by Ruth Gruber
“Just a glass of tea will be fine,” Mama said.
The garden tearoom was a mass of white uniforms; young doctors and nurses from the Hadassah Hospital sat at little tables, eating sandwiches and cakes.
Raquela, sitting with Mama, looked furtively at the open yard behind the bakeshop. In the center of the yard was the cistern used to catch the precious rainwater. But this cistern had been emptied of its water. Shula had taken Raquela down the stepladder one day and shown her the underground cavern that stretched beneath the whole yard and the house. Every evening, Shula told her, twenty or thirty young Haganah men climbed down the ladder. They marched; they drilled; they learned to shoot rifles. And no one could hear them. For the Patt apartment was headquarters for the Haganah High Command, and Jacob Patt, Shula’s uncle, famous for his bravery, was Jerusalem commander.
Two men in mufti sat at the table next to theirs, sipping coffee. Jacob had taught her to observe closely. Yes, she could see a bulge near their back pockets.
When they finished their tea, Raquela and Mama returned to the bakeshop to make their selection for the Bat Mitzvah. Raquela studied the glass showcase, her mouth watering as she chose cheesecake, layer cake, a honey cake golden brown and flecked with almonds, English sponge cake, cookies, mish-mish, apricot pie, and her favorite, Mrs. Patt’s apple strudel.
A bell rang. Mrs. Patt whispered, “It’s the British. The bell is to warn us they’re coming. The Haganah boys on the terrace must have seen them heading here. Just stand and talk to me as if nothing is happening.”
Raquela saw the men with the bulging pockets dash in from the garden tearoom. Mrs. Patt grabbed their pistols, pushed open the back door where the bakers were kneading dough for doughnuts, and tossed the guns into the pile of soft dough.
In seconds, the guns disappeared.
Back at her station behind the counter, she casually began writing up Mama’s order. The glass door opened. Raquela’s heart began thumping so loudly she was sure the two British policemen could hear it.
Afraid to lift her eyes, she saw their khaki shoes, their khaki socks, their khaki shorts. Coarse, curly brown hair covered their bony legs. She raised her eyes a little; each of them carried a club with a leather handle strapped to his wrist; attached to their khaki belts were black holsters. She tried to look calm, like Mrs. Patt and Mama.
“What can I do for you?” Mrs. Patt asked.
“We’re sorry to trouble you, ma’am. But we have a search warrant,” the taller policeman said.
“Search,” Mrs. Patt said expansively. “Search wherever you want. But pray, may I ask, what are you searching for?”
The policemen cast their eyes around the bakeshop. “Mrs. Patt, you know very well what we are searching for.”
“Please, gentlemen”—Mrs. Patt’s voice was controlled—“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but go right ahead.”
Raquela watched the two uniforms enter the garden tearoom. All the doctors were frisked. The law prohibiting Jews from carrying weapons was strictly enforced, and there were Jews languishing in jail, serving hard sentences, for carrying so much as a pocketknife. Arabs were almost never searched.
The only “weapons” the doctors had were stethoscopes. The policemen returned to the bakeshop and opened the back door to the bakery. Inside, the bakers were rolling the dough. Raquela thought her heart would burst right out of her body.
She saw the policemen approach the bakers. She sent a silent message through the air: Dear God, don’t let them look in the dough. Please don’t look in the dough.
The policemen strode past the bakers’ table to the icebox. Shula had once shown her how the Haganah concealed its guns in the upper half of the icebox, behind sacks of vegetables.
The policemen opened the lower half of the icebox, looked in, found nothing, and shut the door. They returned to the bakeshop. Raquela’s heart dropped back into place.
“May I offer you gentlemen some cake?” Mrs. Patt smiled, never more gracious.
The policemen looked at the glass buffet. “You know how we fancy your cheesecake, Mrs. Patt,” the shorter one said. “But we have no time. We have a few more places to search. We’ll be back.”
“You are always welcome,” Mrs. Patt said. “Maybe you’ll take a few cookies with you now? A little nourishment for the road.”
“You’re very kind. Don’t mind if we do.”
