Henrietta Leah Amitai (née Dorfman), my great-grandmother who I and much of my family affectionately knew as Savta Ena, passed away in her sleep yesterday. She was 93. A life long-and-well lived, undoubtedly, but it’s still hard not to be sad.
Across my 20 years of life, I’ve cumulatively spent a year in Israel. It’s my mother’s country of birth and where her core family still resides, so often during the summer, my mother and I, and occasionally my father, pack our bags and visit our family there for a few weeks.
One of the staples of our trips to Israel was visiting Savta Ena in her Netanya home. Netanya is a coastal city in northern Israel home to many Jewish immigrants from the Anglosphere, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. Indeed, Ena lived in an apartment overlooking Netanya’s glorious beaches on the sapphire beauty of the Mediterranean. The view of the sea from her apartment was impeccable.
An adventure to Netanya would usually look something like this; in the morning, my grandmother would drive with my mother and I to the city of Netanya, dropping off my mother outside the same apartment building overlooking the sea so she could go and spend a few hours with one of her cousins. My grandmother would bring me along to her work for perhaps an hour or two, allowing me to explore the premises while she got done whatever she needed to get done. Afterwards, she’d drive me back to the apartment, where we would enter the building and ascend to the fifth floor via elevator.
I’ve never seen a room take the character of its inhabitant the way the front room of Savta Ena’s apartment did. The front room of Savta Ena’s apartment was full of paintings; her own paintings, including paintings of my deceased great-grandfather, of Jasper Park’s Rockies, and of the steps leading to the nearest beach to her apartment.. The nexus of the room was the television, backed up against the back wall of the room. To the right and in front of the TV were two loveseats, and to its left were two armchairs, one of which my grandmother would always sit in, leaving the loveseats for everyone else. My grandmother would stay to talk for a few minutes to Ena, with my grandmother talking in Hebrew and Ena responding in English and crooked Hebrew. A born-and-raised Edinburgher, her thickly-accented Scottish English was her first and main language, something which she and I had in common. Though she immigrated to Israel in the 50s, she maintained a strong connection to Scotland through her life. She was decidedly Scottish in self-identification, not British.
My grandmother would then leave, leaving Savta Ena and I to fill the time. Though all the adults in my Israeli family know enough English to be at least conversational, Ena’s English was, of course, the most natural. Talking to her, there was no fear of using any words alien to the Hebrew ear. Despite our massive age difference, our discussions were full of joy and laughter, always. Her sweetness permeated through every word, particularly her idiosyncratic terminology. As far as I can tell, it was Ena who popularized the word “adventure” within the Amitai lexicon, enough that just about every outing that she, my grandmother, and even myself undertook was an adventure. I can barely imagine her without a smile on her face.
Likewise, we watched lots of English-language television, particularly British news. Her channel of choice was Sky News, of which I was too young to know that at the time it was one realm within Rupert Murdoch’s reactionary media empire. Regardless of if it was owned by a right-wing ghoul or not, I have zero regrets about it. The time I got to spend with her was so much more important, so precious.
As I got older, cognizant of our shared mother tongue and my growing consciousness of the political world around me, she’d happily give me her copy of the Jerusalem Post – once she’d finished reading, of course. Though by no means a perfect paper (then again, no publication is perfect) it was invaluable in the elementary stage of my political education. Having an English-language resource that provided analysis of Israeli and of Middle Eastern politics more broadly straight from Jerusalem, rather than the tired perspective of bloated pundits from Washington, Los Angeles, or New York was critical.
Great-grandmothers, just like all grandmothers, enjoy fattening the family children. This universal pastime for reverend mothers everywhere did not skip the Netanya apartment. Savta Ena’s baking specialty was a chocolatey rougelach. Funnily enough, her recipe is an adaptation of my other great-grandmother, Savta Malka’s recipe (who thankfully is in good health and still with us). Years before I was born, Ena traded her bourekas recipe for Malka’s rougelach. Both since have perfected their recipes and made them their speciality dish in a delicious display of inter-Jewish cultural diffusion – Ena was from a bone fide, Yiddish-speaking Scottish-Lithuanian Ashekenazim background, whereas Malka’s Sepheradim family hailed from the Turco-Greco-Bulgarian melting pots of Ottoman Adrianople and Saloniki.
But in humble recognition of Israel’s scorching sun, far-off from the dewy highlands of Scotland, Savta Ena had an arsenal of popsicles she unleashed when I and other (great) grandchildren visited. My personal favourite was a popsicle flavoured with artificial lemon, coloured into a bright neon yellow. To reduce the mess, she’d always peel down the plastic wrapping into a skirt around the base of the “ice lolly.” No matter what, the popsicle would always end in a sticky, fructose-y end. That popsicle truly was the taste of Netanya.
We would also regularly eat at the café in front of the apartment building. To get there, we’d always go out the back of the apartment building, which Savta Ena playfully termed her “shortcut.” The café’s patrons were demographically similar to Ena; geriatric and largely English-speaking. As such, she had made many friends there, though she privately expressed contempt for at least a couple of them. The café served coffees and waters, but also fit-for-lunch bagels and salads and also a decadent chocolate cake that young me could hardly get enough of. King of all Netanya eateries we frequented was the Pundach HaYom, with its delicious chicken shashlik and unique Frankenstein’s monster amalgamation of purple soda named “sponga.” Unfortunately, just like so many restaurants everywhere, the Pundach was a casualty of the pandemic.
Food and British programming were not the only highlights of those adventures to Netanya, of course. There were morning adventures to the Netanya beach and there were afternoon adventures to Netanya malls. Oftentimes, my mother and I stayed overnight in Savta Ena’s apartment. Those sleepovers were adventures in themselves and therefore exciting.
In retrospect, 2016 was a turning point. Days before flying to Greece with much of my Israeli family, Ena had a series of strokes. None of them bad enough to be truly debilitating, but enough to permanently wreck her health. She started going dement immediately afterwards, and the person she once was was twisted. It’s very easy to say that what made Savta Ena the person she was disappeared, but I don’t think that’s true. The person she was before was still there underneath, appearing in glimpses of kindness, but contorted. There were surprising bursts of anger that were completely uncharacteristic of her. Her physical health declined as well. First went her walking, and soon she needed in-home care by a nurse. The last time I was in Israel, in 2019, during a large family dinner hosted by my grandparents, Ena fell asleep multiple times at the table. It was very upsetting and sobering to see just how much her health had declined. The last photo I saw of her before her passing, I was shocked at just how gaunt she was. Yet she still had a big smile on her face. All of the pictures I have of her on my phone are of her smiling.
There’s no beating around the bush; we live in difficult, turbulent times. The global recession of 2008, the destructive civil wars brought about by Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya, and the Houthis in Yemen, refugee and migrant crises, the electoral rise of right-wing populists across the West, the pandemic, the rise in costs of living and housing, the war against Ukraine, the crisis in American democracy, and more all contribute to a feeling of hopelessness. I do not believe in false optimism, but Savta Ena’s perennial joyfulness taught my family that despite it all, when we have each other, there’s something to be happy about.