Bryan Schwartzman – ‘Far, Far Away’

Episode I:

Summer, 1999……

It is a hopeful time in the Middle East. A new Israeli Prime Minister

has promised to make peace between longtime enemies.

Meanwhile, a young college graduate,  Bryan Schwartzman, has left his home in New York

to be part of it all and discover himself.

Awaiting him is an unlikely friendship. Yet little does Bryan know how fragile the hope of peace and friendship really is…

 

“Hey, does anyone play tennis here?” 

I posed this question to a group of kibbutzniks and foreign volunteers busing their trays after lunch. I’d arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi less than 24 hours prior. I still didn’t know how to do my laundry, where to find a doctor if I got sick, what job I’d be assigned, when I’d start Hebrew classes and where I’d eat dinner since the chadar ohel(dining hall) only opened for breakfast and lunch.

There was even more I didn’t know. I’d stepped off any semblance of a path in life. Barely a year out of college, I’d already left my first newspaper job, needing to fill an indefinable spiritual hole. If I’d amassed any wisdom at that point, it was to realize that I was more than the sum of my experiences, that what had happened to me since my birth, wasn’t the totality of what shaped me. And I had an almost cosmic sense that figuring all this out could happen in Israel. With the help of my father — who spent his career in British Airways’ New York office —  I got a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv, with a stop in Dublin, for approximately $55.

I’d arrived in the country in March — although I wouldn’t get to the kibbutz until the middle of June, first completing a program focusing on volunteer work, hiking and Jewish studies —  in time to see Ehud Barak campaign on a promise of completing the peace process with the Palestinians and also pursuing a reproachment with Asad’s Syria. With Barak’s convincing victory over Bibi Netanyahu and strong coalition position, many believed it wasn’t a question of if peace would come, but when.

Yet I chose to ask that group of kibbutzniks about tennis. I had been carrying around my classic Pete Sampras Wilson Pro-Staff in my duffle for months and was determined to use it. I’d competed in high school and the sport brought memories of losses and pressure and striving and failing to reach my potential, but I still loved so much about the game. Hitting forehands and backhands was my way of laying claim to a place.

“Yeah, there’s this Japanese guy, Yasu. The chicken farmer,” one of the men responded.

A few days after arriving at the kibbutz I was fired from my job as assistant to Shimon the plumber. No Hebrew, no plumbing experience, no problem, I’d been told. Wrong.  I’d turned off a fan I was supposed to have left running over lunch, leading to Shimon pulling at what little white hair he had left and screaming “lama, lama, lama.” (Why? Why? Why?) I got the sense that he’d have to redo whatever we’d done before lunch. I’d been reassigned to wash dishes — not an assignment I coveted, I imagined myself working in agriculture, beneath the sun — and placed in the most basic Hebrew immersion class. After these blows, I strolled along one of the kibbutz’s many flower-lined paths, wondering if I could make it as a kibbutznik. What I needed at that point was some comfort with my decision to step off the hamster wheel, to not care what others thought (or what I imagined they thought) of my choice. Yet walking along that path, that’s where I first saw him. 

Yasu Ishimaru.

He wore a red bandana and a sleeveless, brown shirt that must have once been white.

“Ah, you are Bryan.” Someone had already told him about me.

Yasu greeted me with the kind of smile that suggested that what he wanted more than anything was to meet a fellow tennis player. He laughed as he introduced himself. Not the kind of laugh that treats the world as a cruel joke, more an expression of gratitude, that he’s alive, that chance has brought him into contact with whoever he’s with at the moment. In thirty seconds, he lifted me out of a place of self-pity.

“Love to a play tennis,” he’d said. “No today. Swim and run before work. A tired. We play Thursday, no?”

I couldn’t remember the last time the mere mention of playing brought me pure joy.

“I’ll be there.”