She stuffed two large bags with cake and cookies.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the policeman said, smiling. “You’re most generous indeed.”
Raquela watched the two khaki-clad men, who had marched into the shop bristling and suspicious, walk out like pleased customers.
Mrs. Patt turned to Mama. “Now back to Raquela’s Bat Mitzvah!”
The garden was set with long tables covered with Mama’s white sheets and centerpieces of Papa’s white calla lilies. Raquela and her brothers brought out bowls heaping with fresh fruit, platters of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, cheese sandwiches, bottles of orange juice and gazoz—lemon-flavored soda—and trays stacked high with cakes still hot from the Patt Bakery.
Mama, putting the last touches of ferns on the table, looked up at Raquela, already several inches taller than she. Raquela saw tears form in Mama’s eyes. “If only Zayda and Bubba could have lived to see this day,” Mama said. “It’s already over six years since they died, and I can’t fill the hole they left in my life.”
Raquela put down the glass bowl she was holding.
“They were always so happy.” She looked beyond the festooned garden, down the road Zayda had walked so often. “They worked so hard, yet they were always laughing. Sometimes I think, wherever they are, they’re whirling around, dancing and singing their Hassidic songs. I still remember Zayda’s stories. How excited he was when he came here from Russia, from his town, Vitebsk. When was it, Mama—about 1880? That’s more than fifty years ago. He used to tell me how a good Hassid loves two things—the Torah and work. They both loved living so much; I can’t think of them being dead.”
Mama wiped her eyes. “We must hurry, child. This is no day to be sad.”
Earlier in the morning, Mama had asked Raquela, “Would you like to invite Aisha? She’ll be coming soon with her figs and eggs.”
“Aisha! I don’t know, Mama.” The terror in the Seminar welled up.
“Maybe it’s better not to ask her,” Mama said. “It might not be too healthy for her if some of the ruffians in Ein Karem found out she had come to your Bat Mitzvah.”
All afternoon the guests arrived, relatives from both sides of the family, Mama’s Russian and Papa’s Sephardic cousins and aunts and uncles, school friends and family friends from Jerusalem and from the towns in the north and the kibbutzim that had become Haganah sentinels.
Raquela, radiant in a white party dress with a ruffled collar, stood at the garden gate to welcome each guest. Soon the party was in full swing; some guests danced on the patio; others sat at the tables, eating the food and drinking orange juice and gazoz.
The accordionist struck up a hora. Mama and Papa joined hands with Raquela, and soon most of the guests were up, dancing in a circle, faster, faster, faster, until, laughing and damp with exhaustion, they stopped.
Now the musician began pumping a Russian melody. Mama danced alone, her slim, well-shaped legs flying over the patio floor. Like Bubba and Zayda, Mama could dance at any hour. She pulled Raquela and her school friends out to the floor for a polka or one of the Hassidic dances she had learned as a child.
The music changed. Señora Vavá dressed, as always, in brown, with a necklace of three strands of seed pearls twined in her hair, rose from the table. Everyone moved to the side watching as she led Raquela into the center of the patio, the stately grandmother and the growing girl, delighted smiles on their faces, both holding their heads tilted ever so slightly back, both carrying their bodies gracefully yet regally straight, dancing a formal Spanish dance, the brown silk skirt swishing against the party dress,
as if even the dresses were magically drawn to each other.
It was long past midnight when the music stopped and the guests began to depart. Señora Vavá bestowed her benediction on Raquela: “May you be as Rachel, your namesake in the Bible. May you be, like her, a mother in Israel.” Raquela shut her eyes, her grandmother’s fingers seemed to press the blessing into her forehead. “Be as Rachel…” “Raquela” was the Sephardic form of “Rachel.”
Señora Vavá bent toward her. “Never forget, no matter what happens—more riots, more disasters—no matter what lies they tell about us. Never forget, Raquela, you are a ninth-generation Jerusalemite. Sephardic on your father’s side, Ashkenazic on your mother’s. You carry within you the two great streams of Jewish civilization. Never forget!”
* * *
*Sephardic Jews name their children for the living as well as for the dead.
THREE
JANUARY 31, 1943
Snow rarely fell in Jerusalem: at most, once or twice a year.
