Another week, another Friday night spent solo. Sitting at the computer terminal inside the Carleton University laboratory, Ishmael Rosenberg Teshale sighed deeply. It wasn't easy being him. He'd been living in the City of Ottawa, Province of Ontario, for over a year and could still count his friends on one hand. Friday night and he had nothing better to do than to sit at a computer, playing games online while listening to Linkin Park songs on YouTube. Ah, the life of a genius slash recluse. Fun, as in really not. If only his parents could see him now. Theirs was a fascinating story. They'd be disappointed to see their only son tainted with ordinariness, after everything they overcame not only for their love but also to create him.
Ishmael looked at his Blackberry, and saw that his pops had called him from Boston, where his parents were spending their summer vacation. The young man sighed. Although he loved his old man, he didn't feel like talking to him tonight. His father, Ahmed Muhammad Teshale was born in the City of Alamata in northern Ethiopia and his mother Josephine Rosenberg was an American Jew originally from the City of Boston, Massachusetts, who moved to the City of Tel Aviv, Israel, in the 1980s. Ahmed Muhammad Teshale grew up in a predominantly Muslim part of Ethiopia, but he was raised in the Jewish faith. He moved to Israel in 1985 as a young man. There, he experienced a lot of discrimination because many of the European Jews living in Israel had no love for their darker-skinned cousins from eastern Africa, and they didn't exactly hide it from them.
Ishmael thought about what it must have been like for his dad to struggle through the racist Israel of the old days as a young Black Jewish man. There were so many limitations placed upon the Ethiopian Jews in Israel in the old days. In many ways, they weren't treated any better than the sub-Saharan refugees whom Israel was rounding up and detaining today in an act of xenophobia and racism masquerading as ethnic and cultural self-preservation. After obtaining Israeli citizenship, Ahmed Muhammad Teshale opted to study in the United States of America. In 1987 at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, he met a lovely young Caucasian woman named Josephine Rosenberg, the daughter of an upper-middle-class Jewish family who'd been in New England for many generations. It was love at first sight for the two of them. Ahmed had a thing for tall, athletic young white women with blonde hair and blue eyes and the six-foot-one, lanky Josephine Rosenberg was his dream woman. In spite of objection from her family, Josephine Rosenberg married Ahmed Muhammad Teshale, the handsome Ethiopian Jew, and moved to the town of Tel Aviv, Israel, to be with him. This, five years after they met.
According to the most sacred laws of Judaism, any person born of a Jewish mother could move to the State of Israel and eventually claim Israeli citizenship. It was easy for Josephine Rosenberg to move to Israel. She had always been fascinated by what life must be like in the Jewish state, and she was in love with a tall, dark and handsome stud who took her breath away. Even though she knew they'd face adversity, she was fairly confident. The young New Englander was armed with a civil engineering degree from Northeastern University and as for Ahmed Muhammad Teshale, he earned himself a Law degree from Northeastern University. They stayed in America long enough for him to earn U.S. citizenship as well.
The two of them spent half the year in Israel and the other half in America. They were passionately in love and traveled the world together. They visited Spain, Italy, Germany, and Brazil. They visited South Africa after the end of Apartheid was officially announced by president Nelson Mandela himself. The only country they didn't visit was Ahmed's homeland. For reasons the young Ethiopian would rather not go into. Ahmed swore to himself he would never return to the Republic of Ethiopia, where Ethiopian Jews were thought of derisively by both the Christian majority and the growing Muslim minority of the oldest country in the continent of Africa. Five years after they met, their son Ishmael Rosenberg Teshale came into the world. Ishmael Rosenberg Teshale was born in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, at Mass General Hospital. On the afternoon of February 5, 1989. At seven o'clock. He weighed in at seven pounds four ounces. A little brown bundle of joy with curly hair and greenish eyes.
Ishmael flipped through his family photo album on his Facebook profile. He gazed at pictures of his parents on the beach in the City of Manaus, Brazil. Shots of them at the Citadelle La Ferriere in the island of Haiti. Riding horses in the region of Camargue in France. Yeah, his parents were a fun-loving couple. They defied the odds by meeting in the first place, and then they got married, achieved their academic and professional dreams, and found lasting happiness. Oh, and along the way they had him. A six-foot-four, 250-pound young man with light brown skin, curly black hair and pale green eyes. The only son of an Ethiopian-born African-American father and Caucasian American mother. A citizen of the United States of America by birth and of the State of Israel by blood, through his father and mother, both of whom were Jewish.
Ishmael clicked out of the Facebook album, and checked his messages. He checked his messages for the tenth time that night, hoping something new had come up. Nada. Exasperated, he finally checked the one profile he told himself he wouldn't check. That of Bethlehem Melkamu. The six-foot-tall, curvy and absolutely stunning young Ethiopian woman he met in his civil engineering class at Carleton University. Bethlehem was something else. A whip-smart stunner who took his breath away. Ishmael, a lifelong nerd ( in spite of being big and tall ) surprised himself by working up the courage to approach her. And he also asked her out. Imagine his surprise when she said yes. They began officially going out.
