Just Call Me Miri

By Mandi Eizenbaum

Miriam Engel is a forty-something-year-old single woman who has been desperately searching for love and purpose her whole life. Her story begins some thirty years prior on a high school study-abroad program in Israel. Miri experiences a series of ambitious exploits, a tumultuous journey that is upended time and time again by her impulsive decisions. Miri had always been popular, smart, confident, and passionate. However, Miri’s most endearing quality, her light-hearted whimsy, turns out

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640964679

Book preview

Part I

Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

—Ibn Battuta

Chapter

1

Miri

July 1982

Jerusalem, Israel

The boom sounded loud and wild, but nothing out of the ordinary was evident. I instinctively looked up into the heavens, where a blurred streak of smoke in the otherwise brilliant blue sky had drawn my attention only seconds before. There was no respite from the incredible heat that day. The sun glared white from the clear blue pallet above, the skies only lightly dotted with a few scattered puffs of white cotton billows. Waves of heat rippled in the still air and warped the mountains that edged the distant horizon. My sneakered feet throbbed. I could feel them swelling from the heat and straining against my laces. Mucus dribbled from my nose from the dust and balminess that was inevitably causing my allergies to flare. In the discomfort of standing there in the midday heat, listening to the impassioned speech of our teacher Fred, I began shuffling from one foot to the other under the weight of my dust-streaked backpack, my concentration disappointedly broken.

An eerie silence suddenly descended on our small group that stood on the sandy hill looking down at Jerusalem. Four military fighter jets (was it a practice run or an actual combat mission?) had passed overhead in a perfect diamond formation and had swept through the open skies, visibly leaving behind only four thin columns of white smoke and the lingering drone of the planes’ engines in the far distance. That’s when we heard the boom. The ground shook, and we all took a collective gulp of thick, dry air. Sweat dribbled around my neck and down the small of my back, tickling my nerves and my focus. I couldn’t breathe. The rumble of the ensuing boom shook my very insides. I would never get used to this.

"Miriam, Mi-ri-am!" I heard my roommate and closest friend whine. Judy’s jaw was clenched with panic, and her eyes were bulging with terror. She dug her fingernails into my forearm. I squeezed my own dry eyes shut as tight as I could. I didn’t know what disturbed me more in that moment: the roar of the jets that sent shudders through my chest, Judy’s nails digging into my skin, or the sound of my ugly old name ringing out from Judy’s lips.

I had decided before Judy and I came to Israel to attend the Heritage High School Study Abroad Program that I would change my name ever so slightly as to not insult my old-fashioned, proud, and loving parents, and I would surely embody a more modern and sophisticated version of myself. It was a teenage phase I was going through, juvenile and selfish, but I just couldn’t stand my name, archaic and biblical as it was. Judy had actually been the one to suggest using this trip, traveling and living with others who had never met us before, as a convenient point in which I could reinvent myself to everyone as Miri. Both Judy and I had agreed that Miri had a cuter, more eccentric ring to it than boring, old-fashioned Miriam. That was a name that my parents had chosen from ancient scripture and their third-world archaic mother country. Some traditions die hard, but I was determined, at the young age of sixteen, to bury the antiquated Miriam among the sandy, sacred footsteps of our ancestors and give birth to Miri, a refined and more stylish version of myself in a more hip and trendy world. After all, I had just completed my junior year in high school with honors, I had gotten my driver’s license on my first attempt, and I was now free as a bird traveling around the world. Life couldn’t be more wonderful and carefree, a great time for new beginnings, I thought. So why does Judy still insist on calling me Miriam?

My parents had both emigrated from Estonia, in northeastern Europe. My mom, Kayla Dernbaum, was still a toddler when she, her infant brother, Levy, and my grandparents—Baba and Zeide—came to America in 1948. Mom’s family was lucky enough to be sponsored by some distant relative who settled in New York before the war. Most of Mom’s family had stayed behind in Estonia to endure the ravages of the world war, getting caught between the governing Soviet Union and the occupying Nazis. But Mom really didn’t remember much of the old world she left behind at such a young age, and she rarely brought up any of her family’s tender past.

