Dana El-Kurd

Here she was.

The article states that she immigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s at the encouragement of her, quote, Zionist mother.

But what had led her between 1933 and 1948 to marry and then leave a Palestinian?

And then why was she visiting her grandchildren and apparently me in the 1990s?

So apparently after her civil ceremony with my great grandfather in 1935, they had traveled across Europe for a whole year, even meeting the extended family in Poland, where Rachel's family was originally from.

Her new husband was honored by her uncle, who was an important rabbi.

Now, for reasons she does not outline, Rachel discusses leaving her husband, maybe assuming the separation would be temporary in 1948.

But unlike the story that my father had heard and I had been told, she had not left her children.

And in fact, there had been four of them.

She left two of them with their father and took the eldest and the baby that she was pregnant with to West Jerusalem.

She kept her married name and she never officially divorced.

I can only assume that she didn't guess the city would be divided or maybe didn't understand for how long.

Now, when Israel took the rest of the city in 1967, she not only reconnected with her, I guess, Palestinian children, but it seems from this article had warm relationships with them until the end.

The children who had been raised Israeli had reconnected with their family to varying degrees.

Some of the Palestinian children visited the Israeli children in Tel Aviv, according to this interview.

In this article, I recognize the descriptions of my mother and my aunts.

Rachel had kept visiting them until she died in the mid-1990s.

So that explains the visit that my father had witnessed.

It's also not lost on me that much of this obfuscation relies on the common misogynistic trope of the negligent mother, which was apparently easy for everyone to believe.

Now, I won't say that Israeli-Palestinian marriages are common or that intimate relationships between the two groups are easy to find.