A Stranger No Longer

I eagerly boarded an El Al flight for my first international trip, which would take me to Israel and Greece for several weeks. After a 10-hour direct flight, I was to be met in Israel by a cousin who had twice visited our family in Connecticut. Due to a variety of complications, the trip took over 24 hours before arriving in Tel Aviv. As a result, I had no way of knowing if my cousin would be waiting for me (as this was long before cell phones and the internet).

For security reasons, the public was not allowed into the terminal. So, as I departed the building, exhausted and with luggage in tow, I was met by a massive sea of strangers’ faces. The crowd stood six-rows deep behind barricades that stretched as far as I could see. The roar of hundreds of voices calling out to arriving passengers in a foreign language added to my confusion. As if by conveyor belt, I was moved – shoulder to shoulder – along the passageway by the throng of my fellow travelers.

My eyes anxiously scanned faces in the crowd, hoping for some recognition. I tried in vain to slow the blur of faces; many looked slightly familiar, but none acknowledged my gaze. Finally, at the end of the barricade someone waved excitedly in my direction and called my name. Relieved, I recognized my cousin but did not know the short, round-faced gentleman who stood next to him beaming as if I were his long-lost child. And in his mind, I might as well have been.

As our eyes met, the cacophony around me seemed to fade. My maternal grandmother’s brother, whom I’d never met, was the first to embrace me with a warm, tight hug that signaled his sheer joy at my arrival. While he spoke no English, the emotion on his face and the tears in his eyes said all that was needed. To me, it said, “Welcome home.” You see, I was the human link to the sister he had not seen since she left Poland for America (and he for Israel) over five decades earlier.