I think of my father, and his journey from humiliated little poor boy, the“dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill”, to Corporal Israel in the Army Air Corps, to fledgling Communist, to scholar studying for his doctorate in American history at Columbia, to intellectual and Civil Rights advocate, police escorted speaker on school integration, to brash street-talking bad ass idealist in mutton chops, to director of Zionist youth movement, to increasingly bitter older and older man, to suddenly dying man finally telling the whole truth on his last night on earth.

The story of his life is like a cloud of smoke, something the wind will eventually carry away.  A workman will wonder, if at all, what the words “peekayach veh nahvone” on his headstone mean, or, more likely, what odd language the words are carved in. And, pausing for a break in the demolition of the old cemetery hidden by the winding country road, who the hell was this tribe, buried here under undecipherable inscriptions?