My mother was 82 when she died, and my father was 84. During their last years, when they lived in a retirement community in New Jersey, they grew weaker. They both had rather frequent medical emergencies and were taken by ambulance to the hospital in Princeton. But when I visited them from Israel, which I did as often as I could, but obviously not often enough for them, I always found them clear in their minds and involved in their lives, curious about me and my children, and connected with friends and relatives - who were all getting older an dying off. I was in my late forties when they died, and I remember wondering what it was like for them to know that their lives would end in the foreseeable future. Now I'm 72 myself, and, if I die at the age my parents did, that isn't so long from now. Ten years, in retrospect, is a very short time.
So I pin my hopes on my children's and grandchildren's future, wishing them a full and rewarding life, while at the same time I have never been so pessimistic. I see disaster looming: ecological, political, and economic. But, obviously, I could be wrong, and I hope I am.
Not all parents are or can be ambitious for their children. Many people in the world live in such poverty and instability, that they are deprived of the luxury of imagining a decent future for even themselves, let alone their children.
Holding out hopes for one's children and inspiring them with those hopes can empower them, and this is a precious and wonderful gift that a parent can confer. However privileged parents are often oppressively ambitious for their children, having overly specific ideas about what their children must do for a living, whom they must marry, and so on. Perhaps because I am an immigrant in a country I have had to struggle to understand, my ambitions for my children were never very specific, and I know that by moving to Israel, I frustrated my parents' ambitions for me. But I think they were pleased by my modest accomplishments. I am certainly very proud of my children, who are doing admirable things with their lives.
Among my accomplishments have been my translations of a dozen or more novels by Aharon Appelfeld, who survived WWII as a child in a forest in the Carpathians. I have always been aware of the painful loss suffered by Holocaust survivors. Identification with that loss, although my fortunate close family was virtually untouched by the destruction of the communities they emigrated from in the late nineteenth century, was one of my reasons for moving to Israel. I wanted to share in the rebuilding of a Jewish world. But my understanding of that loss had more to do with what was, with what they had, with the relatives and friends who were killed, and with the local Jewish culture that was snuffed out. Recently, perhaps because my own future looks so short, I have realized that they also lost their futures - at least the futures their parents hoped for them, and the futures they hoped for their children.
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, Appelfeld's most recently published novel, in my translation, is very much about the effort of a young survivor to stake out a future for himself, knowing that it will never be as rich and beautiful as the future his parents expected for him before the war.
So I pin my hopes on my children's and grandchildren's future, wishing them a full and rewarding life, while at the same time I have never been so pessimistic. I see disaster looming: ecological, political, and economic. But, obviously, I could be wrong, and I hope I am.
Not all parents are or can be ambitious for their children. Many people in the world live in such poverty and instability, that they are deprived of the luxury of imagining a decent future for even themselves, let alone their children.
Holding out hopes for one's children and inspiring them with those hopes can empower them, and this is a precious and wonderful gift that a parent can confer. However privileged parents are often oppressively ambitious for their children, having overly specific ideas about what their children must do for a living, whom they must marry, and so on. Perhaps because I am an immigrant in a country I have had to struggle to understand, my ambitions for my children were never very specific, and I know that by moving to Israel, I frustrated my parents' ambitions for me. But I think they were pleased by my modest accomplishments. I am certainly very proud of my children, who are doing admirable things with their lives.
Among my accomplishments have been my translations of a dozen or more novels by Aharon Appelfeld, who survived WWII as a child in a forest in the Carpathians. I have always been aware of the painful loss suffered by Holocaust survivors. Identification with that loss, although my fortunate close family was virtually untouched by the destruction of the communities they emigrated from in the late nineteenth century, was one of my reasons for moving to Israel. I wanted to share in the rebuilding of a Jewish world. But my understanding of that loss had more to do with what was, with what they had, with the relatives and friends who were killed, and with the local Jewish culture that was snuffed out. Recently, perhaps because my own future looks so short, I have realized that they also lost their futures - at least the futures their parents hoped for them, and the futures they hoped for their children.
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, Appelfeld's most recently published novel, in my translation, is very much about the effort of a young survivor to stake out a future for himself, knowing that it will never be as rich and beautiful as the future his parents expected for him before the war.
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