Raquela jumped out of bed, on the last Sunday in January, to find snow swirling around her open bedroom window. She stood before it freezing as the wind raced toward her, ferrying white flakes in its wake.
Was the snow an omen: good, because it made all of Jerusalem, even its poorest alleys, beautiful? or evil, because the city, isolated on its mountains, was so vulnerable?
On the treacherous hairpin-curved roads, nothing moved. And Raquela was due at eight in the morning for her first day at the Hadassah-Henrietta Szold School of Nursing.
She closed the window, rubbed her hand over the frozen pane, and watched the uncertain daybreak. Was the city paralyzed already?
Swiftly, then, she pulled a woolen skirt and a sweater over her head. She glanced in the mirror as she brushed her long hair, now chestnut brown with hints of gold. In these six years since her Bat Mitzvah, she had grown tall, like Papa and Señora Vavá. She held the hairbrush motionless for a moment, mourning the beloved grandmother who had died just before World War II engulfed the Middle East.
How would Señora Vavá have reacted to my becoming a nurse? she wondered. Be a mother in Israel.…Was nursing wounded soldiers back to life—was that not being a mother in Israel?
She finished packing the clothes, checking them off the nursing school’s list: six bras, six panties, six slips, six pajamas—all labeled with her name—and one party dress and pumps.
Papa and Mama were waiting for her as she joined them at the dining table in the entrance foyer. Papa was quiet, a faraway look in his eyes. Mama, bustling back and forth to the kitchen, boiling coffee on her little primus—the one-burner kerosene stove—kept talking: “And remember, Raquela, if you don’t like the school, if you don’t like being a nurse, you can always come home.”
“I’ll be all right.” Raquela downed the hot brew. “Don’t worry, Mama.”
“Just don’t be ashamed. If you’re not happy, just tell them you don’t want to stay and you can—”
Raquela jumped up. “I’d better get going. Who knows if any buses will even be running in this snowstorm.”
She scurried back to her bedroom and took a swift look at the simple iron bed, the books, the cut-out pictures on the wall. She said farewell to her childhood, picked up her suitcase, and ran out. At the table Papa still sat, deep in thought.
He stood up and embraced her. “May God go with you.”
She stooped to kiss Mama. But Mama was putting on her winter coat. “I’m coming with you,” Mama announced.
“Oh, no. I’m not a child, Mama. I’m eighteen years old.”
“Of course you’re not a child. Who in these black years can be a child anymore? I want to see with my own eyes where you’ll be spending the next three years of your life.”
Raquela was already putting her arms into her coat.
“Mama, please. I have to do this on my own.”
Papa placed his arm on Mama’s shoulder.
“Tova,” he said gently. “Trust her.”
Mama slowly took off her coat. “But put a scarf on your head. Don’t catch a cold your first day.”
Raquela smiled. “Good-bye, Mama.”
She turned to go. The wind leaned against the door.
She pushed it open. Mama and Papa stood at the door, watching her crunch through the fallen snow to the bus stop.
The world was white and silent. She looked at her watch; it was exactly seven o’clock. One hour to reach Mount Scopus—if the buses ran. Through the white fog she heard heavy tires skidding around the circle. She gripped her suitcase; the omen was good.
Bus 8 moved into sight, pulling up directly in front of her. The driver stepped down to wipe the streaked windshield.
Raquela lugged the suitcase up the steep stairs, slid it under the first seat and sat down next to the window. The driver clung desperately to the steering wheel, as if he were pinning the thick tires to the slippery road. Raquela held tight.
They were out of Bet Hakerem now, entering Romema from the west, its sidewalk coffeehouses deserted; then they were winding through the Jewish quarters. In the fresh snow, Mea Shearim looked like a winter shtetl in a Chagall painting.
Downtown, on King George Street, she stepped out to change buses. Luckily for her, Bus 9 pulled right up.
She slid her suitcase down the aisle. Bus 9 was jammed, most of its passengers Arab men in white keffiyehs. They watched her walk unsteadily until she found a seat at the rear.
