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wasn’t particularly interested in taking care of us, and she often voiced her disapproval of her son’s marriage and criticized my mother’s efforts to be a good wife and parent. She once offered my mother ten thousand dollars to leave our father. My mother never figured out if this was a joke or not.
    A lonely widow deprived of her lifelong friends and familiar surroundings in Tel Aviv, Savta would not have been happy in Chicago under any circumstances. As the overprotective mother of one living child, she wouldn’t be satisfied with anyone who married her son. Benjamin Emanuel could have proposed to Golda Meir and Savta would have found something lacking. In Marsha Emanuel, she believed she saw an ambitious American who would weigh her precious son down with too many children and grandiose expectations for the privileged kind of life she saw on American television. Big cars and suburban houses represented to Savta a trap that would prevent her son from returning to Tel Aviv to live. And she was certain that his wicked wife would force him to choose this American life over Israel, which meant that she would have to accept either exile in the United States or life without her son in Tel Aviv.
    What Savta did not understand was that my father was the one most devoted to the American dream of a home in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, and a climb up the social ladder. He liked both the challenges and the opportunities of working in the country with the most technologically advanced medicine. He also enjoyed the culture, comforts, and opportunities that surrounded him in the richest country inthe world. Sure, he loved his homeland, and he imagined that he might one day return. But it was my mother who longed for Israel the most. After all, in the short time she had lived there she had had more close friends than she had ever known in America and gold had literally rained down on her from above.

Three

THE EMANUELS
     
    The story of the gold begins in Odessa, on the Black Sea, long before my mother and father were born and, indeed, before the family was even called by the name Emanuel. As pogroms and civil wars blazed across the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to Western Europe, America, and to what was then called Palestine. Today, millions of families in America and around the world can trace their stories back to these displaced Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. To others, these events can seem like distant history. To us they are both shrouded in faded memories and deeply personal dramas filled with danger and heroism and lessons that echo in our own attitudes and perspectives.
    I was told that my father’s relatives left their home in Odessa in 1905 after selling substantial landholdings. With their fortune converted to gold coins and diamonds, they immigrated to Jerusalem. At that time my ancestors went by the name of Auerbach. My father’s father, who was also named Ezekiel, opened a pharmacy financed by an old friend from Odessa who was passing through Palestine on his way to settle in Rome. The pharmacy supported his wife; his eldest son, Emanuel; and the younger Benjamin, who was born in Israel in1927. Ever suspicious and fearful, Ezekiel hid away the gold coins and jewels against an uncertain future. He told no one, not even his wife, Penina, where he put them.
    While not political activists, the Auerbachs were Zionists who supported the ultimate creation of a Jewish state that would be a bulwark against the anti-Semitism and terror they had seen in Europe. Before this dream could be realized, they and other Jewish pioneers who had come to Palestine would have to wait out the British occupation, which had begun at the end of World War I. The Jews and Arabs of Palestine both resented British rule, but during a period that ran from 1930 into the 1940s the Arabs were the most violent in their opposition to both the occupation and to the Jewish immigrants who came fleeing anti-Semitism,