Among Red Poppies in the Sand: Prose and Poetry of Promise and Remembrance, My First Trip to Israel

The three red poppies on the cover of Among the Red Poppies in the Sand reflect the three generations of Jews familiar to and understood by the author: grandparents who came from the Diaspora and the Holocaust; their children who toiled in the fields and who raised their children in the free and democratic state of Israel, as well as those across the United States; and their children, who now constitute the contemporary Israeli military, along those memorialized in cemeteries around the world. Not only is the Israeli desert environmentally hostile, but there is military contention between two major cultures that are, tragically, socially and economically dichotomous. Among the Red Poppies in the Sand expresses the hope that the fourth generation will live in peace and mutual respect.