Huddled against the window, cold and uneasy, she peered out as the bus skirted the walls of the Old City, dropped some of the Arabs in East Jerusalem, then lumbered up the road to Sheikh Jarrah, now the most dangerous quarter in all Jerusalem.
Here were the stone palaces, high and majestic behind stone fences, of the wealthiest Arab families, many of them leaders in the Arab riots. Here was the villa of the notorious terrorist leader, the mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, reviled and feared even by the other effendi families. But the mufti was not home; he was in Berlin, creating a Nazi-Arab axis, counseling with Hitler in his war office on the fine art and science of killing Jews and conquering the Middle East.
The bus stopped in Sheikh Jarrah; Raquela watched the Arab men draw their keffiyehs across their faces until only their eyes were visible. Then they lifted their long skirts over their western-style brown shoes as they descended into the snowstorm.
She tried to force herself to think of Aisha, but her mind refused to relinquish the still-vivid memory of the bus attack before her Bat Mitzvah, in 1936. For three years those attacks had continued, increasing in violence as the mufti’s gangs plundered, attacked, murdered. Then, in 1939, the riots ended abruptly.
The mufti and his terrorists had achieved their goal: a spectacular capitulation from the British.
Nineteen thirty-nine: the year that Hitler sealed the borders of Germany; the year the Nazi dictator sent his Panzers blitzkrieging across Poland and Central Europe, trapping Jews, holding them for the kill; the year Great Britain issued its “White Paper.”
The White Paper. Henceforth, for the next five years, the number of Jews permitted to enter Palestine would be cut drastically. Then, in 1944, no Jews at all would be allowed to enter. Jews could no longer buy any land in Palestine. Nor could they settle the land they already owned.
The Arab terrorists could afford to wait until 1944. For the White Paper meant the end of the British promise to establish a Jewish homeland. And, perhaps, with a few more riots, the extinction of the Jewish community in Palestine.
The bus was taking a long time unloading Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah. Raquela looked down at her hands. Sunburned. Callused. She smiled. Even her cheeks still felt the sun and wind of the last eight months working on a farm.
Like high-school graduates all over Palestine too young to join the army, she had volunteered for “national service.” The farms were desperate for help. Fifty thousand Palestinian-Jewish men and women had joined the British army; one hundred thousand British troops were in Palestine. They needed food.
Mama and Papa had sent her off with their blessings when school ended the last day of June 1942. With her friend from school, Rena Geffen, who lived nearby, she traveled north to Tel Adashim, a moshav, a cooperative village in the center of the Jezreel Valley between Jewish Affulah and Arab Nazareth.
The young women could easily have been sisters: both tall, well shaped, with luminous dark eyes, they were two of the prettiest and most popular girls in the University High School. They were happy young women, open and ripe for adventure.
They had chosen Tel Adashim for their wartime service because Papa had friends there whom Raquela had met as a child.
Tel Adashim had a pastoral air: barns filled with cows and horses, chicken coops, Caterpillar tractors, small stucco farmhouses with pink tile roofs, eucalyptus trees lining the unpaved roads. The main thoroughfare was aptly called the Mud Street.
The girls woke every morning at six and spent most of the day picking apples, pears, plums, and grapes, and corn for the cattle. They spent three days in meshek, three days in neshek. Meshek was farming; neshek was training in defense. The Haganah used the synagogue as headquarters; Raquela and Rena trained with the young sons and daughters of the moshav. They were taken into the fields and taught to use old World War I British and Italian rifles. They learned how to use clubs in hand-to-hand combat in case of Arab riots. They hid their guns in the underground “slicks” where the Haganah cached its firearms, away from the prying eyes of the British patrols.
Evenings they danced and sang and visited; they were the “sophisticated” city girls from Jerusalem, sharing their experiences with the girls on the farm.
After eight months they returned to Jerusalem, their national service completed.
In the living room in Bet Hakerem, Raquela confronted Mama and Papa. “I’d like to become a nurse so I can go to the front.”
Mama reacted instantly. She was angry, dismayed. “What do you want to be a nurse for? Mess around with bedpans and sick people. All that blood. See people dying. Ugh! What does a girl with your talents want that for?”