My grandfather's key

Generally, we use the word "key" to describe positive things. A business may purport to hold the "the key to success"; lovers will give each other "the keys to their hearts"; a coach boosts morale by telling his athletes that they are all "key players." A key connotes the ability to open doors that seem shut, a burgeoning of possibilities, the power to surmount barriers. I've noticed that as I grow older, the number of keys I own has grown with my responsibilities: My first key was to a piggy bank that guarded the precious dollars I would save from lemonade stands opened with my neighbors. Later on, my house keys let me into my home, representing membership in my family and the trust they placed in me. My car keys came along and allowed me to travel, see friends and attend events. Now, my room key grants me a solitary space inside a hectic college life, a home away from home.

Yet one key haunts me to this day: my grandfather's key.

It's an old key, long and thin and somewhat out of place, as if it belonged in the Victorian era along with top hats, walking canes and Charles Dickens. I can see its former glory, imagine it opening a stately door to a magnificent house. I feel vestiges of the importance and power its owner must have felt knowing what it represented. The maturation of a poor, fatherless boy, who left his ancestral home for the city in search of success, into a wealthy, influential man who provided a magnificent home for his wife, six kids, extended family members, servants and drivers. The key was good then. It opened doors and signified success and ownership. As it jangled in his pocket, it must have reminded this man of the rewards of hard work and good fortune and inspired faith in future possibilities.

The key is cold to my touch now. It has not opened anything in 64 years. Its vibrancy and aura have dulled along with its shine and color. As I hold it, it feels as though, year after year, its New Year's resolution fails and depression and sadness inflict the same, weighing toll on it as they do on us. I cannot imagine it being this heavy in my great?grandfather's hand, 64 years ago, when he would nimbly unlock the door after work and find his young son waiting by the door for him.

As I turn the key over in my palm, I see a momentary glimmer in my grandfather's eye as he tells me how each time he heard the lock twist, he would jump up from his seat to greet his father. The glimmer, however, is fleeting, and his old eyes harden again, as if his temporary lapse of nostalgia has left him vulnerable to a harsh reality. By reminding my grandfather of the happiness that the key created in a previous life, it reopens the still fresh wounds inflicted when that life was ripped from him.

My grandfather watched his home fade beyond the horizon 64 years ago, when he and his family escaped the fall of Haifa. He was 11 years old at the time. Like his key, my grandfather's tragedy bears heavier and heavier on him as the years pass. He is now 76. Though he left Palestine so many years ago, Palestine never left him. Just as his key carries thousands of beautiful memories tinged, stained, corrupted by the tragedy of its parting, my grandfather carries Palestine within his heart. His idyllic childhood, his loving family, his closest friends, all in some way overshadowed by the catastrophe that caused them to disappear. How can he remember his home, built three stories high by his uncle, without seeing the key I now hold in my grasp lock its door for the last time? Can he still admire his father's noble and generous decision to share his house, floor by floor, with a Jewish couple fleeing the Nazi Holocaust and British officers stationed in Haifa, knowing now that these guests would not fear for their lives nor have to abandon the home on that fateful spring day? He cannot recall the view from his porch atop Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea without looking back up its slopes at tank barrels opening fire on the docks where his family crowded, along with thousands of other Arabs, with the hopes of boarding one boat among the armada of makeshift vessels frantically setting sail into the sea.

While Friends of Israel at Tufts readies itself to celebrate Israeli Independence day, I implore them and the readership of this publication to remember that, like a key or a beautiful memory, a celebration of independence can evoke more pain and sorrow than the joy and happiness that its name may entail. Palestinians mark Israeli independence as Al?Nakba, the great "catastrophe." By "catastrophe," we don't mean the creation of a Jewish homeland; rather, we mean the forced removal (through fear and violence) of three-quarters of a million Palestinians whose ancestral threads bound them up with the land so tightly that it required a brutally ruthless, severing cut, rather than a methodical yet deceitful unwinding to separate these people from their homeland. Just as a key may lock us out of the very place we wish to enter or happy memories may become unbearable with the pain that ended them, independence may be irrevocably stained by oppression and exodus. Celebrating independence each year will not erase its mutilated meaning for Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor will the exaltation of Jewish self?determination ever extinguish the desire of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and establish a state of their own.

The key remains in my hand; its cool metal sends shivers up my arm. "Why do you keep it?" I ask my grandfather.

"I don't keep it," he replies, "it just never left."

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Hani Azzam is a freshman majoring in international relations.