by Yehuda Koren
In spring 1944 John Steele was transferred to Palestine and stationed in the Ein Shemer camp, just an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv. As a meteorologist, he was able to work a number of nightshifts in a row so that he could get a few days off to spend with Assia: ‘lots of walks and snuggles on benches’. And Café Nussbaum became a regular haunt. They applauded the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony. At the cinema they were moved to tears by For Whom the Bell Tolls and Un Grand Amour de Beethoven, a 1936 French film about Assia’s favourite composer. Lena Horne, though, was her idol; Assia was captivated by her dark, beautiful face and seductively husky voice.
Steele realised that his renewed presence at the Gutmanns’ home had meanwhile become a red rag to a bull. ‘Dr Gutmann got very tired of this uniformed Man Who Came to Dinner, with designs on his daughter. He made all sort of dirty cracks, and I’m sure, wished me far away.’ Adding to Steele’s discomfiture and bewilderment, was the fact, according to Assia, that her mother was in love with him. So as not to annoy the host, Steele decided to stop going to the Gutmanns’ for lunch. It was a decision Lisa could not entirely accept. Her solution was to make a sumptuous picnic lunch for Assia and John to eat under the trees in the back yard. She confessed to John that her husband was jealous because she had ‘robbed him so completely of his wife and daughter’s affection’, Steele recalls.
Rarely did Assia and John let politics come between them but, on one occasion, Assia indignantly compared the British activities in Palestine to those of the Nazi Gestapo. At first Steele was shocked. ‘But I was bound to admit that the whole Palestine affair is rather a black page in English history.’ Assia’s words, though, continued to affect him. On one of his trips to Tel Aviv Steele hitched a ride on a bomber from a nearby RAF base. As he sat in the nose of the aircraft and gazed at the world beneath, he saw the brown, monotonous wilderness, lifeless and forbidding, suddenly change into a fertile green. ‘The Jewish homeland! I think at that moment I became something of a Zionist, it was all so crystal clear that the land should belong to those who would work it. And while since then I may have lost some of my youthful naïveté, I see it as a life-long inoculation against anti-Semitism.’
The affair between Assia and Steele often went sour. They had squabbles; accusing each other of not loving enough and often he’d vowed to break it all off. Independent of John, Assia’s social life was blossoming, and he knew that she was dating others. He knew that she was being courted by a variety of glamorous officers who, unlike a sergeant in the RAF, could open the doors to many of the places in town that Assia wanted to go. And Assia was absolutely delighted when one of them – an Australian officer, John Lefebure, who served with Steele at the Ein Shemer base – took her up in a plane. Lefebure captured Assia’s heart and they would date regularly when Steele was on duty. In her photo album, under the photo of the tall, handsome Lefebure, Assia wrote the words ‘Amour Blue’. Nor did she spare Steele the details. ‘It irritates me to hear the catalogues of the times they had together, the things they do that I so desperately want to do, like going on moonlit bathes, visiting dances and fairs, that always come off when I’m on duty,’ Steele complained to his diary. As would all of Assia’s future lovers, Steele swallowed his injured pride while he strove to tolerate, and even justify, the presence of other men in her life. ‘I never did blame her for seeking more privileged company, although she probably got spoiled by all the attention.’
Christmas in Tel Aviv was a defiantly ordinary working day, with no festive atmosphere. The stores were open, people went to work, and passengers filled the buses. But the Gutmanns celebrated the holiday to the hilt and Lisa cooked an English turkey with all the trimmings. She and Celia presented Steele with a hardcover edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Assia gave him Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That Dr Gutmann chose to ignore him in the gift giving irritated Steele a bit. The two hardcover Russian novels survived Steele’s kit bag and the war; both now stand like honoured veterans on the bookshelf in Steele’s home. The front pages of War and Peace did suffer one injury, but not in the war: years later Steele’s second wife tore out the front page, which bore Assia’s inscription.
‘The 1940s in Palestine and in England were prudish times, scarcely believable today,’ Steele recalls. ‘The kind of “shacking up” without benefit of clergy was almost unknown in my recollection. Sex between Assia and me was surreptitious, hole-in-the-corner, fumbling gropes.’ Even the most innocent associations between British soldiers and Israeli girls were discouraged, however. Before the end of 1944, more than three hundred girls had already ‘left their nation and country, some of them even their religion’, as one Hebrew newspaper indignantly reported. While one arm of the Tel Aviv municipality was embracing the foreigners in uniform, the other was pushing them away. Fearful that Jewish girls would marry out of their faith, the Committee for the Defence of the Honour of Daughters of Israel, which was sponsored by the Religious Council of the Tel Aviv municipality, published leaflets denouncing girls who dated British soldiers and policemen. Armed with details of the girls’ misconduct, emissaries of the committee pressured them to break off their relationships with the foreigners. If that failed to alter the girls’ behaviour, the committee visited the parents with the threat of having their daughter’s name displayed on billboards throughout the city.
