During a medical evacuation, the wounded are loaded into the helicopter as the pilot makes circular hand signs to hurry so that we can take off, always in a lateral and upward, gut-wrenching fashion to avoid ground fire. Soon, we are circling the hospital’s landing pad. It is 1973, and this will be my last reserve duty as an Israeli Air Force doctor before leaving for Canada. The din of the rotors fills the air as I make sure the two soldiers are secure and all IV lines are taped in place. I check the identification tags of the wounded again against my medical report and sign the medical evacuation forms as we are close to landing. I write my name at the bottom—Michael Gordon, MD—in grade-one-level Hebrew and then below it in English so that I can be identified if further information is needed later on.
I know the drill. I have done helicopter evacuations before. As we touch the landing pad, the wounded soldiers are expertly extracted, moved to gurneys, and rushed to the emergency receiving area. We take off back toward the Lebanese border from where we had come. As we lift off, my identification tag falls to the outside of my flight suit and there, on both halves of the double metal tag, is my name in Hebrew above my military identification number. I push the tag inside my suit as I look out the side windows of the helicopter. I scan this new Rambam Hospital in Haifa, next to the older beachside building where I spent a month as a medical student in obstetrics and gynecology in 1965, and later spent time as an intern in 1967. That first summer month at Rambam, which led inextricably to the current moment in a military evacuation helicopter in Israel, was the result of my name and its history.
It all started with my family name—Gordon—clearly of Scottish origin. As a child, I puzzled over where my name came from as I knew all my grandparents were from somewhere in Eastern Europe. I shared a bedroom with my maternal grandmother during my childhood years and knew she came from a small village in Lithuania. She told me about the murderous pogroms, about her coming to New York as a teenager to enter the garment business, and about becoming a lady garment workers’ union organizer. But, of course, her name was not Gordon; that was my father’s family name. His father had come from the same small village as my grandmother. When I was about nine years old, I asked him what our name had been before it was changed to Gordon. Most of my friends knew that their names had been changed when their parents or grandparents came from Europe (from rather long names ending in ovich or owitz or osky).
“Gordon has always been our name. My great-grandfather was a Gordon, even in the old country.”
I pondered this, and some years later verified the story with my father’s oldest brother’s wife, while we were both attending a bar mitzvah; she had married into the Gordon family in Lithuania before they immigrated to America. Because of the name, I was a curiosity among my friends.
I had decided on a pre-med curriculum and, following the mesmerizing lectures of a world-traveling professor during my early years of university, decided to take a six-month leave from university and travel in Europe. Our neighbors attempted to convince my parents that undertaking such an apparently frivolous and potentially dangerous idea was crazy; nevertheless, my parents supported the trip. My father, who had worked during the day and studied at night school during the depression and experienced the very restrictive war years working as a department of defense civilian engineer, confided in me, “I always wanted to travel around Europe.”
On my return from a six-month meander around Europe, I decided to try and study medicine overseas. I raised the subject to my parents, and, in keeping with their openness of spirit, they encouraged me. After all, some years before they had undertaken a six-week, cross-America trip with me, my sister, and our dog Bingo. We camped all over the country—sleeping in the station wagon, on the ground under the stars, or in a small tent—experiencing a world that most people in our situation could only dream about.
The neighbors were aghast, for they knew that I was a good enough student to get into an American medical school. Why I would want to study overseas? How could my parents allow such a plan? I applied to every reputable medical school in Europe and the United Kingdom. The son of our family dentist’s neighbor was attending the medical school at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, so I made sure I applied to that institution as well. The responses were all positive, but indicated that a place would likely not be available until the fall of 1962, a year and a half away. This meant I would finish my fourth year at Brooklyn College and then enter their first year, unfortunately losing some of the benefits of my pre-med training and adding two years to my studies.
One late August day when I arrived home from a swim, at Brighton Beach where I grew up, there was a telegram waiting for me. It was unexpected and exciting. Telegrams were unusual and always worrisome in those days. In the era before e-mail and cell phones, telegrams were often purveyors of either bad news such as the serious illness or death in a loved one, or good news such as congratulatory wishes at weddings. Receiving a telegram was not an ordinary event. I was still dripping wet from my swim at the beach and danced from one foot to the other in excitement and dread as I opened the envelope.
A place had become available at the University of St. Andrews in second year, and the registrar deemed that my pre-medical courses would be accepted in lieu of the first year of studies. I was so excited I did not know where to go: the house was empty, and there was no one around I could share the good news with—especially in a wet bathing suit. Ultimately, my parents came home and, after digesting the news, they agreed to my going, knowing that it would mean my being very far away and that we would not see each other very often as transatlantic travel was quite expensive, and we did not have a lot of money.
