Jumping Fences, Love and Hazelnut Cake
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About this ebook
As a young adult, I wanted to know about love, and why I didn’t experience it. I looked at the world around me and saw very little evidence for its existence. I was confused and worried, but undaunted, at nineteen years of age, I set off looking for answers. But not just any answers, I wanted answers that made sense, and that didn’t require a PhD or hard work.
Unlike the lost car keys we eventually find behind the couch, to me, love seemed profoundly AWOL and so difficult, that I began to suspect that finding it, would be easier trying to define it. I felt like a passenger on an express train that never stops at the station, where love is standing.
Making matters worse, now and again I experienced moments of profound warmth and love, but as quickly as these experiences came upon me, they faded, and I was once again back in the daily grind. In the course of my quest, something unusual and unpredictable happened; my train began to slow and life took on a very different complexion.
I was with my father when he died in 1997 and with my mother in 2008, the most remarkable people I ever met. My mother was the smartest person I've known and while they’re not here now, in the way they were before their death, I still experience my love for them, unchanged.
Jack Braunstein
I am a retired architect (Australia), currently living in the USA, where I work as a writer and strategist. I am also a certified End of Life Doula and volunteer my time in New York City. "Jumping Fences, Love and Hazelnut Cake" is my first book. I started writing it as the story of the year my mother died, and it expanded into an account of my search for love and meaning. The day my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, she asked me to look after her at home. While this was not the scenario I'd anticipated, I took it on to please her. I had no idea how difficult it would be or how I would cope and nonetheless, it was an extraordinary time. With only days left, she and I had a conversation that turned me upside down, and opened the door to seeing my entire life in a different light. In her matter of fact way, my mother enabled me to make sense of questions that plagued me since I was nineteen years of age; why did I not experience love and what the heck is my life? I looked back and saw love in everything I had done, in every person I'd met and in every place I had traveled. In this book I go back in time and revisit the past but from the perspective my very wise mother passed on to me. Both my parents were lion hearted in their love and ruthless in the discharge of their duty to my brother and I. To understand this, is to know me.
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Jumping Fences, Love and Hazelnut Cake - Jack Braunstein
JUMPING FENCES, LOVE &
HAZELNUT CAKE
By Jack Braunstein
Copyright © 2015 Jack Braunstein
All Rights Reserved
Distributed by Smashwords
No part of this book may be stored, copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever, except brief extracts for the purpose of review without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Cover Design: Mari Diaz
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Opening
Chapter 2: Deported
Chapter 3: Transported
Chapter 4: Les Sœurs de Sion
Chapter 5: Santa Katarina
Chapter 6: Joseph Solomon
Chapter 7: Whisky
Chapter 8: Nazareth Hospital
Chapter 9: In The End
Chapter 1: Opening
One push and you popped out,
my mother said, often.
I was born in Cairo, Egypt, 1952, at a time when an internal dispute between the King, Farouk I and his military elites, coupled with a regional struggle over control of the Suez Canal, threatened to spill over into open conflict.
Despite its chic and charm, Egypt’s grandiose life unraveled quickly and by September 1956, Cairo was simply too dangerous for us. Unlike Farouk, who was given the choice of abdicating and leaving with his fortune, my parents chose at gun point, to cut and run with nothing. I was four, and my brother Lucien, eleven, when my parents, Joe and Rachel delivered us safely to Melbourne, Australia.
They lied about my age for school entry so Mum could also find work and that first day, Dad dragged me into the classroom, terrified, screaming, and begging him to take me home. To stop me from punching him, he clamped both his hands tightly around my wrists and forced me through the large blue door.
I sat in class not understanding a word, ate lunch alone and waited for Lucien at the end of each day to take me home. While I soon learned to speak English and forgot about life in Cairo, the terror and panic remained. In the next twelve months, I broke my arm, split my head open on one of the benches outside the school, almost got expelled, and went missing.
My world was no longer safe. The fall was sudden and absolute. The assurances and safeguards enjoyed by a four-year-old vanished. I began living with the fear that events outside my control would change catastrophically at any moment, that people were dangerous, and that they must be closely watched from a manageable distance. With this as my world view, I can only imagine what I would have become if life had continued as it had started. But for reasons I cannot explain, what should have unfolded, did not.
Some four years after we arrived in Australia, I began to stumble on peculiar experiences. In one moment I was eating lunch or looking out of a window and in the next, with no warning, I was outside my body, floating around the Universe, experiencing a profound stillness and calm. In contrast to the turbulence and hurly-burly of daily life, in these moments out of time, I was overcome with warmth and the knowledge that I was loved and would always be loved.
These fleeting experiences were so removed from the world into which I was flung that they were problematic and confusing. I wondered if they were real and why I did not experience love the way others did. I also wanted to know what had happened to us, why we had left Cairo and why I felt so frightened. As I grew older, my questions persisted. I wanted to understand my life, what the heck I was doing here and what I could make of myself.
I sometimes thought that I was losing my marbles and told myself to stop thinking so much, to buckle down and get real, but I could not suppress my curiosity or my appetite for adventure. As I saw it, sometimes, the grass really was greener elsewhere, when new challenges and adventures are only possible by forgetting about safety and jumping the fence.
At the age of nineteen, I set off in search of answers, and somewhere along my path, I realized that if I didn’t behave as though my life is my own or have a clear and meaningful response to the question of its direction and purpose in any moment, I was confusing breathing and being alive.
****
Chapter 2: Deported
There he was, self-assured and happy; in his prime, exuding the kind of charm and warmth only someone with an upbeat and buoyant perspective on life can. I was standing in front of Dad in my swimming costume, shy, head buried in his thigh and he, legs apart in the sand, hands on hips, white Lacoste polo shirt and dark swimming trunks, smiling at the camera through tinted Ray Bans.
Most things about my father were gentle and also unyielding. Even his hair receded to a certain point and stopped. Dad was great in a jam, always at the right place at the right time. Nothing about him was obvious; you wouldn’t notice him until he was opening the door or handing you a drink or holding your chair.
You were three,
Mum said, handing me another photograph. This was taken at Stanley Beach in Alexandria. Your father would take you into the water on his back and slowly pull himself down until you were swimming on your own. Cairo was too hot in July.
Following Sunday roast, Mum would often take out three shoe boxes full of black and white photographs they’d brought with them and after carefully clearing the table she’d sift through each one like an archeologist. I watched intently and listened to her descriptions for markers and hints, trawling my memory for anything, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant that could take me back to that time with her.
Mum was a touch over five feet and a strikingly beautiful woman. She was also the smartest person in the room who said the least. Her most interesting features were her hazel-green eyes and thick, dark eye-brows. Together, they revealed everything you needed to know, including anger, sadness, curiosity or boredom. I learned to read them by trial and error, mostly error, often failing to appreciate her economy and the unswerving logic with which she conducted herself. I had not then, nor since met anyone as solid.
Her hair was jet black, short, and swept off her face. Several times a week, after dinner, she took out a manicure set, removed the old polish, sculpted her cuticles, and re-polished her nails, all with scientific precision.
Do you member the La Fortes?
she asked handing me another photograph. The photo showed Monsieur La Forte from the fifth floor in a white sports jacket and dark pants. He and