My dad, on the other hand, had immigrated to America as a teenager. He had been living with his ultra-religious grandparents in a small village in southern Estonia throughout the war since the untimely death of his young father from lung cancer and his mother’s second marriage to an often violent and bitter older man. In the turmoil of the 1950s in Eastern Europe, amidst the remains of the still-fresh wounds from the Nazis and the more immediate threats of the Soviet communist regime in his homeland, Dad’s grandparents grew impatient and troubled by Dad’s wild and hooligan-like lifestyle. Dad didn’t like school and had gotten deeply involved with a Jewish youth gang that formed years earlier during the war in the forests of Eastern Europe. The group had been made up in large part by ruffians and transient youth who found their own ways to take part in the war effort, even managing to smuggle guns and ammunition to the Allies. Dad’s grandparents were left with no other option than to painstakingly send him off to America to join an uncle who had already immigrated to New York. His involvement with this Jewish resistance group in Europe during and after the war remains part of Dad’s guarded memory.

As much as I have tried to ply him for more of the sordid details, Dad would never budge. He remained sealed and burdened with his memories, but proud of his present and bound to his future. Dad seemed to believe that if he did not acknowledge the past, those memories would cease to exist. So while I (and our whole family) am still left to only speculate about his past, I respect Dad’s space. I am left with the struggle to understand a lot of things, but his silence wins out, and we never speak of his dark history. Dad would cut any mentions about his past with an evasive and incensed, We cannot make ourselves be victims. We must move on.

My father, Abram Engelhoff (his name had been shortened to Engel by the immigration officer at Ellis Island in 1952), had struggled at first to accept his new life in the United States, and he took his sweet time trying to fit in. With his narrow and incomplete education, Dad slowly began to absorb everything about his newly adopted country. Dad learned English pretty quickly; he read every newspaper he could get his hands on and slowly managed to acquire the ways of his newly adoptive home. He found two jobs that he could handle with his limited English language and lack of professional skills: in the evening, he would sort mail in the silent, empty mail room of an old monastery; and during the day, he would pump gas at a local gas station. My father soon realized that he would never again live anywhere else in the world but in America. He discovered new traditions and behaviors in his adoptive country, eventually succeeded economically, and reared a beautiful family that would honor his Jewish ancestors from a safe distance.

Shortly after my father had earned his US citizenship, he was drafted in the US Army. His service did not last long because the government discovered that he, like his own father, had suffered from an acute respiratory condition. Luckily, this saved Dad from ever seeing true battle; but despite this setback for him, I am certain that one of his proudest endeavors had been his short service in the US Army. Soon after his honorable discharge from the American military, Dad met Mom, who had been training in New York City as an assistant librarian at the time, fell in love, and together they moved to Brooklyn to begin their own fresh and peaceful history. Dad’s youthful energies decidedly turned to building his own strong family in America. He was brave and remained quietly devoted to his Jewish heritage that ran deep in his veins. So as hard as it might have been for him to send me off to the volatile political situation in Israel to study, I knew he would ultimately be proud of me, his legacy.

I had always loved to reminisce with my father about the stories of his youth. Abe Engel had been a confused young teenager. Even if he would never admit it, my father’s senses always blurred with jumbled sentimentality and reserved thoughts when recalling stories of his younger years. I remember my father saying more than once that he didn’t even want to come to America, and at first had resented his grandparents for separating him from his beloved country and family. He had spent many years in anguish over this, questioning everything from his family’s love, to God’s apparent lack of concern for the plight of the Jews. It had been a very long and painful process for Dad to come to terms with the brutality and evil that his family and people had to endure over and over again.

