Digging Up A Dream

It is often said that our ancestors’ dreams are the blueprints of our reality. But what happens when those dreams are forgotten or never shared with the next generation?

For as long as I can remember, my parents, especially my mother, always said that it was too expensive to go to Israel. Israel was never a place any of us thought much about as somewhere we had to visit. In fact, the furthest we ever traveled on a family vacation was Canada.

I was connected to my faith and believed that Israel was our homeland, but I never gave much thought to the fact that I had never been there. After my parents became empty nesters, they began traveling to other countries, including Israel for the first time. Even then, there was never any pressure for me to visit.

I didn’t feel the pull until I was a young married woman listening to friends talk about their gap years in Israel or family vacations there. Still, it would be nearly twenty years before I would make my first trip.

In 2017, a year after my maternal grandmother passed away, my mother brought me several Israel bonds that had been purchased in my name years earlier by my grandmother. Handing them to me, she said, “Don’t use this to pay bills. Take the kids to Israel.”

And so we did.

It was the first time I had ever known my mother to be so adamant about visiting Israel.

The second time came two years later, in 2019, when we traveled for a family Bar Mitzvah. Once again, my mother insisted that we all go together. We were a small family, she said, and it was important to be together for such a special occasion.

And again, we did.

A few weeks after my mother died in April 2020, my daughter and I went through her closets and drawers, filling bag after bag with sweaters, blouses, skirts, and dresses to donate to Yad Leah, a nonprofit organization that collects new and gently used clothing in the United States and distributes it to families in need throughout Israel.

We had eight large black garbage bags full.

At the time, it felt like the perfect tribute, imagining my mother’s clothes finding new life on the backs of women and young girls throughout Israel.

Then, in the spring of 2025, while cleaning out my parents’ house in preparation for its sale after my father moved into an apartment, I came across something I had never seen before.

It was a small bound book my mother had written for a class assignment in April 1960 when she was twelve years old.

The book was titled I Led 3 Lives and chronicled her life from her birth in 1948 in East Liverpool, Ohio (a fact that surprises most people who assume from her unmistakable Brooklyn accent that Brooklyn was the only place she ever lived or wanted to live) to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and finally to Brooklyn, New York.

I had seen yearbooks and old photographs before, but never this book.

Reading it was like hearing my mother’s voice all over again. Various members of our family passed it around, laughing at the stories and observations only she could have written.

But one passage stopped me cold.

On the final page, my mother looked ahead to her future and wrote:

“If my husband gives me a choice of where I want to live they would be either Israel, California, or Florida.”

My mother never mentioned this dream in all the years I knew her.

I don’t know whether she forgot it, outgrew it, or simply kept it to herself.

But I had always assumed that her love of Israel developed through her travels there as an adult, not that it had begun in childhood.

I often remembered my mother’s age by saying that she was the same age as Israel. Yet somehow, despite all the stories she told and all the years we shared, I never knew that my mother at twelve years old imagined a future there.

When you clean out a family home, you peel back layers of time. You uncover artifacts of who your parents were before they became simply “Mom” and “Dad.”

For me, that personal archaeological dig uncovered a dream that had been buried for sixty-five years.

My mother never lived in Israel.

But today my daughter, her granddaughter does.

Not only does she live there, she is working on an archaeological excavation team, literally digging through layers of history in the land her grandmother dreamed of at twelve years old.

My mother never saw that dream come true.

Yet somehow, it did.

The dream wasn’t forgotten after all.

It was simply waiting for the next generation to dig it up.