KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
comfortable talking to me than to other people. Or perhaps on those occasions when he talked about the past, his words were engraved in my mind and became an integral part of me. Part of my life jour- ney has involved trying to understand his journey. The summer after I graduated from college, I attended an ulpan (an intensive Hebrew language course) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I have always felt that my limited knowledge of Hebrew is a great personal inadequacy. That summer, I had the opportunity to spend time with some of my father’s Israeli friends, which made me feel closer to him. At the end of the summer, I almost stayed on for a year to work for the Israeli government. In 1988, ten years later, I made contact with a distant relative, Samuel Tiktin, who lived in Rovno, a city close to Ludvipol, and who fortunately spoke fluent English. After corresponding with him, I decided to “return” to Ludvipol and see it with my own eyes. My new and accommodating wife Cindy and I went off in search of my roots. The trip was memorable for many reasons, but when I went to Sosnovoye, as Ludvipol had been renamed, instead of feeling a sense of fulfillment or triumph in the knowledge that our family had survived, a tremendous sense of emptiness set in. Ludvipol felt like the far side of the moon, devoid of any personal connection or of anything Jewish, and I realized that whatever I was looking for was not there. In 1998, for his seventieth birthday, my father and I traveled to Israel. This was the first time we had been there together. We visited Kibbutz Yagur and met with many of his friends, both his Ludvipol landtzmen and the group of orphans he had lived with when he arrived in Israel, who had become his extended fami- ly. Along with one of those friends, Moshe Trosman, we threw a surprise seventieth birthday party with over eighty guests. This was a very special evening for my father and for me, and it helped me understand where to find the roots for which I had been searching.
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