The last time I saw Joe, I was with my family, eating, greeting, telling stories about this and that. After a few days, I noticed that if my Uncle Joe wasn’t at work, he was always with my Aunt Esther, his children, his grandchildren, or his dog. Curious, I thought.

So, I asked him, “Joe. Don’t you have any friends?”

Joe looked up, leaped to his feet, and said. “Come.” I followed him to the back of the house. He hopped on one bicycle, pointed to another bicycle, and said, “You want to meet my friends, I’ll show you my friends.” Then he began to pedal up the road. I leaped on the second bike and I followed him.

Joe was like a little gnome with a big dent in a high, furrowed brow. His wife, my Aunt Esther, had come to him from a tumultuous past. Born one of 13 children in Lachine, Canada, she survived her siblings (boot camp for adulthood), joined the military for a brief stint during the war, and then somehow landed up in California with three children, married to an abusive, alcoholic husband. With a lot of help (my parents, her brothers and sisters), funds were accumulated, and Esther sailed across the Atlantic with her offspring to become members of Degania B, a Kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee.

Beautiful setting to start a new life.

And beautiful settings often lead to … romance, of course. The real thing. The real guy. The real hero.

Enter Joe.

Joe Zion was the person we all would have wanted to be if we’d had the misfortune to be alive, young, and Jewish in Europe when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Joe was sixteen years old. Until the end of the war, he hid in the forest and fought in the resistance. Six million Polish citizens were murdered by the Germans during World War II. Joe survived. He emigrated to Israel.

Great timing.

Wham … Joe was being shot at again.

With Lebanon to the north, Syria on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee and Jordan on the south, Degania B was literally the bull’s eye of a target. And there was my Uncle Joe, smack dab in the middle.

In 1948, during the War of Independence, Joe was in a trench defending his kibbutz against a Syrian attack when a bullet or a piece of shrapnel gouged that hole into his forehead. He lost an eye, too. Same battle. Same trench.

I met Joe many years later. Long after he had fallen in love with my Aunt Esther. He was no longer a warrior then.

He was a short, energetic, smart, smart, smart forty-year-old man who spoke and wrote seven languages. Joe knew everything about everything, was willing to engage in philosophical discussions, and was happy with his small, tight family. He raised chickens.

“Chickens?” I asked. “You like chickens?”

“No. ”