Rerun, 2019: The story of a Palestinian and a Jew in Chicago--at a time when only loyalty to each other counted....
I wrote this four years ago and posted it on my old blog. Since then, a wonderful friendship developed between me and Ty Cahas' granddaughter, Alicia Howington Ziegler. So glad she tracked me down.
Taufic Yusef “Ty” Cahas, a Palestinian, and my dad, Lew Taman, a Jew, were very good friends. They met at a brokerage house my dad did business with decades ago. Ty worked there and they did a lot of business together. Until Ty died in 1984, they were on the phone many times a day, like two teenaged girls. The best of friends.
My dad really loved Ty; and Ty really loved my dad. They kidded each other and they laughed a lot. They were pleased when buys and sells turned out the way they wanted them to. And they commiserated and moved on to the next ones when they didn’t. They shared a lot of information every day, because back then, there weren’t tweets and texts and YouTube videos, and you depended on friends to keep you in the loop.
There was a big age difference between them–but because my grandfather died when my dad was in the Battle of the Bulge in World War 2, it’s possible that Ty was like the father figure my dad missed.
They respected each other and I don’t think they ever thought about who they were in relation to the other, ethnically and internationally speaking.
In 1977, I went to Israel for several weeks with my first husband to visit one of my cousins–who was experiencing life on a kibbutz. Ty asked my dad to ask me to do him a favor. He wanted me to go to the house he grew up in, in Bethlehem, in the area occupied by Israel for the previous 10 years. And snap a picture.
When we got there, we rented a car and drove everywhere. From the northern part of the country where my cousin was–where the sound of bombs exploding at night never stopped–to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And Gaza, Sharm el Sheikh and the Sinai Peninsula, areas that Israel has since given up.
We spent a lot of time in the area still occupied by Israel today, on the West Bank, looking for Ty’s house. We drove round and round and round, in and around Bethlehem, anxiously looking to snap a picture of it and give it to him when we got home.
We had no luck.
When I found Ty’s draft card online accidentally a few days ago, in preparation for doing this post, I thought maybe we misunderstood him back then because it looks like he was born in “Birken,” which is probably the town of Burqin (also on the West Bank) misspelled. But he never said he wanted us to visit the house he was born in, but rather the house he grew up in.
As our trip came to a close and we hadn’t yet found the house, every time I spotted a postcard from Bethlehem and other towns around it, I bought it for him. By the time we got home, I had a pretty nice stack of postcards for him. I thought he’d enjoy looking at the sights, especially the aerial shots, in the areas around Bethlehem and beyond, even though we never found the house.
But there was a consolation.
My dad gave the cards to Ty at the end of the summer of 1977 when we got back. And Ty looked through them. My dad was with him when he did. Suddenly he found one that freaked him out (and us, too–when we found out about it). Ty began crying profusely, because right there on one of the postcards was his house!
We had brought him a picture of his house without realizing it. And professionally photographed, too!
My dad told that story for the rest of Ty’s life–and the rest of his own life, too. A story that emanated out of God’s country, from the actual town that Jesus was born in. The Jewish daughter of the Jewish friend of the Palestinian in the land of milk and honey (and Jesus, Mary, Joseph and three Wise Men) had inadvertently performed a mitzvah. A miracle.
Which brings me, of course, to–where else?–today’s politics. Especially the politics of a freshman representative in the House from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, the oldest of 14, whose parents are Palestinian immigrants, just like Ty was.
But she’s not sweet as pie like Ty. She seems to be really mad at Jews. She accuses them (even when they aren’t really Jewish, but just supportive of our ally Israel) of having dual loyalty. She says it calms her to think of the Holocaust. Of all things. Because the Jews sought refuge after the war from her ancestors. Even though she’s angry that her ancestors lost their land and their dignity because of it. (Dual loyalty on her part?)
I feel sorry that she never knew Ty and Lew, two friends in Chicago, a Bohemian/Polish Jew born here and a Palestinian born there who talked every day about everything and laughed about a lot of things and who loved each other dearly.
Lew and Ty knew how to get along with each other in the United States of America. And there’s no reason she can’t learn that, too.