New York Post, Sunday, October 25, 2020
nypost.com
POSTSCRIPT Culture Club
“I have heard Joe Biden say
he has never discussed
his dealings with Hunter.
That is false. I have
firsthand knowledge
about this because
I directly dealt with the
Biden family, including
Joe Biden.”
— Hunter Biden’s ex-business associate Tony
Bobulinski (left) accusing Joe Biden of lying about
his involvement in his family’s overseas dealingsChatter
Gidon Lev survived
the concentration
camps, cancer twice,
the death of a
spouse and so much
more. Julie Gray
(together with Lev)
was tapped to write
his memoir — and
then fell in love.Courtesy of Gidon Lev and Julie Grayby JULIE GRAY
L
at e ly, I’ve been thinking about hope.
Because I’m fresh out.
The ills of humanity — turmoil, strife,
jealousy, hatred, sickness and death — have
flown out of Pandora’s box all at once, it
seems. Hope, “The thing with feathers,” as Emily
Dickenson wrote, that “perches in the soul,” is
the only thing that remains within.
It’s hard to feel
hopeful when there
is a pandemic in its
second deadly wave
and winter is on the
way, making a third
wave probable.
Worldwide, there
have been more
than 1 million
deaths from
COVID, and we are
still months — if not
a year — away from
finding an effective
vaccine.
My life partner does not share my sense of
hopelessness. In fact, he is implacably optimistic.
So much so that sometimes I wonder if we are
watching the same news on TV. That’s not the
only difference we have. He is 29 years older than
me and is from the former Czechoslovakia. He
is a Holocaust survivor, a former kibbutznik and
dairy farmer and the father of six. I am from the
’80s; I rode a Vespa, had bleach-blonde hair, went
to photography school and loved The Cure.
I met Gidon Lev three years ago when he was
looking for someone to help him write a book
about his life. Although I found him very charm-
ing, I turned the project down. First of all, I had
no experience working with life stories. Sec-
ondly, as an editor with an eye on the market, I
doubted whether his story would grab the atten-
tion of readers during such tumultuous, gloomy
times. Yet I knew that Gidon’s story was impor-
tant — maybe even imperative. I took a leap of
faith and wrote “The True Adventures of Gidon
Lev: Rascal. Holocaust Survivor. Optimist,”
which came out this year. I had no idea what I
was getting into; in the writing of the book, I fell
in love with Gidon and I also found a master
teacher of the practice of hope.
Gidon was born in Karlovy Vary (or Carlsbad)
in 1935, about six months after Hitler was elected
Führer in Germany. When Hitler annexed the
Sudetenland in 1938, Gidon and his family fledto Prague. In 1941, the family was transported to
the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration
camp. Gidon was 6 years old. The camp was lib-
erated by the Red Army in May 1945. It took al-
most a year before Gidon and his mother, the
only two surviving family members, discovered
the fates of their loved ones. Gidon’s father was
45 years old when he died on a transport from
Auschwitz to Buchenwald.
When Gidon was a child, the whole world was
ending, over and over, every hour of every day.
Hope was the only thing that could not be taken
away from him.
As I worked on “The True Adventures,” I real-
ized that it was an oversimplification to think
that Gidon’s experience in a concentration camp
is what makes him hopeful. Long after he was lib-
erated at age 10, Gidon has gone through many
difficult and heartbreaking experiences. His first
marriage ended tragically, and he suffered from
cancer — twice. He lost his second wife after 40
years. Gidon has experienced loneliness, despair
and hopelessness many times.
For Gidon, sadness, loss and suffering are una-
voidable facts of life that are layered between
other life facts like joy, adventure, laughter and
change. Over his 85 years of living, he has pushed,
pulled, worked, succeeded, failed and risked over
and over again. Gidon sees what is in front of him,
whatever set of circumstances, as a challenge that
he might be able to overcome or a pleasure that
he will probably enjoy. This, to me, is the essence,
the real power of “positive thinking.”
Gidon isn’t always cheerful nor does he over-
come every challenge. But to him, hope, laughter
and gratitude are old-fashioned good habits like
exercising or brushing your teeth. In other words,
hope takes practice and repetition. In Gidon’s
life, hope has been the difference between living
and dying.
“You don’t get the life that you want,” Gidon
once told me. “You get the life that you get.” Gi-
don understands, through lived experience, that
the fact that we are alive at
all is evidence of hope, re-
alized, over and over
again. Hope doesn’t just
grow on trees; it must be
planted and nurtured reg-
ularly.A native Californian living in Tel
Aviv, Julie Gray has been published
in The Times of Israel and the
Jewish Journal among other
publications.How a Holocaust survivor helped me find love — and light in a dark time for our world
— Trump, saying Biden failed
to implement criminal justice
plans while he was VP— Biden speaking to Americans, after
Trump pushed him to answer accusations
that he and his son Hunter got rich off
deals with foreign companiesfIGHT nIGHT “Homosexual
people have a
right to be in a
family. They’re
children of
God.”
— Pope
Francis,
acknowledging
gay people’s
right to
same-sex civil
unions for the
first time