But Dad eventually found strength to move on, giving in on his deep-seated dream of returning to his homeland and to reconcile his faith and love for God and the world. He had certainly turned his life around when he achieved the American dream. He was a business proprietor—Dad eventually owned a chain of small supermarkets—a family man, and a landowner. Dad successfully established a meaningful and robust life full of love and pleasure. Abe Engel, my awesome father, would continue to yearn for a homeland in Israel for his people and defend his deep-seated roots, but he would honor and love his new country and the glorious life he had been given until the day he died.

Feeling Judy’s elbow stabbing me in my rib jolted me out of my nostalgia and back to that mountaintop in Jerusalem, where my irritation and discomfort resurfaced again. It’s Miri, I reminded Judy, grinding my teeth. Get your nails out of my arm, your elbow out of my side, and for the last time—please stop calling me Miriam!

I didn’t notice my voice rising with annoyance as Fred continued with his lecture. I could feel the flush in my cheeks deepen as I shrugged away from Judy’s grasp. Sweat and grime dripped in the crooks of my elbows as we stood staring down at Mount Scopus. I sneezed four times in a row without a single tissue at hand, and my favorite T-shirt (the image of Snoopy and a yellow Woodstock, with gold rhinestones studding the bird’s feathers) stuck to my belly. I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to die right there.

Okay, Miri, don’t have a cow! Judy responded under her breath. I’m just so jittery with all these explosions and guns and things. She pulled a packet of Kleenex from her pocket and handed me a clean tissue.

Now who’s being theatrical, Judy? Let go of my arm, I insisted again, grabbing the tissue from her.

A girl from Detroit in our group turned to look at us and shushed us, annoyed, putting her pudgy finger to her lip and rolling her eyes toward our teacher. You’re lucky I love you so much, Judy, I added. As familiar as we were with each other, I knew how sensitive Judy could be to my biting sarcasm. She shot me a quirky grin and stepped away. I gave her a wink and blew my nose without much more thought.

Noticing the general skittishness of our young, innocent group, our impassioned teacher looked up at the sky and interrupted his own serious lecture. Fred, an immigrant who had made Aliyah to Israel four years earlier with his wife and two young children from Nashville, explained in his rolling Southern drawl, "Yes, students. As you know, light travels way faster than sound, and that boom we just heard and felt was what we call a sonic boom—the recoil of the military jets that flew by just moments earlier. We can always see them before we hear them," he informed our group. Science was never my strongest subject in school, but I had always been intrigued by the phenomena of nature. I hemmed and hawed in awe as we all continued to shuffle about. Why do we always get the warning after the fact? I wondered.

Fred was stomping his sandaled foot into the red clay in the very spot where he was trying to wrap up his lesson about the onset of Israel’s Six-Day War (ironically, occurring just fifteen years earlier, almost to the date, right in that very spot). The two Israeli high school students who were accompanying our group as security guards, both carrying loaded rifles over their shoulders, let out an overture of simultaneous, conspicuous yawns. They stared condescendingly at my classmates and nonchalantly shifted the weight of their rifles. These two young soldiers in training—Asher was a sabra born in Israel, and Shimi was an American whose family emigrated from Michigan—seemed completely unfazed by the constant military interruptions, and their composed demeanor both amazed and calmed me at the same time. Their relaxed acceptance of the constant threat of attack was admirable, even though I didn’t think I could ever be able to live with an armed presence around me all the time. I had the opportunity to get more acquainted with the two guards, Shimi and Asher, as they traveled with our group on all of our tiyulim, fieldtrips, around the country. I asked them later that day in Jerusalem how they handled all the hostility and threats in Israel. The answer came simply and obviously.

"Ze ma yesh!" This is what is, and there is nothing they could do about it.

Looking out over Mount Scopus at the streets lined with the rusted military vehicles strewn on the sides of the road as memorial to the country’s struggles for existence, Asher and Shimi shrugged their shoulders and hugged their rifles close to their wimpish chests. The two soon-to-be young army recruits quickly ended our conversation with, We will always defend Israel, no matter what. Blue and white forever!

