Sipping chai among a sea of baby strollers and Times readers at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on a Sunday morning in spring, Avishai Mekonen is your prototypical Upper West Side dad, clad in a weathered baseball cap, crisp polo shirt and a five o'clock shadow. The only thing remotely unordinary about this slight, cheery 39-year-old emerges when he smiles--revealing an unusually-late-in-life set of shiny braces--and when he speaks, softly and carefully, with a faint accent that is difficult to place.
But the story of how Mekonen came to be a Manhattan father is not shared by many of his neighbors. It begins one quiet, pitch-black night in 1983 in a mountainous village of northern Ethiopia, when Mekonen's parents woke him and his siblings suddenly, announcing that it was time to depart for the Holy Land.