In the summer of 1999, Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi was home to roughly 1,000 souls. Kfar Hanassi means “village of the president” in Hebrew and was named after Israel’s first president, Chaim Weitzman. The socialist commune was founded immediately after the end of what Israelis call the War for Independence and Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or disaster. Sitting in Israel’s far north, in the finger region of the Galilee, it overlooks the Jordan River, which, even at its widest, is more of a small stream. The kibbutz sits on a plateau formed by volcanic lava. The landscape is lush during the rainy season, but in the parched summer had turned to shades of brown, tan and yellow. Just across the hill to the south lay Tuba-Zangariyye; a Bedouin Arab town of 6,000. Five times a day, I’d be reminded of its proximity by the muezzin’s calls echoing across the valley. “Allah is great.”   

Here there isn’t far to go until, you run into an uncrossable border with Lebanon. Syria is pretty close as well. If this were a different universe, one could hop in a car and be sitting at a café in Beirut or Damascus in an hour or two.

For the first two decades after it was founded, mostly by Labor Zionists from the United Kingdom, the kibbutz was in direct sight of Syrian soldiers, who’d rain down bullets at farmers. That all changed with the events of 1967, when, among other territory, Israel captured the Golan Heights, pushing Syrians soldiers back out of firing range. When I arrived, the kibbutz had known decades of relative quiet. Now, in place of tents, malaria and nights spent in below ground shelters, Kfar Hanassi had a swimming pool, theater, a pottery studio, boutique hotel, senior home, British-style pub, children’s playgrounds, basketball courts, a 3.6-kilometer jogging path along the circumference, free-ranging children, sheep, goats, well-fed dogs who lived mostly outdoors, a plastic pipe factory, an assisted-living facility, and an abundance of greenery and flowers. And it revealed one of my favorite views in all of Israel. From a bench and gazebo on its Eastern edge, you could look down on avocado groves and out toward the river and Golan. If you were lucky, you’d see Egyptian vultures racing through the sky. It was a perfect spot. From there, you could feel the winds of continents converging.

And it had tennis courts. The courts were a slab of black concrete with lines painted to the correct dimensions and a net that stood upright. On a typical June afternoon, it felt as if the concrete absorbed every morsel of energy generated by the sun, boiling the cells of any human body mad enough to step upon it seeking recreation. A well-surfaced court — the kind you’d find at a private club or really nice public park —  plays with a certain feel that allows a player’s feet to gain traction and for the racquet to apply spins and slices to the ball. Hitting on the kibbutz court, however, felt like bouncing a ball on a concrete sidewalk. The game moved so fast it was difficult to put spin on the ball or find a rhythm or do anything but scramble to reach the ball before it bounced twice.

My parents were somewhat thrifty — always saving for my future —  but had splurged on years of tennis lessons. As a kid, they’d more or less forced me to play soccer and baseball. Tennis was the first and only sport I played whole-heartedly. 

Yasu lacked proper instruction and violated nearly every fundamental principle of technique with each jerky, inefficient stroke. For instance, if I hit a short ball that landed before the service line and he needed to move forward, he wouldn’t get into position, set himself and then hit as one is taught. Rather, he would swing without stopping, then keep running once the ball left his strings, in a mad, continuous dash toward the net, where he’d either smash a floating ball or make it easy for an opponent to hit it around or over him. My training hadn’t given me a blueprint on how to play someone lacking a playbook or discernable patterns. He’d also never been introduced to the finer points of tennis decorum and would talk and comment throughout the point — occasionally yelling out “shit” with the point still in play, sometimes causing me to lose focus and miss the next ball. 

While I might have found him annoying to play against, I couldn’t help but admire his tenacity on the court, how hard he competed and how effectively he blunted my gameplan. He was so fit and fast and unflappable that he’d push me and even win a few sets.  It didn’t hurt that he’d played professional soccer at some level in Argentina. Or was it Thailand? The man’s English was hard to understand, and his Hebrew was even worse. I spoke no Japanese. Yet, I can’t help but think there was something deliberate about his method of dispensing information, as if some part of him enjoyed being a curiosity, a mystery.