In the fall of 1961 I settled in Dundee, the secondary campus of the University of St. Andrews where all the clinical rotations occurred. It was not far from the small university town of St. Andrews, as the crow flies, but it was necessary to either take a ferry to cross the Tay Estuary or take a long drive through the small city of Perth to get there by road. Dundee was an impoverished remnant of the industrial revolution. Many of the tenement houses were covered in a layer of soot from the coal burning that served as their major source of heat. That, along with the gray skies and many days of rain, drizzle, and mist, gave the town of 180,000 people a habitually bleak appearance until the sun came out. Then, everything seemed glorious as the greenery glistened, the light played on the cobblestone streets, and the townsfolk’s faces broke into smiles as they said, in their particular Dundee Scottish accent, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
Being an outgoing person, I made friends with classmates and students from other faculties at the university. Most of my friends had never really known an American other than the occasional tourist or those they met during their own overseas travels. Our cultural differences soon became evident: they did not understand the eagerness with which I undertook my studies. During the first few days of anatomy lectures, I raised my hand to ask a question. The professor looked at me with apparent astonishment, stopped his talk, and asked me what I wanted. After he answered and continued lecturing, I raised my hand again and heard a shuffling of feet from my classmates. Following the lecture, Doug and Ian, two of the local Dundee fellows who befriended me and in many ways took me under their wing, explained, “The whole trick is to get through without any of the profs knowing who you are—no one raises a hand in class!” Soon after, having just bought Gray’s Anatomy, which was tucked heavily under my arm, I met Doug and Ian on the High Street. They looked at the book and said in their broad Dundonian Scottish accent, “What’s that?” “Gray’s Anatomy,” I answered, “the book the prof mentioned.” They burst into laughter, “Goodness! Are you daft? The exam is not for one and half years!” said Doug. “Why buy it now?” said Ian. They could not have known my propensity for always being well prepared in my studies or way ahead in deadlines, a trait I have had throughout all my years of study and work.
Between Christmas, Easter, and summer breaks, I had almost five months of vacation per year. I took advantage of my proximity to Europe and planned my travels, the very reason for studying overseas. Cheap travel was available to me as a member of the International Medical Students’ Association, and I could match it to places almost anywhere in the world where I might complete the clinical experience required of the degree. One of the trips I planned in 1965 was to Athens, Greece, for an orthopedic and emergency room experience, and then on to Haifa, Israel, for obstetrics and gynecology. I had not yet developed any great interest in Israel, and I didn’t have much deep knowledge of the history of the country—or any Zionistic inclinations—but I did have an interest in the Holocaust and the history of the Second World War, about which I had read a great deal. My grandmother had visited Israel in the early ’50s with her Yiddish choir and came back imbued with the country. Based on all of this, I felt I should go; not just out of curiosity, but to honor her memory.
On the journey south toward Athens that May in 1965 to arrive in time for a one-month rotation in June at a large Athens public hospital, I started reading a book on the history of Russia, which was written by a Scottish historian. In one chapter the name Gordon was mentioned in reference to a Russian Jew. Incredibly, the footnote clarified my heritage and roots. In great detail it described the mercenary Scottish general, Patrick Gordon, who successfully fought for Czar Peter the Great. As compensation for battle victories, he was given land in the area my ancestors had come from, some of whom took his name, partly in recognition of his special relationship to the Czar and because he became the landlord of these shtetles (small Jewish villages).
Later that summer in Israel, I would have my first medical contact with Holocaust survivors in the obstetrics and gynecology department where I was working. They were being treated for Holocaust-related diseases, including infertility. Although in New York I had seen a few of my grandmother’s Eastern European friends with numbers on their arms, this was my first encounter in a medical role with survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps.
Within a few days of visiting Israel and starting work at the hospital, much like I might do at home in Brooklyn, I went to the nearby beach. As I walked on the white sand, a great sea of people speaking Hebrew enfolded me while, directly in front of me, was a mother feeding a banana to her child. A peculiar feeling of familiarity washed over me as I recalled those first few days of meeting the patients, the doctors, the vendors, and the people on buses or those walking in the streets. Past and present drew into one as I thought, “These are my people”. It was a powerful, engulfing sense that I had never experienced anywhere or anytime previously. I traveled the country on weekends during the month that followed, re-experiencing this feeling of kinship over and over again. I knew I had to return some day soon.
The chance to return to Israel came, oddly enough, during the year after during my final exams in June 1966. I entered the room for my viva (oral) in obstetrics and gynecology, not my best subject. The professor was my examiner. He was a large man and towered over most of us when he directed our examinations in his clinics.
He looked at me and said, “You’re the Yank, aren’t you? With a name like Gordon, surely you must be Scottish?”
The clock keeping the ten-minute oral examination time was moving along. With my eye on it, I answered, “Yes, I am the Yank, but my name, although Scottish, has Jewish Lithuanian roots. If you have a moment, I can explain.”
His already rose-colored face brightened and he replied, “Please do.”
I spun out the story of my heritage. Two more minutes passed as I spoke of the Czar, and another two as I emphasized General Gordon’s role. Explaining the shtetle and the taking of names took me to the beginning of the last minute.
The professor suddenly looked at his watch and said, “Oh dear, oh dear; time has flown. Give my three signs or symptoms of preeclampsia.”
