Travel: Israel

He and his comrades were called halutzim - pioneers - and they had made aliyah (literally the ascent) to the Holy Land to plough the soil, plant grapevines and citrus groves, raise chickens, tomatoes and children, and to found a new nation.

I know the details of Chaim's life and circumstances because he and his wife, Sonia, were relatives of mine (my maternal grandfather was their cousin), and I recently went to Israel with my oldest daughter, Emily, for the first time to retrace their journeys and uncover what I could about our family's story. So with Chaim and Sonia's three middle-aged children, Leah, Shimon and Benny, as our guides, Emily and I made a kind of pilgrimage to farmhouses and cemeteries, museums and archives - tracking 25 years of Chaim's life.

Some 332,000 Jews arrived in Palestine between 1919 and 1939, most of them from Poland and Russia. Making our home base in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, we began our journey where Chaim began his - in Haifa, looking down from the famed Bahai Gardens perched on the slope of Mount Carmel.

From the gardens' uppermost level, Haifa today has some of the topographical drama of Genoa or San Francisco - lush, green manicured terraces step down to a cityscape of red tile roofs and white low-rise apartment buildings. It was very different when Chaim disembarked here in 1924. Mixed Arab and Jewish then as now, the city Chaim saw was a tight enclave huddled between port and mountain. It probably took Chaim and his comrades the better part of a day to creep by train from Haifa to the Sea of Galilee in Palestine's northeast corner. We did the 50-mile trip in Benny's car in under an hour and a half. The south shore of the Sea of Galilee (in fact a freshwater lake fed and drained by the Jordan River) was the site of some of the earliest successful Jewish agricultural settlements, starting with the Kinneret Colony in 1908. Chaim, during his first two years here, lived and worked not on the lakeshore, but at a small isolated satellite settlement called Mount Kinneret, high up in the hills.

His sons had never been to the long-abandoned colony. Today not a scrap remains of the collective farm that Chaim and others struggled to sustain here on a few precipitous acres. Benny stopped the engine, and in the balmy silence, I tried to imagine the shock Chaim felt when he first laid eyes on the place.

Ultimately, life at Mount Kinneret was too rugged and precarious even for Chaim, and in 1926 he moved down to the Kinneret Colony, a compound of eight small houses set back yards from the shore. That was our next stop.

"See that house with the flat roof?" asked Benny, pointing to the third building in from the right. "That's where the Cohen family lived. They hired our father as a farmhand, and he lived in the shed beside the house." Nevertheless, according to the history my relatives had put together, Chaim had spent the happiest days of his life here. After lunch we wandered down the lakeshore - a glorious vista composed of wide swatches of saturated colour, soft green in the irrigated fields around the lake, powder blue in the mountains ringing it, deep royal blue on the lake's surface.

But history has cast its shadow here, too. Shimon pointed across the water to the Golan Heights. "That's where our older brother, Arik, fell." I knew the story well: Arik, Chaim and Sonia's firstborn son, was serving as a major in the Israeli army tank corps when he was killed on 12 October 1973, by a Syrian shell in the Yom Kippur War.

In January 1929, Chaim, suffering from malaria, left the Kinneret and moved to another fledgling colony, Herzliya, near the Mediterranean coast. Today a seaside resort north of Tel Aviv with gorgeous beaches and plush high-rise hotels alongside leafy villas, Herzliya in Chaim's day was an agricultural training centre for garinim - groups of young Jewish farm workers.

Chaim had been working in Herzliya for three years when his cousin Sonia joined him from Poland in 1932. She and Chaim wed in December 1933, and a year later moved 20 miles up the coast to the village of Kfar Vitkin to join a newly formed moshav (a cooperative farming village akin to a kibbutz but with families farming individual plots and raising their own children).

We visited the tiny stucco box of a house that Chaim and Sonia built for their family, which would come to include four children and Sonia's father.

Then, when he was in his early fifties, Chaim suffered a stroke that left him partly paralysed and unable to work until his death in 1965 at the age of 59.

Before dinner one night, Benny brought Emily and me up to the moshav's cemetery on a breezy hillside outside of town. We wandered, while he translated the names on the headstones: Arik; Sonia's father, Sholom Tvi; and Sonia, whose stone was inscribed not only with her own name and dates (1910 to 1996) but also the names of her two sisters and her mother. They have no graves of their own because they stayed in Poland, and perished along with 14 other relations.

• This article was first published in The Scotsman on October 09, 2010

Our final days in Israel were dedicated to learning what we could about the lives and deaths of these relatives.

In Tel Aviv we devoted most of our time to Beit Hatfutsot (the Museum of the Jewish People, commonly called the Diaspora Museum) on the campus of Tel Aviv University. Two floors of multimedia galleries packed with dioramas, replicas of Jewish artistry and architecture, historic film clips, snatches of music, photos, models of synagogues, and searchable computer terminals conjure up 2,000 years of Jewish exile in all corners of the world.

Toward the end of the week, we headed to Jerusalem. We did a bit of sightseeing from our guesthouse in the Old City, and then spent a full day at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in West Jerusalem. In the five years since it opened, Yad Vashem's history museum has become a rite of passage of sorts for visitors to Israel, and after spending a day there, I could see why. The galleries enclose - indeed, almost imprison - you in a nightmarish maze of photos, film clips, posters, artefacts and scale models of death camps: the whole story of the destruction of Europe's Jews from the rise of Hitler to the liberation of the camps. The Diaspora Museum brought me close to the vanished sepia world where my family once lived. Yad Vashem immersed me in the hell in which 17 of them died. But it also shed some light on one aspect of my family's history that had never been resolved.

Just before my visit, I had e-mailed the names, dates and places of birth of my relatives killed in Europe to Rita Margolin, a staff researcher in the Yad Vashem archives. She had uncovered one bit of information that my Israeli relatives had not known, and she shared it with us when we stopped by the archives. Shortly before the war ended, one of Sonia's nephews had been deported from the Vilnius ghetto to a slave labour camp called Klooga, where he died at the age of 16 - exactly how remains unknown.

This 16-year-old prisoner, No 641, Chaim and Sonia's nephew, was Benny and Leah and Shimon's first cousin. Another relative, a survivor of the Vilna ghetto we met with in Tel Aviv, told us that the nephew fell ill with scarlet fever in the ghetto and went deaf.

After two emotionally draining days, we left Jerusalem for Hadera, the city north of Tel Aviv where Shimon lives, eager to share this new detail at a party the family gave for us on our last night. Chaim and Sonia's three surviving children were there, along with most of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren - maybe 25 people, all of them living in Israel, all of them living, because two starry-eyed halutzim had left Poland some 80 years before to make a new life in the Holy Land.

New York Times 2010

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