Family History 7: The Windmill

To be human is to be creative. Every day we must actively engage with a reality recalcitrant to our dreams and desires. Reconciling reality with our desires requires imagination and effort. Furthermore we must deal with others whose dreams may find the reality of your actions and opinions inconvenient.

The most celebrated embodiment of this contradiction in Western literature is Don Quixote, the knight of La Mancha who decided to imagine his reality as if it were his dream chivalric vision. [I confess to having only read a few passages.] Most famously, he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants.

For most of us this is just comic entertainment, just part of our European mental furniture about idealism and reality. But for some, this stirs greater imaginative feats… as it did for my grandfather (my dad’s father). In his book, The Long Winding Path, he wrote:

“One day he came across the biography of Miguel de Cervantes and on the front page of the book was a windmill.  Well, thought the boy, maybe the ironic windmill, of Don Quixote, can be put to such practical use as the production of electricity for such down to earth purposes as the lighting of homes and streets and making industrial production.  He discussed his ideas with his tutor, the engineer, and they came to the conclusion that the only way to demonstrate the idea was for the boy to put it all on paper, both in memoranda as well as in the design of the windmill, with detailed drawings.  The engineer promised to check both and voice his frank criticism as well as, if merited, his approval.  The project however, should be entirely the boy’s – from concept to execution, first on paper and, if possible later in erection of at least one such windmill.  They went into the project with the enthusiasm that the young possess. He wrote feverishly the memorandum based on climatic and meteorological data he found in that well stocked library.  This data was not too extensive.  In the Land of Israel, just recently taken over by the British, their predecessors hardly kept any such information.  Next, he went into the design of his windmill.  He has never done anything of this sort.  He therefore, did what actually amounted to pencil sketches, at first of what he conceived as the main parts and then the windmill as a whole.  When he was done, he showed it to his friend, the engineer, who examined it very carefully.  “Well”, he said, “this will not pass an engineering test, but it has all the elements for working drawings and for erection instruction” and he looked with admiring amusement at this fourteen year old.  “I suggest that you now show it to our new neighbour, the one on the other side of your plot.  He is a high school Principal and he may have some comments of his own”.”

In my imagination, what happens next is that the high school Principal encourages my grandfather to actually build the windmill, and they do. But when I return to the text, I realize that my imagination has erred,       - though what really happens is just as revolutionary for my family’s fortunes as if the windmill had been built.

Having shown his plans to the Principal, the Principal decides to take my grandfather out of agricultural school (he works on a farm with my great-grandmother; his father having died 5 years or more earlier in Alexandria). He offers my grandfather a full scholarship, as the school is far beyond my family’s means. My grandfather goes to the Principal’s Commercial high school where he receives a much better education. This education prepares my grandfather with the practical skills he would use throughout the varied entrepreneurial ventures that he would later undertake. Thus a better education radically improves his prospects.

The critic in me sees another important theme emerging in this passage. On the one hand, I see the emergent interest in engineering, electricity and power generation. Slightly earlier he writes

“And then he came across works on electricity.  He couldn’t comprehend it all…. after a couple of months he knew enough [from talking with his engineer neighbor] to imagine something about electricity and electric motors In the course of these discussions, he discovered the fact of the “prevailing winds” and their constancy, and he concluded that these winds, very reliable in that country, could be harnessed to create electricity if only a method could be adopted.  These thoughts kept at him constantly.”

After high school he would work for the Electric Power Corporation as a trainee to “help plan and construct electric power facilities.” Later in life, he would own and run a factory that produced the batteries that powered aircraft.

On the other hand, I see his interest in climate and meteorology – the invisible forces that govern the air around us. During the Second World War, he would fly aircraft to help the US government work out the weather when undertaking air missions.

Both of these powerful, seen-at-second-hand forces – electricity and air movements – would thus shape his life. He could merge the palpable and the impalpable to generate practical, tangible projects; make the visible from the invisible; and imagine some of the practical and yet historical forces necessary to make his family’s desire for a Zion in British Palestine a reality.

But his life was also littered with failures – from failing to secure funds in the US for a navy for the Haganah in his late teens/early twenties; to losing his entire business on a promise given by an Israeli minister; to filing for bankruptcy on a later entrepreneurial project involving construction late on in his life.

Part 3 to come – the windmill- the boom and bust of the risk-taker, the spinning fortunes of the ambitious; the cycles of family history.

“I have no reason to live” said David one Saturday afternoon when they met on the beach.  “Well, ‘create’ a reason” said the boy.  “You must aim for the ‘impossible’ and you make it possible.  That will give you reason to live until the end of your days”.