by Yehuda Koren
Assia stuck out at Tabeetha not only on account of her beauty, and as the only Jewish student at that time, but also because she was the most unruly of her classmates. The school prided itself that it ‘habituates to discipline’, and her teachers found it difficult to tame her. So did Dr Gutmann, who was himself drifting and not professionally focused; he did not guide Assia into any specific career or into acquiring any marketable skill. Her Tabeetha education fell into line with his vision of her as a grande dame, a society lady running a literary salon. Already at fifteen, Assia was destined to build her father’s castles in the air and be her mother’s knight in shining armour.
Tabeetha was to provide Assia Gutmann’s basic education, equipping her with some solid fuel to last her throughout her short life. Ted Hughes had the impression that in order to become an Anglophile, she let go of her Russian, German and Israeli heritage. Britain was for the rootless and restless Assia a shining beacon, lighting the way in all her future wanderings. With the legacy of Tabeetha, Assia would write poetry and excel as a London copywriter, comfortably moving around in literary circles. The drawing classes developed her artistic taste, made manifest in her style of dressing and knack for home decorating. But as much as it shaped her, Tabeetha was also her drawback, since it nourished her fantasies, bedazzled her and filled her with illusions.
‘All of a sudden, she began to speak English with a haughty, hot-potato accent. We laughed at it, mimicked her, and she looked at us contemptuously,’ her sister recalls. Assia’s different curriculum and interests cut her off from her Jewish friends too, and she no longer felt part of their world and leisure activities. Their idea of fun was to volunteer to pick fruit on a kibbutz in the summer holidays, while Assia’s was to sunbathe on the Tel Aviv beach.
She developed into a stunning young woman, for ever staring at her reflection in shop windows, sitting behind the bus driver to peek at his mirror and admire herself, savouring the looks coveting her beauty. Mira Hamermesh, the film-maker who later became a good friend, never forgot the sight of a stunning girl who stepped on a Tel Aviv bus, wrapped in a halo of crisp, fresh-smelling soap. The girl was wearing an off-the-shoulder, crisp, white cotton blouse, edged with black velvet, with a silver choker around her long neck, her brown hair hovering above her shoulders. A flowered velvet skirt with a tight belt hugged her waist, and Roman sandals encircled her ankles. She was carrying a leather shoulder bag in the shape of a bucket and was holding Vogue under her other arm. Like other Israeli teenagers at the time, Mira usually wore shorts, and was overwhelmed by this mysterious girl, who seemed to her the most beautiful and graceful creature she had seen outside a film. ‘She was a cooked teenager, while I was raw, and when I came home, I told my sister that I had fallen in love with a girl, a total stranger, and I would do everything to see her again, and if not, at least to dress like her.’ With a limited budget, Mira made a shirt of cheesecloth and sewed together some scarves to make a skirt. She drew the shape of the satchel from memory and sent her brother to look for one, but she could not find a choker.
During the Second World War, Palestine became an important strategic centre for over a hundred thousand British troops who were stationed in the Middle East. The seas, full of German mines and submarines, prevented them from travelling home on leave during the five years of the war, and Tel Aviv became their oasis. On their first long leave after a year, airman John Steele and his close friend, Keith Gems, made the 24-hour train journey from Cairo across the Sinai Desert to Tel Aviv. From there they planned to hitchhike up the coastal road to the snowy hilltops of Lebanon. The son of a banker at the Yorkshire Penny Bank, John Steele had left his home in Bromley to serve with the RAF. In April 1942 he was stationed in Port Taufik, in Egypt, servicing and refuelling flying boats in the marine craft section and picking up ditched flyers.
While Europe was in flames and Jews in the millions were being herded into ghettos and concentration camps, hundreds of thousands having already been shot dead over open pits in the woods near their towns and villages, Jews in Palestine enjoyed prosperity brought about by this same war. The number of cafés and restaurants in Tel Aviv soared to four hundred. ‘Palestine seemed like paradise after the dirt and flies of Egypt,’ remembers John Steele. ‘It was all so cultured, so civilised. It is there that I discovered for the first time Wienerschnitzel and Apfelkuchen and, in the coffee shops facing the sea, you could sit for hours, leafing through British journals and newspapers, playing chess, while music was all around you. To this very day, every time I hear Mendelsohn’s violin concerto, the memory of Café Nussbaum makes me mellow.’ The two friends registered at the Forces Hostel near the beach, and for the first time in so many months, savoured a Pimms No.1. Fortified, they set off to see what the local Jewish hospitality committee had in store.