After that first match, I knew I had found a tennis partner.  I also saw the beginning of a friendship. During those months in 1999, I met rabbis, cab drivers, peaceniks and settlers, Arab farmers and Jewish soldiers, American-born Jews who’d made themselves anew, Israelis born in Morocco and Yemen and Druze shopkeepers and more. And yet Yasu — close to two decades older than me, an atheist with no connection to Judaism apart from the fact that he lived in a Jewish community in a Jewish country, whose English was so halting that it often led to basic misunderstandings between us  — was surely the closest friendship I’d make.  

That summer, he was 39 and I was 23. Lean and muscular, he arose at 5 a.m. daily to train for triathlons, swimming miles in the pool or running and biking as the sun rose over the landscape. He’d bike as far as the Sea of Galilee and circumvent the harp-shaped lake that the Gospels tell us Jesus once tread upon. 

Over many conversations, I learned his basic life story. He’d grown up in Japan but left in his early 20s. I recall his father had held some important job in banking or technology and expected his son to follow a similar path. Possibly his mother also had a corporate background. I don’t remember if he had siblings. Yasu told me that the competitiveness and materialism of Japanese culture drove him away. “In Japan, we no talk about religion. Only money,” he’d once said. Yasu had managed to step away from expectations and family and societal pressure to contribute to national gross domestic product. 

Somewhere in his travels, he learned how to care for chickens and harvest eggs. I asked him if he’d ever eaten any of his own chickens. “I no know,” he’d said. “They no have name tags.”

He’d come to Israel not for the biblical history or the plight of the Jews or Palestinians but because he really wanted to live in a commune where he didn’t have to worry about money and people were equal and looked after one another and he could rise in the morning and train. He seemed to have found what he was looking for since he’d been living at Kfar Hanassi nearly a decade when we met. “I learn to put a gas mask,” he told me. “SCUD missiles very scary.” I admired his contentment, how his ambition was trained not on more valuable commodities than money or status. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a tortured relationship with ambition. I’d fled my nascent career and the only country I’d ever lived in to escape life as a race or game of acquisition. Yet I harbored a different kind of ambition. A feeling arose in me that this sojourn on the Kibbutz and In Israel would have to have some larger meaning to justify itself. It would have to provide the material for a novel, or, perhaps lead me to do something important.

Maybe I was open to this friendship because I was in such a malleable state. This was a period when I questioned everything: my religious practice, what country I would live in, what overarching narrative I claimed, what I’d do with my life. Also, I needed a friend like Yasu to anchor me, as if, in a strange place, I risked becoming a stranger to myself.

There’s another reason I was drawn to friendship. He made sure I had enough to eat. The man invited me to his home on many nights, offering not only sustenance but refuge from discomfort.

What discomfort? I shared an unairconditioned tinderbox of a room with an American medical student. There was no ceiling fan and a window that had to remain closed to keep mosquitoes and flies out. The only way I could sleep at night was to throw on my bathing suit and jump in the outdoor shower that was right outside our room, then crash into bed without drying off, hoping tiredness would overtake me before I became overheated again.

I’d arrived during a period of transition for the kibbutz. Key aspects of its socialist nature were being challenged. Long gone were the days when children lived together separated from their parents. By the late 90s, members were debating the previously unthinkable idea that they could have private bank accounts and their own salaries, that all capital might not be collectively owned by the kibbutz. And, within the past year or so the members voted to shut down the chadar ohel for dinner due to costs and families’ desires to eat at home.

I had plenty to eat for breakfast and lunch, but no chadar ohel meant no dinner. This for someone who took three meals a day as a kind of birthright and who ceases to function when the blood sugar gets low. In theory, there were supposed to be enough ingredients in the moadon (volunteers’ lounge) fridge to cook eggs for dinner. Yet a few weeks after I arrived, the one air-conditioned space theoretically open to at all hours became infested with flies, due, in large part, to lack of cleanup. The sound of those flies was overpowering, like the crescendo of a soundtrack from a horror movie.

