Yoray Liberman for The New York Times  A woman walks through the Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, in Tel Aviv, which tells the story of the Jews in the diaspora and in Israel. More Photos »  CHAIM KAHANOVICH, an 18-year-old Polish Jew, caught his first brown glimpse of the Holy Land from the deck of a steamer in November 1924. He would never leave. Dark-haired, short and solid, Chaim brought with him a teenager’s blazing passion and an ideologue’s stubborn commitment to a cause. The long, slow journey had taken him from Warsaw by train to the Black Sea port of Constanta, then by ship through the Bosporus Straits and across the Mediterranean to Palestine. There at last, rising like the back of an ox from the blue water of Haifa Bay, was the sere ridge of Mount Carmel — the Promised Land.  The authorâs relatives, Chaim and Sonia Kahanovich, on their wedding day, Dec. 7, 1933. He came to Israel from Poland in 1924 at 18, and worked in the settlements. She joined him eight years later. More Photos »  From his boyhood study of Torah, Chaim would have known that Carmel was the place where the prophet Elijah faced down the pagan priests of Baal and fled the wrath of Queen Jezebel. But he had not come to Palestine to study Torah. He and his comrades were called halutzim — pioneers — and they had made aliyah (literally the ascent) to the Holy Land to plow the soil, plant grapevines and citrus groves, raise chickens, tomatoes and children, and to found a new nation.  I know the details of Chaim’s life and circumstances because he and his wife, Sonia, were relatives of mine (my maternal grandfather was their first cousin), and I recently went to Israel with my oldest daughter, Emily, for the first time to retrace their journeys and uncover what I could about our family’s story — a story of immigration shared by thousands of others. What made this trip especially inspiring was that I was able to cover so much of Israeli history: in this ancient but recently conceived nation, the founders lived just a generation ago. It’s as if the children and grandchildren of Washington, Jefferson and Adams were around to give interviews and point out historical sights.  So with Chaim and Sonia’s three middle-aged children, Leah, Shimon and Benny, as our guides, Emily and I made a kind of roots pilgrimage to farmhouses and cemeteries, museums and archives — tracking 25 years of Chaim’s life. We were fortunate because our Israeli cousins proved to be tireless family historians. Drawing on letters, interviews and stories they remembered, they put together a written account of Chaim’s emigration and early life in Palestine. They unearthed and translated a lengthy interview they had recorded with their mother shortly before her death. They introduced me to elderly relatives and friends who had lived through that period as children and to others who had come to Israel after surviving the Holocaust. Museums and archives in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and online databases helped, too, providing context, background, color and precious pieces of the genealogical puzzle.  Making our home base in Netanya, a rather drab but beautifully situated 1970s-era beach town north of Tel Aviv with a weird mix of French and Russian clientele, we began our journey where Chaim began his — in Haifa, looking down from the famed Bahai Gardens perched over the city on the slope of Mount Carmel.  From the gardens’ uppermost level, Haifa today has some of the topographical drama of Genoa or San Francisco — lush, green manicured terraces step down to a cityscape of red tile roofs and white low-rise apartment buildings; a working harbor, more muscular than pretty, bustles behind a breakwater; the azure bowl of a perfect bay opens beyond palms and beaches. The contemporary city also has its share of the depressing sprawl that blots much of Israel’s coastline. It was very different when Chaim disembarked here in 1924. Mixed Arab and Jewish then as now, the city Chaim saw was a tight enclave huddled between port and mountain. Mount Carmel, which today is thickly planted with luxury hotels, university campuses and condos, was largely wild.  It probably took Chaim and his comrades the better part of a day to creep by train from Haifa to the Sea of Galilee in Palestine’s northeast corner. We did the 50-mile trip in Benny’s car in under an hour and a half. But it felt like crossing into a different world, or several different worlds. A few miles east of Haifa, the congested suburbs drop away and the land opens up into the cotton fields and citrus and avocado groves of the black-soiled Jezreel Valley. On the other side of a range of hazy blue mountains, the landscape alters again to something vaguely reminiscent of the Rocky Mountain foothills — tan soil, scrubby vegetation, the air noticeably warmer and drier. We crested a rise, and suddenly, there at our feet was the immense turquoise teardrop of the Sea of Galilee (known as Kinneret in Hebrew) bordered by a patchwork of irrigated farm fields.  David Laskin, a Seattle-based writer, is at work on a history of his family.
A first-time visitor to Israel explores his familyâs past, from the shores of the Sea of Galilee to farms north of Tel Aviv to the galleries of remembrance in Jerusalem.