I carefully and deliberately counted out the answers—“high blood pressure, swelling of the legs with rapid weight gain, and protein in the urine”—finishing just as the minute hand crossed the ten-minute mark.
He stood up, beaming, and shook my hand. As I left the room, I heard him murmur to himself, “Very good. Very good.”
That “very good” resulted in my winning the five-hundred-pound prize in obstetrics and gynecology, much to the surprise of my classmates. Following my completion of a six-month stint as a house officer (intern) in medicine at Aberdeen City Hospital, I obtained permission from the professor to use the money to return to Haifa for an internship in obstetrics and gynecology (“Medicine” in European medicine is the equivalent of “general medicine” in the United States). I was now on my way to Israel, happy to re-visit Haifa’s Rambam Hospital for some months of training.
Toward the end of that extraordinary personal and clinical experience, I visited kibbutz Nir Oz on the Negev border. A woman I had met two years previously questioned me about my marriage intensions when I wrote that I would be return for a six-month stint to Haifa. She was under the impression that I was coming back to re-connect to her in a more serious and likely permanent relationship. I was taken aback and kept trying to reconstruct our interactions—we were tender with each other, but not more than that. With regular mail being the available option of communication, prior to the eventual world of e-mail, she was clearly disappointed when I informed her that I had no attention in any permanent relationship with her. A letter later informed she could not wait for me to decide and committed herself to another kibbutznik who she soon after married.
While working in Haifa I visited her on the new kibbutz on which she had settled with her husband: an offshoot of her home kibbutz—a very common phenomenon within the kibbutz movement. Nir Oz abutted the Gaza strip in Egypt. I traveled there with my hostess. At the border we met Indian troops who were serving with the United Nations. A week later, Egypt’s President Nasser unilaterally removed these troops. I left Israel to visit my sister Diti, who was serving with the Peace Corps in Tunisia.
It was in the small town of Hammam Sousse in Tunisia that I experienced the Six-Day War. For the first two and a half days, all I could hear on the battery-powered shortwave radio were Arab-language reports and an English-language broadcast from Egypt. Diti could understand, and she translated the depressing news from the Arabic. The Arab-sourced broadcasts in English came every few hours and were very clear in their details of the destruction of Israel. The BBC was scrambled, so there was no way of hearing any other information.
Incredibly, I managed to find batteries in a bicycle store, for there were none in all the electrical shops. To the surprise of the owner, I bought his whole supply. The next day’s local newspapers were full of stories of Israel’s destruction, as explained to Diti by those in her school who read the Arabic to her. The people who had become “my people” might disappear in the fire of war. On a visit to Sousse on the second day, we noticed many armed soldiers. A street vendor told Diti that they were Algerian troops on their way to the war “over there—far away.” I ran the dial on the shortwave radio back and forth all night on the day the war broke out and again on the second day and night which was June 6. That night, as I was slowly moving the dial, I heard very distantly, a song, with guitar accompaniment, which I recognized as Hebrew.
The music stopped and a voice came on the air. My knowledge of the language was rudimentary, but the voice sounded calm. Then I recognized that it was the news being read, although I could not understand the details. I heard the word maot followed by the word migim, which I surmised was the Russian aircraft used by Egypt and Syria. I knew that, since mea was a hundred, maot must mean hundreds. This was followed by the word shtemeser, which I knew meant twelve, followed by the word, miragim, which I knew to be the Mirage, the Israeli fighter jet supplied by France. After the news, music started again, and the reception became distant and replete with static. I went to sleep hoping I had understood enough Hebrew to know that things could not be all that bad. The next morning, the BBC made it through and announced the clearer reporting of the war. Israel had not been destroyed, though the war was raging on at least two fronts—Egypt and Syria—and Israeli tanks seemed to be rushing towards the Suez Canal.
Two days later, I flew to Paris and then to London where Steve, my flat mate from medical school, lived. By this time, it was known that Jordan had entered the war but had lost their stranglehold on Jerusalem, and the West Bank had been taken over by the Israelis. The last battle going on was for the Golan Heights, which was in full force by the time I arrived in London that Friday, June 9. The news was sketchy, but Israel clearly had survived so far. Steve and I tried vainly to get to Israel to volunteer. Then, suddenly, on the Saturday morning while we were walking through Hampstead Heath where a cricket game was being played, the war ended. I left the next day for the United States, and each of us vowed to meet again in Israel.
Two years later, in the fall of 1969, I arrived in Haifa by ship from Greece with my Israeli wife, Yael, having left America in 1968 for Canada for one year of medical residency training, with the stimulus being the Vietnam war which I opposed. After a three-month late honeymoon journey through Europe, I was setting foot in Israel again, this time as a married man. I had met Yael just prior to the Six-Day War, during my five-hundred-pound-prize visit, the result of the story of my Scottish name! Now, four years later in 1973, I was bringing wounded Israeli soldiers to the helicopter pad of the new Rambam Hospital, which now dwarfed its older hospital counterpart, the place where, in 1965, as a medical student, I had delivered my first Israeli baby.
Excellent, riviting.