There’s no doubt I complained about all of this during our tennis matches. I’ve never been one to keep thoughts to myself or suffer in silence. Soon, Yasu began inviting me for meals at his home, which, importantly, had its own window air-conditioner.  

“You like fish?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“OK, salmon tonight.”

I learned to tolerate salmon.

In some ways, his place was like a city row home as units were attached on both sides. It seemed more peaceful and desirable and lived in than my own quarters, with a gliding chair and a few potted plants out front. He had stacks of National Geographic magazines lying around; that, he said, was how he learned to read English.  

At July’s onset, Yasu invited me to his place to watch the ‘99 Wimbledon final with Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. Despite the fact that I played with Sampras’ racquet, Agassi had been my favorite player since age 12, when he made the semifinals of the U.S. Open as a mullet-sporting, denim-wearing 18-year-old. By ’97, his career and ranking had nosedived (he’d later admit to experimenting with crystal meth during this period.) Agassi made a resurgence that spring, winning the ‘99 French Open. I’d followed his run in the Jerusalem Post but hadn’t seen any of it on TV. My whole life, watching Wimbledon was a morning activity because of the time difference between New York and London. With Israel being two hours ahead of the U.K., we were able to enjoy the match after the work day and sat, sipping iced tea, and marveling at Sampras’ display of virtuosity and utter dominance. I didn’t even mind too much that my player lost. 

“Be nice to play like that, wouldn’t it,” I’d said.

“I love to play a tennis no matter how play,” he responded, looking at me quizzically.

What did we talk about in those hours we spent together, munching slowly, enjoying the hum of the air conditioner or maybe sitting at a round table outside his front door? That summer, my mind was pulsing in overdrive and wrestling with all kinds of ideas and questions about Judaism, Zionism, the Palestinians and what I owed America’s unfulfilled promise. I did my best to articulate this, and he tried to explain how it made perfect sense for him to be where he was. 

“I just want girlfriend, but nobody,” he’d said.

This was a man badly in need of a woman, someone who genuinely sought a soulmate. Yasu talked wistfully of his past relationships with kibbutzniks and volunteers and I learned that he’d once been engaged in Thailand. She’d called it off on their wedding day, something I thought only happens in movies. He would also ask me about some of my fellow female volunteers, if they had boyfriends, which I found off-putting, in part because he was nearly 20 years older than most of the women he asked about, and because it made me feel like a kind of spy.

One day, he’d reserved one of the kibbutz cars for an outing to Tiberias.  A group of five or six kibbutzniks and volunteers piled into the car and he drove to the ancient Roman provincial capital on the shores of Lake Kinneret. We enjoyed what felt like an absolutely lavish meal overlooking the water. It seemed that Yasu just wanted guests on the kibbutz to enjoy an evening out. This establishment specialized in Thai food and other Asian fusion cuisine. Drinking a Danish beer and feeling the hot evening breeze sweep off the lake, I felt both satisfied and suddenly aware of, if not the deprivations, the lack of the things I was used to having, like air-conditioning and food whenever I wanted it and being able to the go to the movies. It was the kind of perfect night out that I should have appreciated, but instead only reminded me of what I didn’t have.

Of all the things I could have wanted that I didn’t have, I fixated on getting to the movies. One movie in particular. 

Yasu could get me to a theater to see The Phantom Menace.

I’d seemingly waited my whole life for this movie. The last new Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, was released in the summer of 1983, when I wrapped up first grade. Seeing it in the theaters had been a rite of passage; the moment when Darth Vadar sacrifices himself to save his son, Luke, was more completely etched in my mind than the sacrifice of Isaac or any story from Jewish tradition. The Phantom Menace, Darth Vader’s origin story, had been showing in theaters in the States for a couple of months, but only more recently had come to Israel. I could finally learn how the hero that was Anakin Skywalker became the arch-villain Darth Vader. Only, without a car, it was complicated, maybe near impossible to get from the kibbutz to the nearest movie theater and back in the hours when I wasn’t working or sitting in Hebrew immersion. Kfar Hanassi lay about six or seven kilometers east of the nearest bus station, in Rosh Pinah. Missing the movie had seemed like an acceptable trade-off for this once in a lifetime experience — until I’d tasted the freedom of a car. 