Since our arrival in Israel almost two months earlier, I continued to be rattled by the uniformed armed soldiers in the streets and fighter jets flying right above us on a daily basis. But I kept these feelings to myself. Unfortunately, I quickly had to accept that instability and fear were a cruel reality in this region of the world. The unnerving situation had become commonplace for the inhabitants of this blessed land. I desperately tried to get used to it, to understand it. I reasoned that, surely, the country had reason to defend itself. Israel had just entered an all-out war with Lebanon the month before our summer study abroad, and I tried to make sense of the constant dangers. Peace might have to come at a heavy price, but the Israelis seemed to take it all in stride. I wondered if all the tourists and spiritual soul seekers who flocked here to the hills and deserts of the Holy Land were really able to find themselves among the chaos and insecurity of the country.

What did I know? My world was calm and peaceful—a piece of cake, actually—compared to this terrifying lifestyle in Israel. Teenagers in this country, some even younger than me, had to prepare themselves for an inevitable two- or three-year mandatory military service. They had no time to contemplate the idea of starting college, getting a driver’s license, dating, or any other typical teenage concern until their service to their country was completed. In America, we learn early that, with our freedoms and liberties, we also have a right to move around as we please. If we don’t like our situation, our environment, our life, we could just pick up and leave it. After all, my parents had moved their whole family from New York to Florida simply because they didn’t like the cold climate. The only issues I had to deal with at the time were what to do with my unruly, frizzy curly hair and what to wear when I went out to the discos.

Truthfully, I had everything. A beautiful home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in South Florida, two loving and committed parents who worked hard and were role models of decency and strength for me and my younger sister, and a fairly robust social calendar in and out of school. I was told by everyone who knew me that I had the charm and wit of a true leader, and I was tagged at an early age as a sure contender for law school. I was always academically on top of my class, and I could convince a pauper to invest his last penny in a risky stock. Always the center of attention, people would indulge me for the great theatrics that I could always provide in any given situation. I was serious and compulsive about my commitments and goals, yet altogether and dubiously too flighty to make any ideas really stick. I had a plan for the future, but it was an abstract and generic future that led to nowhere in particular. One day I was here, and the next I would be there. Wherever. I only knew that I wanted to fall in love and, in my juvenile romantic mind, figure out who I truly was and why I was here on this earth.

My younger sister, Sarah, is my complete opposite. I adore her; I worship and elevate her to the heartfelt point of sainthood. But there was a sobering sibling rivalry that naturally hedged our otherwise mismatched relationship. Where I tend to be more emotional and dramatic about life, Sarah is naturally more rational and grounded in reality. Her typical sober, cautious, and reserved attitude toward things always fascinated me. Nothing ruffles Sarah’s feathers—not good news nor bad news. How did she do it? How does she always manage to stay so calm, cool, collected? There are no hugs or warmth from Sarah, but I learned to appreciate and respect her temperaments and her space. Ignoring the fact that she is two years my junior, I relied on Sarah for sound, stable advice and controlled emotions. I love Sarah with all my heart. Sarah never gets flustered or upset by anything, and that is a good thing, I think. I could never be like that. Truthfully, I often wonder how the two of us came from the same parents, but I need her just the way she is.

Actually, sometimes I wish I could be more like her and less like me. I tend to be overly reactionary, wild, and emotional. My parents often point out the differences between me and Sarah, and they tease incessantly about my obsessive-compulsive, immature behavior in comparison to Sarah’s calmer and cooler demeanor. They often claim (in their heavily accented Yiddish banter) that I have shpilkes en tokhes—pins in my rear end.

