On Sunday, March 1 at 2 pm Eastern Time Bracha Horovitz will be our guest for a Casual Conversation on Zoom. Ms. Horovitz is the author, with Sophie Paulson, of Soldier On: A Woman’s Memoir of Resilience and Hope (2002 Endeavor Literary Press) ISBN 978-1-7368734. She is also the partner of classmate Bob Nadelberg who suggested that she participate in this session with us.
Our guest is a Sabra, a term modeled after the cactus, i.e., tough on the outside and tender on the inside, born in Israel as one of the first of a new generation of offspring of European Jews who moved to the newly formed nation. Her mother’s Sephardic Jewish family was expelled from Sofia, Bulgaria, and her father lost his Ashkenazic family in the Holocaust, slaughtered by the Nazis. Her father survived Auschwitz. In her small town, just outside Jerusalem, “nearly everyone the age of my parents or older had experienced the war and the Holocaust. . . . [N]o one escaped unscathed.”
But, as our guest writes, “instead of succumbing to despair, my parents’ generation had picked themselves up from the dust, set their eyes on the horizon, and kept moving forward.” This was a lesson in resilience (see the book title), one that Ms. Horovitz would learn to emulate because, when she had a choice, she moved forward, finding that life, despite all that she personally was faced with, was beautiful. And as she states:
[W]e do have a choice. We always have a choice. Will we give in to self-pity and let suffering become the lens through which we see the world? Will we quit and walk away into a life of selfish pursuits? Or will we face the hardship and resolve to make something beautiful?
She had a choice when she was faltering in the brutal challenge of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) Beret March. (All Israelis were required to perform military service, though when she became of age, women were not combat soldiers, although they were trained to fight.) Later, she had a choice when she faced herself in the mirror and decided to be as much a Sabra on the outside as she had accomplished for herself on the inside.
She had a choice when, after giving birth to two healthy daughters, her next child, a son, was so threatened with health and cognitive disabilities that one doctor suggested that he would not live beyond a day. Ms. Horovitz turned from self-pity, her mother’s default, to resilience, from “Why me?” to “Why not me?” and becoming the mother that helped her loving and courageous son live to age 39, ultimately capable of independent movement and discovering meaning in the worlds of family, film, and especially music. Her husband told her that life was beautiful and asked her, when Ronny was born, what the plan was.
The plan? To live a life of Aliyah, of rising. To care for her children, to be a fixture in a life of joy for her son, to bring two more sons into the world, and to care for her Israeli husband, Zvi, when he came down with a “curable” cancer that was not capable of being cured. And ever to meet suffering, the intruder, with resilience and not “through a lens of loss” because we always have a choice.
Ms. Horovitz recounts a moment when she was sitting on the floor babysitting her son Ronny and a friend’s son, the same age and without the same challenges. She turned to the famous saying from Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not know, when?” She knew then she had to take of herself first so that she could care for Ronny. And she did. (You know the instruction from the airplane drill: First put the oxygen mask on you and then on your baby.)
For a review of the book, and a short summary, please see: https://booktrib.com/2023/10/11/from-israel-to-boston-from-soldier-to-pageant-contestant-to-mother/
Our classmate does not make an appearance by name in this memoir, which ends its narrative when our author is about 66 years old, but Ms. Horovitz gives him this tribute in the Acknowledgements: “Special gratitude goes to my partner, who has believed in me and walked beside me through every step of this journey.”
One final matter: Let it be clear that his is not a geopolitical discussion, that whatever your feelings about Israel, Zionism, and the IDF, they do not belong as part of this Casual Conversation. The experiences are Ms. Horovitz’s, and the lessons she learned and shares in her memoir are not political. Keep your politics to yourself and treat her with the same courtesy and respect that we have shown all our guests. Don’t forget that I have access to the “kill switch” and I will have no hesitation to use it should anyone cross the line.
Let me know by COB this Friday, February 27 if you plan to attend. My email is:
arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson
P.S. “Bracha” means blessing in Hebrew.