Eyes of a Different Color

A BookFest Award Winner in Personal Memoirs!

Oy vey! It’s 1979, and a young Israeli girl finds love with an American doctor during a brief visit and risks it all to get married after a whirlwind romance. Now the young couple must really get to know one another post-nuptials while trying to survive as fish out of water in rural Texas. This true love story will have you laughing and crying through life’s ups and downs while experiencing a marriage story like no other.

What could Bob, a newly minted New York physician, and an 18-year-old Israeli woman, Iris, have in common? From New York to Tel Aviv and, finally, of all places, Odessa, Texas, they develop a mutual love. While struggling to outline the boundaries of a marriage, Iris is determined to find her own identity, apart from just being a doctor’s wife. She must master a new language, face antisemitism, and fight the loneliness of being away from family and friends in a new land. Both experience a new culture in Texas, encountering cowboy boots, the Texas two-step, and differing religious views. Follow Bob and Iris as they travel from the skyscrapers and mountains of New York to the hills of Jerusalem and on to the desert of Texas. Meet the people they knew—New Yorkers, Israelis, Texans—and the situations of marriage, culture, and self-identity that many of us share. This true story is one of hard-won triumphs and unexplained tragedy.

Robert Jaffee, MD is a retired ophthalmologist. He is a graduate of New York University and The Medical College of Wisconsin, where he graduated with honors. After additional training in Pittsburgh, Connecticut, and New York City he passed his ophthalmology boards and moved for further training to Odessa, Texas. He eventually settled in the Catskill mountains of New York, remarried, and had a successful ophthalmic practice for thirty years. Now rn retirement in Williamsburg, Va., he pursues his hobby of collecting Civil War memorabilia and wet plate photography. He has written a dozen articles on Civil War artifacts that have been published in magazines such as North South Trader's Civil War, The Rail Splitter, and The Gun Report. He also co-authored a scientific article in the Archives of Ophthalmology. Currently he volunteers at Colonial Williamsburg and Historic Jamestown and is a lecturer at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.