“Bubs, there’s this guy — Yaakov Pleet — yeah, that guy, and yep, I ran into him again. Dude, you’re going to go into Tel Aviv one of these days and you’re going to run into Yaakov Pleet. I swear to god. You’ll know him when you see him. The guy’s a hoot.”
The sun was now up; the day had come. Time to pack the bags. Time to head home. What a ride it had been. What a journey. A defining year in my life.
___________
Fast forward three weeks. I’m back home in Iowa. It’s Easter Sunday, and Bubs is now standing shoulder to shoulder in a jam-packed sea of humanity in the center of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the heart of Old City Jerusalem.
He’s inhaling the fumes of incense and history, gazing at the vaulted ceilings high overhead, the sun casting filtered beams of light through stingy window slats high in the rotunda, pinching himself to be right here, of all places, and right now, of all occasions.
Behind him, a gentleman suddenly offers up an unsolicited guided tour, directly into Bubs’ left ear… “That section up there is twelfth century, built during the Crusades and, just next to it, those arched columns were rebuilt by the Ottomans after a fire in the early 1800s, but that portion of the wall you see there dates back a thousand years to the Byzantine period. You can find graffiti left by Crusaders etched into the columns just below…”.
Every hair on the nape of Bubs’ neck and arms was now standing on end. He wheeled 180 cramped degrees to face his one-in-a-billion guide in a throng — “You’re Yaakov Pleet, aren’t you?”
Even Mr. Pleet was a bit nonplussed by the encounter.
He was far more accustomed to being recognized on the streets of Tel Aviv… by people he’d already met…
__________
Forty years later, curiosity and this new thing called Google prompted me to do some research. After World War Two, Yaakov Pleet had indeed dedicated his life to help refugees reach Palestine. In 1946, he helped put together a shipload of immigrants in Italy — and even posed as the ship’s captain. The mission was a success and Yaakov lived out his days in a tiny room in the back of an old factory in the poorest section of Tel Aviv.
January 13 was both his birth and his death date. He passed on in 1981. Yaakov was born and raised — right here in Ottawa, five blocks from where I’ve lived this past decade…
You know, I fully expect to encounter Yaakov Pleet again some warm sunny day, on some Ottawa bus bench… I’ll know, because he’ll be spouting poetry, I’m pretty certain.
