By Varda Levy
ENCINITAS, California — The watercolor has been in my family seemingly forever. It used to hang in my parents’ apartment in Tel Aviv, but it has been in my different homes in California for decades. In it a young girl of five or six years faces the painter with a slight pout and a high forehead crowned by a white ribbon. The sadness along her lip line is unmistakable. One can imagine small pools of tears about to gather in her big dark eyes. She is wearing a summer dress, but the painter chose to focus on her face and in quick brush strokes drew two blue straps over small shoulders that are colored a distinctive pink.
The girl is I. I remember the day and circumstance of the sitting. It was a Saturday afternoon. Our family tradition in Tel Aviv was to spend every summer Shabbat morning at the beach. Consequently, I was sunburnt and somewhat uncomfortable during the afternoon hours. I liked the dress that I wore that day—baby blue with a small ruffle across the chest and a flowing skirt that my mother, Michla Gornitsky, starched and ironed to perfection. My older sister Sarah, my mother and I were visiting a family friend who lived near our apartment in Tel Aviv. It was the early 1950s and he was beginning to make a name for himself as a painter in a very young State of Israel. He had promised to draw a portrait of my sister, and I tagged along.
Midway through the session, as my sister’s portrait took shape, the continued focus on her and the increased discomfort of my sunburn took their toll over my young psyche. I lost patience and began to fight tears. The following sitting was mine. I don’t know to this day whether all along the intent was to draw a portrait of me as well or whether the artist asked me to sit because I was visibly upset, but the resulting portrait depicts me and my mood exactly—sad dark eyes, pouting lips, sunburnt, blue sundress straps—an almost teary little girl.
I love the painting. It brings me back to a charmed childhood growing up in a small, intimate Tel Aviv, where everyone knew everyone. In fact, the painter, Avram Binder, was a friend of my parents. My father, Efraim Gornitsky, and Avram had met in the 1920s in Grodno, a city in today’s Belarus, one of the European Zionist centers at the time. They joined a Zionist youth group, where they were trained and prepared to make Aliya to Palestine, which they ultimately did, Binder in the late 1920s and my father in the early 1930s. They settled in Tel Aviv early on, and when I was a very young child, the Binders were a fixture among the circle of Grodno ex-pats to which both my parents belonged.
Today I am worlds away. Sixty-seven years have passed since my portrait was created. “Little Tel Aviv,” as we used to call it, has evaporated; it has transformed into a bustling metropolis. My parents are gone; their many Grodno friends are gone. And I have left too.
My home of forty-six years is on the other side of our planet, in a small town called Encinitas, where nowadays I spend time hunkered down because a new virus infects the earth. My immediate world has shrunk, as have the lives of millions of others, into the confines of my walls. Yet today, a missive re-opened my horizons, sending me back in a flash to my own youth and to my father’s Zionist beginnings in Grodno.
The message arrived from Lauren, a friend who is a member of a WhatsApp group recently created to keep a unique cohort of female friends connected during the Covid-19 stay-at-home mandate. We call ourselves the JWG, which stands for Jewish Women Group, but this is not a new group. Our JWG was assembled in 1981, thirty-nine years ago, when north San Diego County was a new community into which everyone had just moved from someplace else, where no one had family or old friends. Two of us, Jane Frank and I, felt disconnected and decided to assemble a group of young Jewish women with whom we could meet once a month to talk about Jewish topics and feel sustained by camaraderie. We invited almost everyone we knew who was Jewish and female. Some of the women we met at children’s pre-schools or dance classes; others we picked up in line at the local supermarket or on a community playground where our kids happened to play. No one we approached declined. Twelve began the group, and only two left in our thirty-nine years together. We grew up and matured as wives, mothers, and now grandmothers. We witnessed births, Bar and Bat mitzvahs, weddings of children, divorces and loss of spouses. Through it all, once a month, we are still meeting to connect—to laugh, cry, and discuss anything the hostess deems relevant. To compensate for our current inability to meet, we generated the WhatsApp group through which we stay in touch almost daily now.
This morning, in her WhatApp message to our JWG, Lauren shared a photograph depicting herself in front of a large painting at her home. She explained that she had purchased the painting with her husband in Israel on their first visit in 1981— interestingly, the year JWG was formed. The photograph was published very recently by the San Diego Jewish World as a part of a featured portrayal of San Diegans and their Ju-daica. The caption beneath the photograph read, “Lauren Lizerbram with Avram Bind-er’s celebration of Israeli Independence Day.”
The very same Avram Binder who had created my childhood portrait decades ago.
In an instant, I returned to a summer Shabbat afternoon, to a baby-blue dress on sun-burnt shoulders, to a young Tel Aviv into which I was born, to my father’s Zionist ori-gins. A pictorial electronic message from a woman who had become a life-long friend in a world thousands of miles removed from my past transported me not only to my own youth but also to my father’s. Inadvertently, Lauren demonstrated to me that we are never separate, that we share collective experiences and memories—threads in a magnificent tapestry made not only of our present but also of the rich communal past woven into who we are.
*
Varda Levy is an Israeli born and raised who moved to live in the United States in her early twenties. She is a re-tired educator who began her career as an English teacher in high school and community college. Prior to retire-ment she served as principal of Rancho Buena Vista High School at Vista, California. She has been a resident of Encinitas since 1974.