After our day’s lesson in Jerusalem, I grappled again with the reality of the small young state of Israel. We had to begin reading James Michener’s celebrated novel The Source—over one thousand pages of pure text and history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from the beginning of time to the birth of the modern State of Israel. The book offered the perfect combination of faith and fact, the basis to argue for Israel’s right to exist in peace. In one concise text, I found all the information I needed to support the unstable little country that was slowly working its way under my skin. Sitting at my desk, clear visions flashed fervently in my head of the timeworn scattered army vehicles that permanently line the road into Jerusalem. The vehicles remained there like ghosts along that road, the same road where my forefathers all lived and loved and died. Goose bumps covered my arms and thighs as I hungrily perused the pages of Michener’s novel, and then I felt again the rip of the soaring fighter jets that trembled through my chest and pierced the clear skies right into my heart.

I started pacing back and forth between our bunks in our dorm room with nervous energy, those proverbial shpilkes en tokhes poking at my concentration, my mind returning to the tenacity, inspiration, and courage I saw in our Israeli security guards that day. Shimi and Asher were so young and full of life and spirit and purpose. They had a cause, a fight, a homeland to defend and secure. Suddenly, it all became very clear to me. The decision was obvious. Although I didn’t have much of a history at age sixteen, it was only time that separated me from my people and my identity. I was dangling by an invisible thread that kept me woven to my past. I hugged my stuffed Sneezy dwarf (a gift that my dad had mockingly but oh-so-lovingly given me before leaving home), and I decided that I too would be a part of the success and endurance of the State of Israel and its people. Dad would be proud of me for this epiphany. I, Miri Engle, want to be a defender of the State of Israel, a real Zionist hero of our time. A pioneer. A fighter. A survivor. Just like Dad.

Chapter

2

Miri

May 1986

Tel Aviv, Israel

I really had a hard time motivating myself beyond all the chaos. It was Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, and it is traditionally celebrated with raucous celebrations, concerts, and outdoor parties in the streets all over the country. But the world was suffering from catastrophes, and I was feeling a bit guilty about wanting to go out and celebrate Israel’s thirty-eighth birthday when terrible events around the world were unfolding and Ivan’s family was still grieving the senseless demise of their nineteen-year-old son. Judy was a total basket case over the news of our friend, and she wasn’t helping the dreadful mood that had settled over us. It was Daphna who finally convinced me to go out with a group of friends on campus and celebrate the young country’s birthday. My favorite Israeli singer, Shalom Chanoch, was performing at a park in Tel Aviv, and I looked forward to seeing his show. Mashiach Lo Ba was one of my favorite Israeli pop songs, and it echoed in my head as I dubiously got ready for the evening festivities.

Judy watched me from her bed (she stubbornly refused to join us that night) as I threw my Popeye T-shirt over my head and pulled it down over my black leggings. I really wanted to wear the bedazzled Betty Boop T-shirt that Judy was currently wearing, but I didn’t have the heart to ask her to take it off and give it to me. I clipped my long wild curls up away from my face with my favorite banana-clip and hastily applied some eyeliner, blush, and mascara.

Keep the clip in your hair like that, Judy commented through a long drawn-out yawn. Your hair looks good off your face, and it will probably be humid out there tonight. She reminded me of my grandmother, who was always pushing my hair away from my small face. Baba would constantly remark, "What a sheine punim you have, and you always want to hide that gorgeous face with all that hair." Even in Judy’s grief, I could rely on her familiarity and friendship.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I asked Judy one more time, Are you sure I can’t convince you to come out with us tonight? Israel will only be thirty-eight years young once. My hair actually did look better clipped up.

Judy wasn’t listening to me. Why do these things keep happening? Judy pleaded, as if I had the answers to all our problems. I just don’t understand it, she whined over and over.

I knew exactly what things Judy was referring to. We seemed to be moving from one disaster to the next. Our junior year abroad from the University of Miami began in Israel four months ago, just as an extreme right-wing political party led a three-week-long protest at the entrance of the university, causing a long, drawn-out student strike and a delay for the start of our semester. By the time our college overseas semester began, nobody was even sure what the strike was about or what results were gained by all the fuss. Then we were all shaken with the Challenger space shuttle tragedy. Later in the semester, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in the Soviet Union, just as we were preparing to travel and visit Turkey for the Passover-week vacation. At the time, it seemed safer to just stay put in Tel Aviv than to venture out on international travels. We had envisioned this to be the best year of our lives, but shattering events seemed to cloud the past and continue to devastate the future.

