UNI—TED STATES“I’m seventy years old. I won’t be here forever,” Sam said with a wry smile. Maybe he would be here forever, it felt like it at times. Especially when he had a dream about Sam Jr. In the dreams his dead son was getting older, and sometimes he’d say, “I’ll meet you soon dad.” And in one dream he could see his son, Sam Jr., had incipient circles under his eyes.
“You’re working too hard, son,” said Sam in the dream.
“What else is there?” replied Sam Jr.
There seemed to be a whole parallel world in these dreams, like it was the most logical thing in the world that he should be rejoined with Sam Jr. and that his death in the war, and their separation, was an anomaly. They would eventually be reunited, and Becky would be there too. The family reunited.
“I’ve always wondered about something,” Becky would say, “Sam, why did you scrimp on household expenses about every third month?”
And Sam would reply.
“I did it partly for the Jewish cause in Palestine. Taking barren lands and making them productive, giving the harassed wandering tribe of Israel a home at last.”
Unfortunately, over the hot coals of Palestinian opposition. Oy vey—what could you do! One thing and another. I am also tired, Sam confessed to himself, I once lusted to buy land in Honduras to grow my own bananas, now I just want to take a nap. I want to turn on the radio and have a nice long siesta as the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico caress my daybed upstairs.
The Times Picayune told him that tomorrow the fate of Israel would be turned over to the United Nations as the British Occupation relinquished control and turned the fate of the state of Israel over to the United Nations.
“Ee hhaaaaa!” Sam Delaney took off his Homburg hat and tossed it in the air in sweet anticipation of the General Assembly vote.
Look, it didn’t have to be that way. In 1820 Mordecai Manuel Noah tried to found a Jewish state (City of Refuge) in Grand Island in the Niagara River. This harbinger of Israel was to be called Ararat City after the biblical resting place of Noah’s Ark. M.M. Noah built a monument much like a developer putting up flags for his dreamed of, unbuilt suburb, the sign went up on the island and said, “Ararat, a City of Refuge for the Jews, founded by Mordecai M. Noah in the Month of Tishri 5586 (September 1825) and in the Fiftieth Year of American Independence.” In his writings on the restoration of the Jews, Noah proclaimed that Jews would rebuild their ancient homeland and America would play a vital role. He called on America to lead in this endeavor. Noah’s visions influenced Joseph Smith, who founded the Latter-Day Saint movement in Upstate New York several years later. Furthermore, there was the Uganda Scheme. The plan was to give a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland. The offer of 5000 square miles in what would be Kenya in 1903. The offer was made in response to Russian pogroms, and it was hoped that the area would be a refuge against persecution for the Jewish people. The idea was brought to the World Jewish Organization at their meeting in Basel in 1903. A fierce debate ensued. The African land was dismissed as a “Waiting room to the Holy Land” but other groups thought that making a state on Africa would make it difficult to the founding of a Jewish State in Palestine. In the 1920s, the new Soviet government once turned its eyes to the Crimean Peninsula. Concerned that the Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Germans who mostly populated the region were anti-Communist, officials in Moscow were eager to buy the loyalty of new recruits with land grants and promises of autonomy in the fertile peninsula. When the American agronomist and communal activist Joseph A. Rosen suggested providing financial support through the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle Jewish victims of the pogroms in the region, the Kremlin jumped at the opportunity. In 1923, the Politburo accepted a proposal for establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea. The Soviets being the Soviets reversed themselves a couple months later.
It surely would have infringed on no other territories, and they were Russians and Jews—chiefly Europeans—and would not have been the invasive species that they connoted in the Holy Land. Finally, and perhaps most daringly Mr. Melvin Brooks, well-known intellectual and prophet, proffered the notion of Jews in Space, in his groundbreaking, “History of the World, Part 1,” and various deconstructionist scholars, including Pio Tapia, have seized on the notion that Brooks advocated colonization.
To be continued…
Graydon is the Wizard of Fiction
