A tree has been planted in Israel in memory of my mother.
Mum was a practicing Roman Catholic, but surely she would be moved beyond words by this gesture. I spoke with her many times of that land I have loved since my first visit, when I sang in Jerusalem, and where I spent two wondrous weeks of discovery, on tour with the Royal Opera House (I’ve written before about that memorable ‘Carmen,’ performed each night under the stars at the foot of the ancient city, at King David’s Gate).
Harry, the thoughtful man behind this memorial tree, traveled north from his current home in Florida several times in the last few years, and always visited my mother. When she died last January, just weeks short of age 101, Harry came up once more to attend the funeral, to represent his family, and was there aside our own family, even as I bent to my knees and laid her ashes in the frozen earth on that sad, snowy morning.
He is the proud son of Dr. Walter Heuman, our family practitioner while I was growing up. The Doctor and his wife Ruth fled the dire suffering of Nazi persecution in those darkest of hours, and finally settled in our little home town of Pavilion, NY.
He offered a job to my mother after a house call back in 1957 because he liked her and trusted her. Dad was against the idea, but she had ideas of her own, including buying me a piano. I was 6.
Mum worked for him at great sacrifice for over 22 years as his medical secretary and general right arm.
Everything I learned about religious and racial tolerance was founded and shaped in those days, right there in that wonderful, small community.