I was sitting in my favorite bar in Manhattan doing two of my favorite things, drinking and writing. I was writing a screenplay about my mother, who was my world—beautiful, funny and strong—but who got sick when I was 11 and died from ovarian cancer when I was 17. I was writing about our annual family trips to her beloved Israel, trips we took until she got sick. And I was writing about the emptiness, loss and confusion I felt after she died that led me to go to Israel to find her. Which is how I ended up taking dual citizenship and becoming an Israeli paratrooper to honor her and protect the country she so loved.
The drinking was to help me remember and write it all down. It was also to help me forget: the suffering my mother endured the last years of her life; the young woman, Dafna, I loved and left in Israel; a fellow soldier, Do-Dee, who became like a brother to me but was killed in an attack; and the insanity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that brought so much pain to all.
Around midnight, when the drinking became a lot more than the writing, I stopped both. Then I gathered up the pile of journals and notepads I had written in by flashlight over two years of nights in the barracks. Hundreds of pages of stories about my mother, my growing up and my experiences as an Israeli Paratrooper. I stashed them and the 90-some pages of the screenplay I was writing by hand into an oversized backpack that I carried them in always. I strapped it over my shoulders, feeling that my whole life and everything I cherished was in that black knapsack.
Drunk and stumbling, I left the bar and hailed a cab. When it stopped, I jumped into the front seat and started a conversation with the driver. He at first objected to me sitting in the front, but then relented. I asked him about his family. We shared stories and developed a bond. I told him I was a mama’s boy and missed my mother dearly. He said he understood, that he too had a strong love for his mother. Then he asked what was in my bulging knapsack. Precious cargo, I said. A screenplay about my mother and my experience as an Israeli Paratrooper. That’s when the mood of the cab changed dramatically. He told me his name was Muhammad and he was a Palestinian.
The next twenty blocks were filled with us yelling our partisan bullet points at each other and cursing at the top of our lungs. The profanity and expletives coming out of our mouths were shameful. I was dropped off in front of my brownstone and got out of the cab. We exchanged our last curses while I slammed the door behind me. But as I watched him speed down my block, I suddenly panicked. I had left my knapsack in his cab—my stories, my screenplay and all my notes, the only copy! I started running down the street, yelling in desperation. All of my characters pressed their faces against the back window of the cab as we tried to reach each other. I screamed and yelled as I ran.
Stop!
The cab reached the end of the block and turned the corner. It was about 1 a.m. in the morning and it started raining (of course). I was beside myself, wasted, desperate and lost. The rational voice in my head told me to relax and go upstairs to my apartment. I refused, knowing the cabby had no idea what apartment I lived in. Loaded and soaked, I lay down on my stoop and for lack of a better idea, I prayed.
After an hour I was close to giving up and going inside, but I just couldn’t. In that cab was my mother. That story was my life. I imagined all my characters frightened and pleading with the cabby to come back to me. At that moment a yellow cab came down my block and pulled up in front of me. It was my cabby! The back door swung open and all my characters, my family, jumped out and hugged me.
Overwhelmed with emotion, I started crying. Yes, I’ll say it, I was crying hysterically and shaking. Muhammad was standing outside his cab in the rain holding up my knapsack in both of his hands. As I moved toward him, he told me he hated me. I told him I hated him too, and then we both embraced in the greatest hug of my life. I didn’t want to let go. I just kept thanking him from the bottom of my heart. Then I asked him why, after all the nasty things we said to each other, he came back. He told me that after turning the corner, he got a customer who was going down to the East Village, far from my apartment on the Upper Westside. That’s when he noticed my black knapsack in his front seat, and his first instinct was to lower his window and throw the knapsack out. But after he dropped off his new passenger, he turned off his “on duty” lights and made his way back to me.
He said he came back because I asked him questions about his family and because he shared the same love for his mother that I have for mine. We disagreed on everything, but agreed that the love of a mother is everything. As I listened to his words, I couldn’t stop crying. He made me promise that my story of my mother would be heard. I promise Muhammad, I promise, I said. He then made me promise that our story would be heard too. I promise, Muhammad, I promise, I said.
I always keep my promises.