I brought it up over lunch in the chadar ohel. 

“No.” Yasu surprised me with his firmness. 

Reserving a car, he’d said, had been a special thing. He’d had to do it in advance and, though he didn’t earn a salary exactly, it had come from a discretionary spending account. Plus, he said, he didn’t care about Star Wars. Not at all.

What? I thought. That didn’t compute. Most people I knew in the States, even if they didn’t love Star Wars, at least cared about it, had an opinion. Star Wars was and remains that big of a cultural force. He seemed utterly indifferent; I’m not even sure if he had seen any Star Wars movie. If that were the case, I didn’t understand him nearly as well as I thought.

I couldn’t let that be the end of it. He had such a strong desire to please, such an antipathy for letting anyone down and maybe for being alone. I could exploit that. I wouldn’t feel good about it but, come on, this was Star Wars.

“How can you not like Star Wars?” I asked Yasu later.

“Don’t know. No like fighting,” he said.

“What if I paid for your ticket? For everything? I’ve got to see this movie.”

He paused for a minute, as if considering this new information. Clearly, he had no great desire to see this movie. But it was something to do. And he didn’t want to disappoint a friend. 

“Maybe chicken car?” he said.

“Chicken car?” I replied quizzically.

“You know, I take chickens to be …..” he made a slashing gesture across his throat. “Free. But smell very bad. Is not good.”

“Yes, chicken car!  I’ll pay for your ticket. And gas.”

“You’ll pay?”

“Absolutely. Happy to. I’ve got so few expenses here.”

“Just you. No friends. Just you.”

But I didn’t keep this under wraps and, soon, a whole group wanted a ride to the movies. 

When it came time to depart, three of us sat in the front seat and four more kibbutz volunteers crammed into the back.  We were packed into this ridiculous car because of me: my desires, my planning, my conniving. Heading north on Route 90, the rumble of the truck on the road vibrated in my ears. My bones shook and my empty stomach bellowed.  We wouldn’t have time for dinner before the start of the movie and I tried to convince myself that I didn’t care. 

We were destined for a mall in a city called Kiryat Shmonah that was about as far north in Israel as one can venture. Even then, the place was a frequent target of Hezbollah’s World War II-era Soviet rockets. Death is in the city’s very name. Meaning “village of the eight,” Kiryat Shmonah was named for a group of early Zionist pioneers who, in 1920, fell in a battle defending an outpost.

Yasu seemed nervous, his expression tense and contracted. He didn’t play music, not even his beloved folk group, the Indigo Girls and drove so slowly it was if he were trying to render the chicken car invisible.  I’d later piece together that, since we’d had too many people in the car, he’d worried about encountering any police, fearing that he’d ultimately be deported back to Japan. It wasn’t entirely irrational. His legal status was somewhat tenuous and unique; a non-Jewish, full-fledged member of the kibbutz who wasn’t eligible for citizenship but had, I was told, the equivalent of a green card because of his kibbutz affiliation. Though, I never understood why he was worried on this day, but not our earlier excursion, when we’d had a similarly-sized group. Maybe it had to do with the chicken car? 

“Shit,” he’d said to no one in particular. Or maybe he was speaking directly to me.