For two decades, the Jews in Palestine had clashed with His Majesty’s Government over issues of sovereignty and the right of free immigration. Having Nazi Germany as their joint adversary changed the mood and policy from thorns to roses. ‘Give a warm welcome to the army,’ the Tel Aviv municipality appealed to the Tel Avivians in a huge Public Announcement Number 6 on 2 April 1940, which was plastered on barrel-shaped billboards all over town. ‘We should make their stay among us as pleasant as possible. When they dine in our restaurants, we should serve them the best cuisine and beverages.’ In the shops, the soldiers were to get extra-attentive service and the citizens were reminded that any misbehaviour would disgrace the entire town. ‘Safeguard the honour and interests of our city, and help make it a magnet for visitors and tourists,’ pleaded the mayor, Mr Israel Rokach.
The hospitality committee organised grand, lavish balls that attracted over a thousand officers and soldiers and the high society of Tel Aviv. The Ark, a Service Club Entertainment Centre on the sea front at 91 Hayarkon Street, had a restaurant, milk bar and a well-stocked library, and tickets were offered at reduced prices for concerts, opera and theatre. The soldiers could take a shower and have their clothes washed and ironed, while they were playing ping-pong, billiards, bridge, skittles, chess and darts. There were rackets and balls free of charge for tennis players and boats on the Yarkon River waited for those who preferred to row. Ladies volunteered to guide groups of soldiers on shopping sprees. In an attempt to round up support for the Zionist idea, there were organised trips across the country. Army doctors and nurses were shown around hospitals, engineers were put in touch with local Jewish colleagues, and soldiers, who had been teachers in their civil past, were taken to visit schools.
The Tel Aviv Hospitality Committee had a list of several hundred girls who volunteered for the tea dances every Wednesday at the San Remo Hotel. The admission fee of one shilling covered tea, cakes, cabaret and a dance band, which played from 5 to 7.15 p.m. But the most sought-after service was home-hospitality. Some 250 Jewish families opened their homes for tea and a chat, giving the soldiers a touch of family warmth in the midst of the rigours of war. Being shy, John Steele was reluctant to go, but Keith Gems insisted and, on one free afternoon, they registered. They were given a note with the address of the Gutmanns.
It was Lisa’s idea, to have a fresh breeze from abroad to relieve her suffocation. She was not just seeking a chess rival for her husband and a chat partner for herself: welcoming soldiers could also be an insurance policy for rainy days of hostility towards German nationals. Moreover, she was devising ways to get her family out of Palestine. Assia was to be the spearhead. Her upper-crust education should enable her to pick up a uniformed groom, plant roots in England, and serve as the lever to bring her family over.
Four
A Teenager in Love
Tel Aviv, 1943–46
Not entirely confidently, John Steele and Keith Gems walked down Balfour Street towards the Gutmann home. The evening was still. Windows were open and sounds of live music seemed to pour from every house.
The two airmen were a little nervous about meeting Assia and Celia’s parents but their apprehension quickl
y dissolved in the presence of their hosts. Lonya Gutmann regaled them with tales of adventure that conjured up fragrances of distant places. Indeed, all the Gutmanns’ memories of life in Riga, Moscow, Berlin and Pisa held the two young men, who had never left England before the war, riveted. ‘Dr Gutmann looked like Sigmund Freud,’ recalls Keith Gems. ‘He was caged in his own iron discipline, his Russian soul hidden somewhere, I suppose. Mrs Gutmann was tall, strong, full but not fat. She was bound by her Germanic discipline, obeyed her husband without question, kept an immaculate house, and cooked copiously. I remember her German cakes – very plain to look at, with different colours of layered mixtures. They were delicious.’
