What I learned from my father’s strange journey from Poland to Algeria to Kazakhstan to the California desert

When I was 76, I thought I knew my father well. He was an open person who talked about his life and did not shy away from talking about the difficult years of the war (as did the parents of many of my friends).

I also knew he loved the desert near his home in California; He used to go there when he was on a weekend break with my mother. But I never appreciated what the desert meant to him.

My father had an unusual life, so one day I decided to sit down and write a short article about him. I started to write that he was born in Warsaw, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. What about the story he told over and over as a little boy traveling with his family from Russia to Warsaw in a horse-drawn carriage, traveling through forests full of dire wolves? Perhaps he was actually born in Russia and grew up in Warsaw.

At the end of his life, he wrote a memoir that I read, then shelved and forgot about. When I read it again I found the answer to my question and all kinds of wonderful stories. Instead of writing articles, I decided to write a book.

My father, Rafał Feliks Buszejkin, was born in Warsaw in 1912. His adventures began when he was 3 years old and his family left Warsaw to escape the Germans and settled in Moscow. When he was 5 years old, they returned to Warsaw to escape the Russian Revolution.

He was not a stereotypical Eastern European Jew of the early 20th century: His family was bourgeois and unobservant; spoke Polish to his family instead of Yiddish; The only Hebrew he knew was what he had memorized for his bar mitzvah. He boxed, raced bicycles and got into fights; Instead of going to his senior year of high school, he played poker, got into mischief with a group of teenagers, and flunked out; He never liked working indoors and was happy to do physical labor.

The author’s father, Rafał Feliks Buszejkin, in long trousers, poses with members of Maccabi, the sports club he founded in Algeria in the early 1930s. (Courtesy of Dvora Treisman)

He successfully repeated his final year of school and went to university in the fall of 1931 to study medicine at the University of Montpellier in France. Everything was going well until he had to dissect a frog in the biology lab and decided medicine wasn’t for him. The following autumn, he announced to his family that he was going to the Institut Agricole d’Algérie in Algeria.

While happily studying agricultural science, she discovered Algeria and Algeria and spent time with two new friends, one from Belgium and the other from Laos. One day in late spring, he was immobilized by an inflammation of his joints. He was advised to go to Biskra, a luxury oasis town at the northern tip of the Sahara, 250 miles away, known for its treatment facilities.

His two friends put him on an old, overstuffed bus; When he sat here, he could not move and therefore could not meet his toilet needs. While he was napping, he suddenly noticed the familiar scent of gefilte fish! He looked around and saw an Arab eating what appeared to be this Jewish specialty. He asked the man (in French) where he got his lunch. The man said that his wife made it and offered it to his father.

He and the man started talking. The man asked him as usual: Where are you going? What are you doing? My father explained. The man then told her that he was a Sephardic Jew and worked as a tour guide at Bou Saada, a large oasis at the foot of the Atlas Mountains – 100 miles west of Biskra.

His new friend invited him to come there and be healed; It would be much cheaper than the fancy spa. My father agreed and spent 45 minutes a day buried in a shallow grave in the hot sand, his head shaded by an umbrella. He recovered after five days of torture.

She soon told her friends that they spent a lot of time sitting around sipping tea, eating delicious pastries, and getting fat. Do they want to establish a sports club and get in shape? Not only his friends, but more than half of the village (both Arabs and Jews) liked the idea. They raised more than 300,000 francs in three days and set out to buy equipment and have uniforms made. The uniforms consisted of white shorts and blue sleeveless shirts with Magen David written on the front. A local lawyer drafted the charter and they named the club Maccabi.

In addition to coaching the boxing team, during his time at Bou Saada, his father rode beautiful Arabian horses, was invited to a banquet with a sheikh, learned to drive when it was time to return from a banquet, and all his friends got so drunk that they stopped driving. My father left Algeria suddenly in May 1933 and returned home when his father went bankrupt.

After returning to Warsaw, my father worked as a cattle and pork buyer for a large meatpacking company. After marrying my mother in 1938, they left Warsaw a few days after the German invasion in September 1939. They spent part of the war in Siberia and the rest in Dzhambul, Kazakhstan, where he oversaw the agricultural production of five kolkhozes, or collective farms. until they were repatriated after the war ended. When they returned to Warsaw, they found that everyone in both families had been killed by the Nazis.

They lived in Nice while waiting for a visa to emigrate to the Dominican Republic, where he farmed in a Jewish collective settlement in Sosua. I was born there. Two years later, we left the Dominican Republic to live in the United States, where more adventures of a different nature awaited us.

As I was finishing my book, I remembered the little faded red notebook I had put in a drawer years ago and went to find it. It wasn’t anything special, it was old, faded and there wasn’t much inside, just some drawings and some writing that I couldn’t read. There was a shopping list and lyrics to a popular song. The drawings were made in colored pencil; Three belonged to my mother and three belonged to my father. Each drawing was signed and dated with the title “Cembul, February 1943”.

One of the drawings showed a woman dressed in beautiful European clothes, holding the handlebars of a motorcycle with a sidecar and talking to a man on the side of a deserted road with two palm trees behind her. It was made by my father. Underneath he wrote “Cielęce lata” and “Algeria”. Alger is French for Alger, so what did the Poles say?

I learned that “Cielęce lata” means “calf years” in English and has the same meaning as “salad days”. He was remembering the peaceful days of his youth in Algeria, far away from Kazakhstan, in the middle of the war. That’s when I realized that for most of his life, his favorite stories were from the time he spent in Algeria, even the embarrassing story of when the javelin he threw pierced his friend’s leg. It also explained why he always wanted to go to the desert on weekends and why he wanted to spend his last years in the desert.

Parents have stories to tell, but we don’t always pay attention to them; Sometimes we don’t listen at all. Sometimes we listen but don’t understand the meaning. Eventually it’s too late. No more stories, no more opportunity to ask questions. I was lucky that my father wrote down some of his life stories so that one day I could pay attention. But still, it was that little pencil drawing that explained things that words couldn’t.

Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Los Angeles, he spent most of his adult life in Berkeley until moving to Barcelona. His new book is “Stories My Father Told Me”.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.