I could tell immediately upon entering the lobby through the mall this wasn’t a state-of-the-art theater. The screen was like something you’d find in someone’s living room circa 1991. The sound had a muffled, almost underwater quality. Yet when I heard the opening John Williams notes and saw the screen crawl “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic, ” the spell worked. I felt like a seven-year-old again for a few minutes. Then, maybe because of my hunger, or the poor quality of the theater or arguably the worst dialogue of the Star Wars franchise, the spell was broken. In the opening scene, the audience meet members of the Alien Trade Federation race who aren’t exactly the galactic empire from the original trilogy but clearly are up to no good. These creatures spoke in English — with Hebrew subtitles — like they were doing poor imitations of a Chinese or Japanese accent. Think Mickey Rooney’s cringe-worthy portrayal of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Additionally, the junk dealer, Watto, talked like a stereotypical Israeli and, of course, Jar Jar Binks, the much-maligned Gungan whose comic relief was more annoying than funny, resembled a cartoon Rastafarian. (The few times aliens spoke intergalactic languages, the subtitles only appeared in Hebrew, so I lost some lines of dialogue.) This wasn’t another visionary rendering of an imagined world but a caricature of our own. I turned to Yasu and felt slightly embarrassed.

A little more than two hours later,  the end credits came on and I thought, that’s it?  That’s what I waited 16 years for? What a disappointment. There was a palpable sense of deflation as we drove home in darkness. We didn’t even discuss stopping to get food somewhere.

“Was OK,” Yasu said, in a tone that clearly meant he’d found it excruciating.

Waking up the next day, it was hard to get through two hours of work repainting playground equipment before finally getting to break for breakfast and fill the empty chasm that was my belly.

Did something change that day? I don’t think Yasu carried palpable anger toward me for taking advantage. What it revealed to me was the limits of our friendship. With our language and cultural differences, it was so easy for misunderstandings to arise, to injure sensibilities when no slight was intended. 

When I returned to the States at the end of the summer of ‘99, Yasu was the hardest goodbye. The way he’d looked at me, maybe he expected me to stay, that we’d be playing tennis and sharing meals for years. As if he were reproaching himself for believing that I wouldn’t abandon him.

Yet, the story of our friendship didn’t end there. Soon after I moved back in with my parents in Queens, his postcards and letters began arriving.  I’d hear his high-pitched voice when reading his scrawl and mangled syntax. Once, he’d sent me his shirt from the Tiberias Marathon: perhaps literally the shirt off his back. I shipped him a crate of tennis balls, racquet grips and some newer issues of National Geographic.

I even got to see him again, in 2004, when the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent sent me on assignment to Israel and I stayed in the country a few extra days. When we played, I couldn’t move as nimbly around a tennis court. I scrapped out a first set and totally ran out of gas in the second. We went out to eat at a new outdoor mall in Rosh Pinah. Sitting face to face for over an hour, neither of us knew what to say to the other. It was so much easier to communicate through postcards. My life had changed in five years but, from my vantage point, he seemed stuck in just about the same place.

The postcards slowed and around 2008, I lost track of him completely, not knowing if he was still on the kibbutz. By then, I’d even forgotten his last name, so occasional Google and Facebook searches became fruitless. On one hand, the friendship remained part of the concoction of memories and experiences that make me who I am. On the other, Yasu had fully receded into my past, a faint, occasional glimmer in a life currently dominated by parenthood and professional pursuits.

I’d been thinking about Kfar Hanassi even before Oct. 7, 2023. After that horror and the onset of a tragic war, the sights and smells of the place made increasingly frequent intrusions into my ruptured consciousness. Peace in that region, which then seemed possible, has now been swallowed by war, terrorism and reprisals. Kibbutz Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz and others, places so very similar in outlook and culture to Kfar Hanassi, each their own little universe, were turned into scenes of mass murder, rape and kidnapping. Kiryat Shmonah has been abandoned for more than year and the residents of Kfar Hanassi braced for a direct hit from a Hezbollah rocket or evacuation orders. My mind gets stuck on the hostages, the terrified, starving, sexually abused, living  in an underworld Hades or perhaps already departed, dying without rescue and salvation. And the brutal, tragic war and all the dead and mourning and hungry civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. As the novelist Joshua Cohen wrote in The New Yorker, I too strangely found myself intensely angered by “the reactions of those around me. My family who wanted to bomb the Palestinian Nazis into silly oblivion, and my friends who daily, hourly, sent me open letters to sign and petitions to circulate: ceasefire now, end military aid, stop Nazi Israel, and so on.” 