They had all been chatting in the living room while they waited for Assia to put on her final touches and make her grand entrance. The two airmen were spared any duel over her, however, since Gems found Assia ‘cold, calculating, and ill at ease’. He preferred the fourteen-year-old Celia, who seemed to him ‘warm, energetic in her blue denim shorts’. On his bed back at the Forces Hostel, the enamoured 21-year-old Sergeant John Steele wrote in his marbled blue diary: ‘Assia was but 16, but coupled with a schoolgirl innocence, she had a well-developed figure, and an exceedingly pretty face. I was definitely struck, and on finding she liked music, quickly monopolised her the whole time.’ For Assia, Steele embodied her image of the ideal Englishman: middle-class, public-school, tall and, on top of that, he resembled her favourite film star, George Sanders.
The Gutmann girls enchanted Steele and Gems enough for them to cancel the trip to Lebanon. Instead, they spent their entire leave in Tel Aviv. Before returning to their base in Port Taufik, the soldiers received an open invitation to visit the Gutmanns in Tel Aviv as often as they wished.
The following week, a smitten John Steele squeezed in an extra leave – no matter the tedious 24-hour journey from Egypt to Tel Aviv – so that he could again see Assia. He picked her up at the Gutmanns’ flat and they then strolled along the shore until they found a secluded spot. They spoke very little. Girls made Steele feel awkward and he was ill at ease in Assia’s company: ‘My parents had no friends with daughters my age, and I would have been expelled if found with a girl at school,’ he recalls. ‘After my schooling as a boarder in an English public school from age 13 to 18, and almost immediately transferred to the military and overseas posting, one can imagine how inexperienced I was in this my first encounter with the female sex.’
Steele did gain a bit more experience that afternoon on the beach, when Assia removed her dress and, clad in a bathing costume, lay basking in the sun. Later that night John Steele jotted down the events of their day together: ‘“May I kiss you, Assia?” There was a long, pregnant silence. Then she took my hand and pressed it tearfully to her face. We lay there. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the surf on shore. “I think I want to cry … nobody has wanted to kiss me before … I’m only sixteen.” These, and other broken sentences, she whispered to me as we lay there. Time seemed to stand still.’ Although she was five years his junior, it was the more dominant Assia who took the lead.
As evening set in, Assia donned her clothes and the two of them climbed to the top of a precarious cliff, where they watched the sun go down. On their way back to town they kept off the main streets, as Assia’s fear of scandal was acute. They turned into a tree-lined boulevard and sat on a bench. Steele felt as if he was playing the leading man in a romantic movie. ‘“You may kiss me, John … May I whisper something? … I love you,” she said.’
Assia was no exception in dating a British soldier; many Jewish girls were attracted to the men in uniforms. Tel Aviv was bustling with activity, wartime having made it a vital, international city. In the course of a short stroll on the promenade, a girl could meet robust Australians, sun-tanned Greeks, blond and blue-eyed Poles and, most of all, tall English servicemen. ‘They all behaved like perfect gentlemen,’ remembers Hannah Weinberg-Shalitt, a friend whom she had met at the Ark. ‘They asked permission for a goodnight kiss and were good at courting, something that the rough, arrogant Israeli men were lacking. They were good dancers, and had the money to spend on a drink, a cinema ticket, a meal and a small gift; all the indulgences that our boys couldn’t afford. The girls were caught in the middle; the British were cross that they were losing their fine men to us, and our people were furious that the most beautiful girls preferred soldiers.’
Assia’s father was very cold towards his favourite daughter’s suitor. ‘But the Mrs was all over me,’ recalls Steele. For he had already sensed that Lisa Gutmann had formulated a plan by which she would use his infatuation with her daughter to get the family out of Palestine. He, though, was not so sure that he was ready to commit himself. As for Assia, while she clearly enjoyed casting herself as the heroine of her own romantic novel or film, she was far from being head over heels in love with John.
