Hi everyone. I lost one of my best friends today. He was 91; I had known him for more than 30 years. Professor Zev Naveh had been a friend of my husband before I ever knew either one of them; they had done research together on Mt. Carmel. I met Zev on one of his regular visits to Cornell when I was just a lowly graduate student. Later, when my husband died of cancer, Zev arranged for me to come for a postdoctoral year with him at Technion. Zev was a diminutive bundle of energy, barely five feet tall and very round, with a shock of grey hair, short neck and glasses….hardly looking the heroic type. But he belonged to a legendary generation and sometimes was heroic. He was a child refugee from Europe in 1939, sent by his Jewish parents on a kinder transport to Palestine. All his relatives would later perish in the Holocaust. Zev was placed at Kibbutz Galed near Mt. Carmel, the same kibbutz where he will be buried on Sunday. There he spent years herding sheep. He told me he also learned both English and Hebrew by practicing on the sheep….at some point decided to look at grazing as a rangeland scientist instead of a shepherd, and persuaded the kibbutz to send him to university. The War of Independence interrupted that, and Zev fought with the Hagana. He was among the soldiers who defended Mt. Scopus when the Jordanians overran the university and hospital, and was again a lucky survivor. Later he went back to university and finished a biology degree focused on rangeland. He married, started a family in a one-room apartment in Tivon, got a master’s degree, and was sent by Golda Meir to Africa to teach the Masai how to graze their cattle. The bemused Masai taught Zev instead and a good relationship developed there. Zev came back with some of his preconceptions rattled, and went on to become one of Israel’s first ecologists, and one of our best. He was one of the founders of landscape ecology as a distinct discipline, and wrote one of the fundamental textbooks on the subject. Zev has been honored all over the world. It’s been my rare honor to be told by his family that I was his closest professional friend. Last week I went to Haifa and had lunch with Zev and Ziona, not realizing this would be our last visit. On Sunday he had a heart attack, and declined from that point. Today, I got a phone call from the family; Zev had died two hours earlier. He had been lucid and talking to the very end, and then simply went to sleep. Ten minutes later he was dead. I’m grieving, but of course it’s mostly feeling sorry for me. Zev had a magnificent life and a good death. When I first came to Israel, I thought the country was full of people like Zev, sturdy and courageous pioneers, living simply with a strong liberal, humanistic ethic. Maybe they were common at one time but that generation has passed, and Zev was one of the last. I’m not only mourning Zev, but the loss of an Israel that was and will never be again. It’s a real loss Shabbat shalom, Linda |
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment