yet even more Left — under
wraps in a town whose most famous boast of
the day was as the headquarters of
America’s only homegrown Fascist group.
Some old Israel contact of A.V.’s dad placed a kibbutznik,
sent to California to help out a local
Zionist-Marxist group, on their ranch. He corralled
as many Jewish children as he could find locally for
membership. As the parents were often close to,
or members of, the Party, Zionism was viewed
with suspicion, but, on the other hand (always another
hand), even the most reluctant nationalist Jew in 1960
was hollowed out by the oh-so recent events, and
thus was scintillated by the stories of pioneers and
survivors creating a state and refuge. So the
emissary kibbutznik worked the farm, organized
the kids for the youth group, and encouraged the romance
of redeeming the land and people with discipline and
song. To earn our membership and the coveted
blue shirt — hultza khula — A.V. and I needed to
sing Hatikva. We neither knew nor read
Hebrew, so we worked off the transliteration.
We spent a week at the bike rack, managing
to memorize a foreign song which only had
a distant meaning, if that. Years later, I finally
figured out the meaning of the line that
cracked us up: Our Hope Is Two Thousand Years
Old. The word “Years” was transliterated as
“Shnot.” What’s this song about “shnot”?
What else does a nine year-old think?
That Friday night at our meeting, A.V. and I
sang, likely off-key, from memory, the
words, and didn’t even start laughing
when we got to the “shnot.”
The leaders, only teenagers themselves,
loosely supervised by the kibbutznik emissary,
who could not have been more than in his twenties,
presented us with the blue shirt, signifying
our membership in the youth movement to
build the Zionist future.
Neither A.V. nor I made it to kibbutz life, although
some of our friends did for longer and shorter
durations. And we’ve lost track of each other,
more or less. But I learned the words to the song,
and eventually even the meaning, and,
now, especially now, I’m glad I have it
imprinted in my heart.
Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious. He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.
If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page:https://dennisgura.substack.com
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