America’s Love Letter from an Immigrant’s Son

My father came here from Israel in 1972, to go to college — the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences, to be exact (it isn’t there anymore — well, it is, but it’s now owned by Jefferson University). A lot of things “aren’t there anymore” from my father’s early days in this country. The apartment building in the Germantown section of Philly isn’t there anymore, we discovered on a recent road-trip through his past a week ago. The factory he used to own, from 1985–2003, in a Bucks County suburb is still technically “there”, but it’s now an antique furniture warehouse.

“You see this repair in the walkway?” he said, pointing to some pavers, “I fixed that.”

When he arrived here he was 24, but he was already a war veteran, of the Six Day War. Soon after arriving, he would meet my mother at a party, and they would start dating and fall in love. The following year, the Israeli Army ordered my father back to fight in the Yom Kippur War.

“I really didn’t think I was going to come back,” he told me yesterday in our living room, “where they sent me… God. It was really bad.”

But he did come back, and he married my mother, created a family, created a business. Repaired some broken sidewalk pavers. Made sales and plans and friends and enemies.