"I can remember flying over Long Island. It was toward dusk and you could see the light down below--I had a strong sense of identification," he says.
Fauth stayed in New York City for a day, then flew to the Midwest and then headed home to the Pacific Northwest. In this familiar region he did some gold panning with a cousin and visited the California redwood forests. He even found some gold, but it was "not enough to pay for the gas fare," he quips.
The month, significantly, was July: Fauth was just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July--and he celebrated it three times.
Fauth reached the West Coast just in time for the Independence Day festivities--first, he headed for Salem, Oregon for a party. As expected, he moved on from there and headed for another celebration, this time in Drain, Oregon, where they played "a lot of softball," he recalls fondly. He ended the day of celebration, not in Drain, but Corvallis, Oregon, where he and some relatives watched the sun go down on what was for them just another Fourth of July, but was for Fauth a return--a knowledge that he was finally where he ought to be.
Applications, Acceptance and Adjustment
Upon returning to Israel, Fauth lost no time in sending away to various universities for applications. Although his parents objected to secular education, Fauth says at that point in his life he finally knew that he wanted to go to college, despite the fact that he had bypassed high school.
He took, and did exceedingly well on, a barrage of standardized tests, from the SAT to six Achievement Tests, to the LSAT and the GRE. All the schools to which he applied, including Duke University, the University of Chicago, three University of California schools and Harvard, accepted him. Only Yale rejected him.
And just like the many high school seniors who got into Harvard with him in 1989, it was difficult for Fauth to say no to the College. So, after an alumni interview at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Fauth soon found himself in Cambridge and in the middle of Harvard Yard.
"I do remember standing in the Yard the first day and feeling slightly disappointed that there was none of that electric tingle that the literature promised me," Fauth says. But despite the initial disappointment, Fauth has, indeed, found a home here. He is on the Undergraduate Council as well as the Coop board, and he is a government major who, like many other such students, plans to go to law school.
And then it's on to electoral politics, he says.
For the first time in his life, Fauth is completely on his own. He is even, as he says, "swinging in the opposite direction [from religion]." And by this year, he has gotten over the tremendous age gap between himself and his fellow undergraduates.
Hillary K. Anger '93, a friend of Gordon's, says she met the sophomore on the Undergraduate Council and enjoys talking to him because "he's so much older than most students and he has reflected on so much more."
"He's so much more mature than most sophomores I know," she adds.
Indeed, Fauth admits "most of the students have been quite kind to me."
"That first semester last year, I did feel a lot older than I needed to," he says.
But despite his amazing ability to adjust to college life and to juggle his past with his present, Fauth seems to make himself difficult for the outsider to understand. He admits that his parents were "disappointed" when he decided to come to Harvard--being a government major did not help his situation with them, for, as Fauth says, they preached "political non-involvement." But in a monotone, Fauth states that father and mother "basically just accepted it."
On why he moved to Israel in the first place, despite the fact that he has always considered America to be his home, Fauth says, "Israel is an interesting place to live." While in Israel, he came close to marriage several times, he says, offering no more detail.
Perhaps Fauth speaks in generalities about the past because he has made the decision to close that chapter of his life and open a new one. His first 34 years were filled with farm-work, churches, herky-jerky education, a lot of reading, traveling and near-marriage. A lot for one person. But only now, it seems, at the age of 35 and as a sophomore at Harvard, does Fauth seem truly content with his life--only now that he is in a land which will provide him with that once-elusive secular education, and many more Northwestern Fourth of July dusks.