During the Seder, I read the Haggadah and think of my mother. “In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as though he actually left Egypt,” it says in the Haggadah, which for me means “In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as a refugee.”

My mother was a refugee her entire life. She was born in 1914, right before World War I, to a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family in central Poland. During the stormy years of the war, the family left its spacious home, traveled across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and returned when the battles subsided. She returned to a razed home. This was her first refugee experience.

Later on, my mother traveled to Krakow to study chemistry at the university there. Jewish students were assigned separate benches at the edges of the lecture halls. She met my father during one of her trips. They got married in 1938 and postponed their honeymoon by a year. As it turned out, they postponed it forever. Upon the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, my mother urged my father to escape east with her, to the Soviet Union. I do not want to see any German faces, she insisted.

They left their home with a handful of personal belongings and became refugees. They slept on the road, at train cars and train stations, while making their way across the Soviet state. They experienced frost at the Ural Mountains and scorching heat at the steppes of Uzbekistan, in a neglected clay home on the outskirts of a Muslim town where residents also hated the Jewish refugees. My father fell ill, while his siblings died in the crematoria. My parents returned to the communist Poland; a Poland wounded by the war, devoid of charm, and overcome by hatred; a Poland that received the survivors with outbursts of violent anti-Semitism. Why did you return? Why didn’t Hitler finish you off?

We lived in the industrial town of Lodz, in an apartment shared by several families, including a shared bathroom. We had a room and a half. A grim backyard. Drunk neighbors. A dark, foul-smelling staircase. My father was a Zionist and worked for local Jewish organizations. My mother knocked on doors and sought jobs outside the establishment, outside the system. On occasion, we had night visits by the Polish security services; the non-communist Jews in Poland were few, and all of them were suspected of espionage and treason. My mother said: I did not return to a homeland; I replaced my refugee life with a different kind of refugee life.

The refugee toolbox

We made aliyah from Poland after the collapse of Stalinism. In Israel, my mother maintained the status of a refugee. She could not overcome the challenge of Hebrew or the sense of foreignness. For years we barely subsisted, bordering on poverty. The Jewish Agency sent us to one transit camp and then to another. Later we were sent to a tiny apartment in a neighborhood situated between Holon and Bat Yam. Keep your spirits up, Agency officials told my father (a prisoner of Zion) and my mother. Soon, a high-speed train will be passing through here, and these apartments will be worth a fortune. These officials were a little premature – the trains will pass through the area by 2010, 50 years later.

In order to maintain a minimal standard of living, my mother worked as a maid for wealthy families in northern and central Tel Aviv. She carried baskets and washed floors, just like a foreign laborer. On occasion I take part in public debates regarding discrimination in Israel. “What do you, Ashkenazim, know about poverty,” a professor or doctor of Mizrahi descent tells me. I do not reply: One’s CV should not serve as an argument in a debate.

I recounted the synopsis of my mother’s life in answer to the following question: What did I get from her that helped me later in life? I got the refugee toolbox: Determination not to show despair, constant willingness to start everything anew, and the belief that no job is too humiliating and that it must be done well. I also gained curiosity, tolerance, endurance, and the ability to keep anger bottled up inside. I also gained the powerful hope that even in difficult situations we always have the freedom of choice; nothing is pre-determined.

I also took from my mother a slight revulsion in the face of big money and the reminder that there are always weaker people, whose situation is worst than mine. Don’t judge them; speak on their behalf, my mother taught me. My mother did not understand economics, but she did understand what it takes to write for human beings. Until she was on her deathbed, I would read out my articles to her, translated to Polish. She was my most demanding critic.

Older people should not be writing about their parents, but rather, about their children. This will make for optimistic writing. My children are wonderful and happy; my mother was an unhappy woman who did not feel that she belonged most of her life. She made do with little, and even the little was scarce. She was small and withered, she coughed, and she died suffering. Her death did not leave an empty space in the world. So when people ask me why I’m a Zionist, I reply: So that my children won’t be refugees like my mother was.