With the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah looming—the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks on the Hebrew calendar—my wife and I decided to take our three girls (ages five, three, and two) away for a week-long trip. Most flights in and out of Israel were cancelled, so we planned a trip to Georgia, the country where my father and grandfather were born and raised. We told the girls and, for a moment, our eldest’s eyes lit up, until, eyebrows furrowed, she asked, “Is it a dangerous place?” I said, “We wouldn’t take you to a dangerous place.” Again she thought and asked, “But didn’t they put your grandpa in jail?”
About a month earlier, I mentioned to some acquaintances that my grandfather had served in the prison camp of Rustavi. Our eldest heard me. “Really?” she asked. I was caught off guard but managed to explain that, back when he was alive, police in Georgia often put people in jail who did not deserve to be there. Hers wasn’t purely a historical question. Since the October 7 attacks, kids in their kindergarten had told all kinds of stories about how their fathers caught Hamasniks and put them in jail. The older bullies scared younger kids by saying they would put them in jail too. Our girls came home afraid.
But there was another reason behind her concern about danger: On October 1, 2024, Iran had attacked Israel with an unprecedented number of ballistic missiles. The sirens wailed during bedtime. Our apartment was built in the early 1930s and has no bomb shelter. We sat next to our front door, the girls looking at us in fear as interceptor missiles shook our windows. When the sirens stopped, the eldest asked what had happened. I told her that there was a country that was trying to boom us, and that the army was sending booms into the air to stop their booms. “So why don’t we move to that country?” she asked. “Well,” I said, “now that they tried to boom us, our army will probably boom theirs.” Rather than inciting feelings of hate or revenge, I presented it as a tragic reality.
All of this informed our decision to take a trip a week later. But the respite was short. At the airport, sirens began to wail—a missile attack from the north—and we had to run to a crowded safe zone until the danger passed and we were able to board our flight. Later, on the plane, we settled them into some simple activities like drawing. As she drew her favorite shape—a rainbow—our eldest looked up and asked, “Are there sirens in Georgia?” I told her that, no, there were no sirens in Georgia. At least not as far as I knew.
We saw that, on this mountain, even if we could not escape the war, we could form a microcosm guided not by aggression but tolerance.
It was night when our plane landed in Batumi. We were met at the airport by our host, Jemal, who ran a guesthouse out of his farmstead in Merisi, an hour and a half drive into the mountains. In the car, as everyone else fell asleep, Jemal and I conversed in Russian. I told him about my great-grandfather, a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army who’d survived World War One and fled to Tbilisi when the Bolsheviks entered Kyiv in 1917. He told me about his great-grandfather, an Imperial Russian police officer stationed in Batumi when Stalin was active. His great-grandfather was arrested twice—once after the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was created, being released after several months, and again in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Purge, when he was executed. No one knew why, he said, until recently, when a village elder whispered that, during Stalin’s arrest, his great-grandfather had beaten the dictator-to-be.
At Jemal’s guesthouse, we learned about the culture they had preserved during seven decades of Soviet rule. Jemal’s family was known as the custodians of traditional choral singing that went back centuries, from the time of Ottoman rule over the region, through the Russo-Turkish War, and the takeover of the region by the Russian Empire. On our first morning, he took us along into town to watch a rehearsal of their choir, Mokvare. Back at the guesthouse, he told us about a song from the village in which the locals sang an homage to the grape vine that could not be made into wine because of the Muslim edict against drinking alcohol. While the region is still considered Muslim, many locals have gone back to wine-making, including Jemal, who makes 800 liters a year. In the mid-2000s, they were discovered by American ethnomusicologists, who brought groups to their home. The pandemic put their guest house in danger of closing, but by late 2021, people from Europe were booking again, eager to study—until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when their guests began to cancel. In recent years, they relied on what Jemal called “post-Soviet people”—groups from the Former Soviet Union led around by guides and uninterested in any cultural exchange.
The only other people staying with Jemal’s family while we were there were an Australian couple. The young man had fallen in love with this region’s culture and music and spent two years living and working with Jemal’s family. He had brought his girlfriend to meet his “Georgian parents.” On our first morning there, I noticed the young man reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the young woman’s water bottle sporting a big sticker reading FREE PALESTINE. I was worried about tension as a result of our being Israeli, so I carefully engaged them on the issues—some of our own experiences as well as the writing I’d done criticizing the government and its policies. We acknowledged each other’s concerns and fears about a world ruled by hate and violence, and I told them how much I appreciated their lack of prejudice toward us. The young woman said, “I fight police, not people.” The young man said they came from a country with one of the clearest histories of settler-colonial genocide. “If we didn’t believe there were leftists in Israel,” he said, “we’d have no right to exist as leftists in Australia.” The kids particularly connected with them, and we saw that, on this mountain, even if we could not escape the war, we could form a microcosm guided not by aggression but tolerance.
The Australian couple left in the middle of our stay. Jemal took them to Batumi, and we hitched a ride to spend a few hours in the city, ending up at a cafe in the old part of town. Our girls, ever precocious, asked the man working at the counter his name. He said Ivan. I asked him where he was from and he said Ukraine. I asked how long he’d been in Batumi. He said two and a half years—ever since the Russian invasion. A young woman walked into the cafe who turned out to be his wife. She was quiet but opened up when I told her I spoke Russian. She and Ivan had lived in Russia. He was a professional drummer and she was a ballerina. They had come to Batumi because they’d seen a lively European cultural outpost. But after the war in Ukraine broke out, Europeans stopped coming. Like Jemal, they were catering to groups of post-Soviets guided around in herds.
We spent Shabbat at the guesthouse, Jemal teaching the girls learning to make wine and his wife Manana teaching them to make dumplings. The rest of the time, they played with Elpiteh, the recently-born calf. The weather turned cold and rainy, and we didn’t want to burden his family with cooped up kids, so we spent the last two nights at a hotel. At a stationary store, we bought the girls modeling clay. The eldest took all of the pieces and created a landscape that included flowers, trees, mushrooms, and a car driving up a mountain road. Our days with Jemal’s family had entered her imagination. At that moment, I saw that this trip had given her and her sisters a taste of the flavors and sights that had animated my own family’s history. Somewhere, in the depths of their memories, we now shared the spirit of Georgia as one of our cultural legacies.
On our day of return, the girls started getting nervous. Our eldest asked whether there would be sirens at the Batumi airport. I said it was unlikely. Her sister asked whether there would be sirens back home. I said I didn’t think so. Our flight was delayed—there had been a drone attack from the north again and the Tel Aviv airport had been closed for a short period—but eventually we made it back.
It was now Simhat Torah, the first anniversary of the attacks that woke us into a nightmare from which neither we nor anyone in the region will likely ever fully awaken. But the trip to Georgia showed me that some of us survive wars—not just physically but also spiritually—by preserving culture. I had seen a family that maintained its traditions despite repeated loss and adversity, continuing its ancient ways even when a world obsessed with power brought new threats. And I knew that we had done something good for the girls when, at our friend’s house, having been served a glass of milk, they asked, “Do you have a cow?”