The film soon became a war movie. After Italy dropped out of the war, Steele was assigned to a pinnace carrying a platoon of soldiers to the Greek island of Kastellorizon, which the British planned to occupy. The Germans promptly reacted and the bombarded British retreated. In the fray Steele’s boat was damaged by the dive-bombing and machine-gun fire. For two months Assia knew nothing of his whereabouts. ‘I have imagined the worst, so nothing would surprise me, but it is still harder and most unpleasant to stay in doubt, and not be sure of anything,’ a worried Assia wrote to Keith Gems on 18 November 1943. The tone of the letter, essentially an inquiry into the reason for John’s silence, does not suggest alarm over the destiny of one’s beloved but rather concern for an acquaintance. The letter may also have been an attempt by Assia to secure Gems as her other English option, should Steele have been lost. In any case, Gems passed the message on to Steele, who resumed his correspondence with Assia.
Lisa Gutmann did not place her hopes on Steele alone. Casting her net wider, she regularly invited Allied soldiers over for cakes and tea. There was a constant parade of British, Canadian, Australian and South African servicemen to the small flat. She pressed her daughters to perfect their English-language skills and further familiarise themselves with English culture. Assia complained to Gems, who by now had become her intimate confidante, that her mother had urged her to finish reading The History of England by Andre Maurois: ‘Instead, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Life of Huckleberry Finn. Great fun, great fun. It makes one regret having been born a girl.’ She took a special preparation course for the London Matriculation exams. (‘I am very doubtful about Maths, though. The language and literature were all cakes.’)
Assia’s parents also tried to impose the morals and etiquette of Old Europe upon her. They questioned her every move and demanded to know the purpose of her every visit to the shops or even to the library. ‘They remember exactly how young ladies behaved 40 years ago. The war doesn’t seem to have changed their ideas,’ she fretted to Gems. It had changed Assia’s. Once she’d finished her exams, she could finally attend to having some fun and she turned the service club into her second home. She bore no real loyalty to Steele. There was little passion in their relationship and, whatever its spark, it was not strong enough to survive their geographical distance, the disrupted postal services and his rare leaves.
Nearly every evening Assia went out partying. She did not drink and was not fond of dancing – in fact, she moved rather ungracefully – but invariably she was surrounded by men who enjoyed engaging her in animated conversation. When she wished to spend a whole night out, she would tell her parents that she was staying with her friend Hannah Weinberg-Shalitt. ‘We were living in a very conservative society, but Assia, with a dare-devil laugh, defied rules and exploited opportunities. I was very naïve, and I admired her for her courage, and could not refuse to cover up for her. She knew how to manipulate people, without making them feel exploited.’
Dating was unthinkable for a Tabeetha girl. It was considered to be totally improper, punishable by the parents and reprimanded by the teachers. Among Tabeetha graduates of t
he 1940s, the story still circulates about the alarmed Jewish parents who begged the headmistress to help them find their daughter: the girl had failed to return home from a date with a soldier. For the first time in her life, the headmistress found herself, despite profound aversion, visiting the bars and clubs of Tel Aviv in her search for the prodigal daughter. The stray sheep was never named, but all her schoolmates agree – it could only have been Assia. Concerned about their daughter’s reputation, the Gutmanns were especially wary of her friendship with another girl accustomed to hanging around with the Tel Aviv smart set. ‘My parents don’t want me to take part in it,’ Assia wrote to Gems on 30 January 1944. ‘I will, though. It’s fun. And the people I meet are more broadminded, and are intellectuals. Still, I’m going to get my freedom through evolution.’ Nonetheless, Assia was not frivolous, and if behaviour on the racy party scene descended towards the dissolute, she would sneak quietly to the cloakroom, collect her bag and go home. ‘I began to wonder whether these are first signs (of their kind) of deterioration of mankind,’ she concluded.
Assia’s letters to Gems, written in perfect English, convey a confident, optimistic, witty girl, a girl full of laughter as well as self-irony, whose observations reflect an insight beyond her years. She appreciated and enjoyed the way words work and, as she would come upon a clever pun or some hilarious mistranslation, she would write it down in her copybook. She was especially amused by a ludicrous notice declaring the freshness of the products at a butcher’s shop. The translation in English read: ‘Butcher, kills himself every morning.’ Wishing to enlarge her linguistic repertoire, she asked Keith to send her a dictionary of RAF jargon. She was disappointed with the booklet, which was neither precise nor comprehensive enough to meet her expectations.