On the Wings of Eagles

The epic of mass Yemenite Jewish immigration to Israel told through one family, starting with an illiterate child bride in Sanaa and ending with her academically ambitious daughter in Tel Aviv, brings to life the unknown—and, often painful— Mideastern side of the Zionist story. My mother was married off to her uncle when she was ten, a Jewish girl in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in the 1940s. She was soon caught up in the mass migration of Jews to Israel, a journey by foot, donkey, and truck followed by cargo flights, absorption camps, and eking out a living in a society dominated by Europeans. Compared with that of the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, precious little has been written about Israel’s Arab Jews, nearly half the country. This is one of our stories, filled with trauma and redemption, told through my family. My parents arrived in 1949, along with some fifty thousand other Yemenite Jews fleeing discrimination. They’d been expropriated more than once—by the precursors of the Houthis, the Zaydis, who regarded the Jews as inferiors. Then, they faced mistreatment at the hands of the European Jews. I tell those painful stories but salute the way we benefitted from a new liberal culture. My mother, a housecleaner, never learned to read. My father was a school janitor. I am a clinical psychologist. This is the Israeli story of getting from there to here.