It May Be the Chance of Your Life

“How could you leave all this?” my daughter asked me as the two of us were walking with her daughter on Tel Aviv’s waterfront esplanade, on a hot, humid afternoon in July 2006. She did not allude to only the sweet scent of the Mediterranean summer, emanating from the vapor of the powder blue transparent sea, and the golden scorching sand under the bluest of skies. Neither was she alluding to only the energy emanating from the beachgoers, protected by rows of orderly placed umbrellas in persimmon orange, hunter green, or ultramarine blue, depending on the section in which the bathers sat, the beachfront cafés, the hip shops, and restaurants.

Nor was she referring to just the neighborhood and home where I grew up—our visit there with her toddler daughter being the highlight of her trip—or the old and new sections of Tel Aviv, designated in 2003 by UNESCO (United Nations Education, Cultural and Scientific Organization) as one of the world’s heritage sights—and the history and art museums, the theatres and concert halls, all telling the story of a vibrant society and a rich culture. For among the most precious things that I left behind when I decided to leave my country some thirty-seven years earlier were the friendships and the deep love and warmth that are revealed to me by family and friends whenever I visit my place of birth, regardless of how often I do so. “Life can take you to places you had not planned to be in, and force upon you decisions you never thought you would have to make,” I answered my daughter, hoping that I had experienced my share of life’s uncertainties for her and her children too. I always hope that.

My American-born daughter has been in my hometown often. But it was her first visit as a mother, and she was proud to introduce her then one-and-a-half-year-old to my family and friends, whom I had left behind and who bestowed on my daughter and her child no lesser affection than they have on me.

Something must have happened, I thought with alarm nearly four decades earlier, as I walked to the subway station on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street, two days after my arrival in New York City in the autumn of 1969, or else why are so many people running in the same direction, looking as if they are in a frenzy?

It was my first encounter with Manhattan on a Friday afternoon. I was on my way back to Brooklyn, after a short visit to the office where I would work for the following three and a half years. The tumult, I soon learned, was only the usual rush before the start of a weekend. That morning I joined my cousins’ tenant on a commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so that I could learn my daily route while staying with my relatives.

“Remember, do not make eye contact with anyone on the train,” my cousins’ thin, pale, frightened-looking neighbor warned me seriously. Lucky to find a seat on the packed subway during the morning rush hour, and taking the warning seriously, I was sitting motionless, scared to look at any commuter. But I could hardly avoid the big, tall man standing in front of the passenger on my left, holding a half-opened newspaper in one hand, covering the front of the middle of his body; his other hand hidden underneath the paper. Curious but unsuspicious, I bent down to look under the newspaper, for the man was clearly not reading it.

“look what he is doing!” I yelled in my fresh foreign accent when I saw the man masturbating. To my amazement, no one reacted, not even after the man ran out when the train stopped at the next station. Surely, where I came from only two days earlier, such an episode would have stirred a huge commotion.

“Are you insane?” the neighbor who escorted me asked when we got off the train, paler than he was usually.

“You...