Sarah’s most recent phone call about Ivan’s passing was the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and I just wanted to forget all about it and move on. Hopefully, the celebrations and parties for Yom Ha’Atzmaut would do me some good. I just wished Judy would come out with us. The news about Ivan came to us three weeks earlier, almost to the day Judy and I had just finished our last class for the day and decided that we really needed to make a trip to the SuperSol market.

Benjamin came pounding on the door of our dorm suite. Phone call for you, Miri, he trumpeted. Benjamin was an Ethiopian student at Tel Aviv University who worked with the administrative secretary, Malka, in the offices located in building A of the dorm quad. In order to work off some of his student debt, Benjamin ran errands, made coffee, and delivered messages for Malka, who headed the housing department for all the international students. Since Judy and I were staying in building G at the far end of the quad, it was easy to see why Benjamin arrived at our door with flushed dark cheeks and panting wildly for breath. There seemed to be an added sense of urgency all over his face, so I hastily jumped from my bed and shuffled into my dirt-stained sneakers. I’ll go, Judy. Wait here for me, and then we’ll go do some shopping.

Arriving at the dorm office, Malka let me know that my sister had called and had left a message for me to call her back. This was not like Sarah. My sister didn’t just call out of the blue. Something was wrong, and I began to tremble with anticipation.

As it turns out, our dear friend back at the University of Miami, Ivan, had died. Our beloved wild, eccentric, and outlandish companion had gone back to visit his family in Puerto Rico over the recent spring break and had not returned to the university. I had one literature course with him, but it was Judy, studying with him in the Department of Art, who had more classes and a closer relationship with Ivan. They were both studying graphic design. Ivan was always the center of attention, flamboyantly and openly gay, energetic, and the life of a party. He lived each day like it was his last, with a zest for living and a natural excitement for beauty. Maybe he knew something all along that none of us were aware of.

What the hell …, I stammered into the phone once I had been connected with Sarah back in Miami. What is AIDS? I heard myself asking. I felt like I was drowning. Sarah’s words garbled in my ears, and I suddenly felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into murky water. Malka and Benjamin, who were both pretending to make themselves busy in the office, were listening to the one-sided conversation and flinched when they heard my questions. They shifted over to the far end of the office. Their reaction made me believe that they knew exactly what AIDS was. The world at that time was talking of the strange and deadly disease, but everyone was under the medical impression that it only affected people in Africa. The only words that came to me then were those from the Jewish mourners’ prayer that I had memorized from synagogue, "Oseh shalom bimromav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael. V’imru, amen."

In a cloud of confusion, I hung up the phone receiver. I stood there in the office, not knowing what to say or do next. Okay, let’s go to the supermarket, I said to no one in particular, but as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe how insensitive and cold they sounded. I saw Malka and Benjamin still staring in my direction, and I covered up for my awkwardness by adding, It’ll take my mind off all this for a while. My head pounded as if bird wings were fluttering and bouncing against my skull.

When I returned to my dorm room where Judy was dutifully waiting for me, I tried to explain what my sister had just told me over the phone. My words poured passed my lips in a jumbled mess, but Judy caught the gist of what I couldn’t really explain. Leave it to Judy; she could always figure me out, even before I could get my thoughts and words out of my mouth.

We actually made it down the street to the SuperSol supermarket. Judy and I attempted to carry on with our grocery errands and tackle the crowded aisles of the market in an odd state of numbness. We picked up items that we didn’t need. We rambled on to each other about nonsense, hoping that if we ignored the news of Ivan’s untimely death, it would just dissolve and simply become a sad, mean joke. When we got to the grocery’s checkout line, we realized that we had forgotten several items from our shopping