And I’ve been thinking about Yasu. Is there any chance he’s still in Israel? Is he happy? Is there any way I could tell him that our friendship mattered, that I’ll never forget knowing him? But how, I didn’t even remember his last name. I told myself that, today, everyone can be found within a few clicks. Had I really tried everything I could think of to find the man?

I knew of a private Kfar Hanassi Facebook group but had felt awkward requesting to join: I’d only been part of the place for one summer. One Monday morning I clicked on a virtual button requesting to join.  An hour later, I was accepted. I asked about Yasu’s whereabouts and well-being. Some replies trickled in and before noon, I got an email address, with a caveat that it may no longer be valid. I dashed something off to him, something that was quick and hopefully easy to read, but also contained the essence of what I would say to him. When I woke up the next morning, a response awaited me.

Dear Bryan

Thank you again for sent me Email and didn’t forget me. Of course I remember you. I left kibbutz on  July 2012.  I had been to live in Japan  from 2012 to July 2016 for take care for my parents . Then I met with Thai woman Now I have partner live together at Nan where north Thailand 700km from Bangkok , 40 km near border Laos. We met play a tennis at tennis courts in Bangkok. Her name is Moss  She have son, We have business sell a cosmetic and kids toys at rural village .

Tennis is expensive sport. we didn’t play a tennis long time. Wish to you and your family be happy and healthy. Take care for now Yasu

This email brought me momentary joy; he’s safe, he’s found a partner, he remembers me. It’s validating to know that, on some level, I mattered to him as well, that something about connection transcends time and place.  I’ve had a few other internet reunions like this and the momentum doesn’t seem to last. Yasu and I have exchanged a few emails since. In one, he wished me a happy Jewish New Year. I’ve tried to call him through What’s App and Line, not technology I normally use, and so far we haven’t connected. I sent a few questions for this essay, wanting to confirm a few facts and ask his thoughts on a few points. Those went unanswered.

I have found some contentment as well, married 17 years with daughters now 14 and 11. Ambition, I’m still ambivalent about it, partially convinced I had some grander destiny that I somehow missed. In many ways, I’ve prioritized parenthood over career and, some days, I’m at peace with that. Yet, on the other hand, what could be more ambitious than the idea of a kibbutz, a place where Jews work the land, eliminate status distinctions and one generation flows to the next. Or that of Zionism itself, which sought not only to change Jewish history but fundamentally redeem a broken world. Or the peace process, which sought to address injustices caused in part by ambition and turn hatred and killing into coexistence. I had limited but real exposure to the kind of ambition that seeks to change the world for the better. The Kibbutz residents lead full lives and are so much more than background actors in my own personal drama. Yes, I made the choice to spend my adult life away from the danger and killing and daily stress. But one can’t totally outrun heartbreak; it can find you across an ocean.

In the quarter century since 1999, I’ve told many people of how a Japanese chicken farmer took me in a chicken car to see Star Wars near the border with Lebanon. I play it for laughs, or perhaps to give the impression I led a colorful life before all the things I was expected to do: settle into a job, get married, raise children, move to a northeastern suburb, clear the fall leaves from my lawn.  

At 23, I asked big questions. At 48, I live my life as best I can mostly without answers. Yasu might say the same at 64. All I can think to say is: May the Force be with him. May it be with all of us. “The Force,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi, “surrounds us and binds us.” What else binds the universe together other than the force of the bonds we build.

__________

Bryan Schwartzman is an award-winning journalist whose fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His stories have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Judith Magazine, Books N’ Pieces and elsewhere. He hosts the podcast, Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Raised in New York City, he lives outside Philadelphia.