It was the summer of 2014, at a sleepaway camp for Jewish youth, when Joshua Ryan Raikin first noticed Danit Levey Hetsroni during a morning prayer service. He was 15; she was 14.
“I see her, and I see her smile, and it’s the biggest, most beautiful and warm smile,” Raikin said.
He mustered the courage to introduce himself, sparking a romance with all the rush of young love. Their first kiss (on the camp tennis court, three days after meeting) was a first for both. For three weeks, they spent every day together, and he recorded their shared moments in a spiral-bound notebook.
After he leaned in for their initial kiss, he filled a page with the words “I did it!” over and over. He wrote about giving her a heart-shaped leaf he found and how good it felt when she fell asleep resting against him on the bus during a camp outing. He imagined them stargazing.
That summer felt light and full of possibility at Camp Ramah in Ojai, Calif. But even then, both teenagers had already faced challenges beyond their years. When Hetsroni was 12, doctors discovered a tumor on her brainstem after she experienced numbness in her face. She underwent seven-hour brain surgery and six weeks of radiation.
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The tumor turned out to be benign, though the trauma associated with it was anything but.
“That is already a difficult age without the brain surgery, and I had to cut all my hair off, so I was really insecure about that,” said Hetsroni, now 26 and a senior volunteer coordinator at Jewish Family and Children’s Services, a social service agency in San Francisco. “I didn’t really talk about what had happened, and I just felt awkward in my own skin and distant from my peers.”
Raikin, 27, experienced his own health scare as a child when his mother’s personal trainer warned that his obesity could lead to diabetes, or even an early death. Doctors had told him he needed to lose weight, but hearing his health risks outlined in such stark terms landed differently.
“That shocked me to my core,” said Raikin, now the vice president for marketing and operations at Kingdom Homes, a real estate investment firm based in Los Angeles.
At 12, he revamped his diet and began working out weekly with a trainer. “I became his soldier,” he said. But even after getting fit, self-doubt lingered.
“I never felt like anyone could be attracted to me,” Raikin said. Two years later, when Hetsroni showed interest, “it was this crazy experience. I was head over heels.”
In the two years following that first summer together, the pair, who were both growing up in Los Angeles, experienced their share of teenage turbulence. They would break up and stay in touch, but one would long for romance while the other thought it best to remain friends. There were moments of confusion, jealousy and tears.
In 2016, at the end of their junior year in high school, they finally found themselves wanting the same thing at the same time — each other — and have been a couple since. About two years into dating, Hetsroni invited Raikin to read the journal she kept during her surgery.
“He was the first person I ever did that with,” she said.
The pair navigated a long-distance relationship while she worked toward a bachelor’s degree in communications at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. He surprised her with a carefully planned proposal on March 15, 2020, during a weekend getaway with friends. Four years ago, they moved to San Francisco, living together for the first time.
“We’ve done a lot of growing together,” Hetsroni said. She said she will lean on lessons learned from the relationship as she starts her own Jewish matchmaking service, which she plans to focus on full time when the couple moves to Los Angeles in September for Raikin’s job at Kingdom Homes.
“Some of my friends asked me, ‘Is it hard that you’ve just been with one person your whole life?’ That doesn’t even cross my mind,” Hetsroni said. “I’m just so lucky that I have known my person for so long.”
The pair married on May 31 at the camp where they met, with 350 guests in attendance. The officiant was Rabbi Adam Kligfeld of Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, who supported Hetsroni and her family through her brain tumor.
“The day before my surgery, we planted a strawberry plant,” Hetsroni said. “He told me, ‘One day we’re going to eat strawberries together.’”
The couple fulfilled that promise at the wedding reception, where dessert included strawberries (though not their own) and whipped cream. They spent the night in a room at Camp Ramah, and Hetsroni found, on her side of the bed, the notebook Raikin kept the summer he approached her. He had never let her see it before.
Reads one early entry: “I met this girl named Danit.”
The post A Teen Summer Romance and the Journal He Kept for Her appeared first on New York Times.