The threats and pressure were not only verbal. A fanatical, secret fringe organisation named B’nei Pinhas (Sons of Pinhas) followed the teachings of the biblical High Priest Pinhas Ben Elazar, who famously advocated the eradication of sexual promiscuity by violent means. His twentieth-century counterparts would ambush and kidnap an allegedly wayward girl, then tie her to a tree and either shave off her hair or smear her with tar. The activities of these zealots, in turn, prompted common hoodlums to hound couples in the streets and on the beach. They routinely beat up soldiers and drove their tearful girlfriends away. Soldiers on leave were frequently harassed and often wounded in fistfights as they left pubs and dance halls. Shocked by the conduct of the hoodlums and the B’nei Pinhas, the distinguished novelist Yehuda Burla publicly denounced it in an article in the Hazman (The Times) newspaper: ‘While Britain is engaged in a war against the most savage enemy of the Jewish people, these unsightly acts of violence might portend disastrous results for our reputation, our country and our future. Instead of nourishing some friendship and sympathy for us among the Allies, we cause exactly the opposite.’
Soon after V-Day, in May 1945, Steele was unexpectedly posted to the Libyan Desert, without a chance even to bid Assia farewell. There were no tears and, since they had not discussed a joint future, Steele never expected to see her again. In January 1946 he was discharged and returned to England. Assia tried to keep up their correspondence, but her letters to him went unanswered.
With the Second World War over, the Jewish underground factions renewed their anti-British activities, especially their protests against His Majesty’s Government policy to keep out and expel Holocaust survivors who wished to settle in Palestine. At night the Municipal Public Health Centre, which was only a few doors away from the Gutmanns’ home, became a training centre for the Haganah, the military wing of the Jewish Agency. Like many of her generation, Assia took the courses in small arms, field training, first aid, radio communications and self-defence. Lisa Gutmann disapproved; she did not wish her daughter to get involved in any illegal and dangerous activities. Ever since they had settled in Tel Aviv, the Gutmanns had been trying to stand aside and not get involved in local politics, a feat that was becoming impossible under the current circumstances. On one occasion, they were startled by a banging on their door and, when a wounded British soldier burst in, they were nonplussed. ‘You must hide me, or else they’ll kill me,’ the soldier whispered. Apparently, he was running away from the squad of a Jewish underground organisation. Dr Gutmann was horrified. ‘As a physician, and a man of conscience, he had to rescue a man from death. On the other hand, he didn’t
want to be counted a traitor,’ recalls Celia Chaikin. ‘So Vati took the middle road, kept the soldier for half an hour, and then asked him to leave. Fortunately it was long enough to save the soldier’s life.’
Since her graduation Assia had been supporting herself with odd secretarial jobs and was taking evening drawing classes at the studio of a prominent Israeli artist. She was doing ‘a lot of drawings, still-life, portraits of impossibly plain girls, in whom we are supposed to find beauty, Yemenite charwomen, and squalid and bearded old men.’ She had also begun to feel less and less patriotic as the Jewish underground organisations had intensified their campaign to drive out the British by attacking their bases, offices, and personnel: ‘We feel like frightful heroes, and think the world is a wretched place.’
Mixed couples, too, were now being more actively targeted by the underground zealots. Being seen with a soldier ‘is sheer suicide … People here think it is high time for me to change my ways. How dare I, in those days of great National rebirth, associate with non Jewish people, and thus “expose” myself to an ever increasing danger of complete assimilation,’ Assia wrote to Gems. Any girl who was ‘sleeping with the enemy’ was deemed to be a collaborator, a potential traitor who might pass on secrets to her foreign friends. In some cases, the girls were court-martialled for fraternisation, forced to sign a confession and executed. Assia, though, was fearless. Defiantly she threw away the hate mail and threatening notes that strangers handed her in the streets. Yet life in Tel Aviv was becoming close to being totally unbearable for her: most of her soldier friends had left for England, as had some of her girlfriends. ‘It is all so disgusting, and so much like Fascism, that I want to cry. You will be surprised to find Tel Aviv so literally changed, the pleasant, sunny, fairly hospitable little town has completely vanished,’ she wrote to Gems on 21 May 1946.
The Hebrew press launched a campaign to deter Jewish girls from following their demobilised boyfriends back to England. Moshe Medzini, the Ha’aretz correspondent in London, reported that twenty Jewish women, who had married soldiers, had already appealed to the Jewish Agency in London for assistance to return to Palestine. The actual number was estimated to be much higher. In one case, the Hebrew press reported, British in-laws forbade their son’s young wife from using the living room and they introduced her to relatives and friends as the maid. The newspapers were filled with similarly horrific stories, like that of 27-year-old Maria Atkins, who was stranded in London with her baby son when her husband left her for another woman. Cleaning houses but still unable to support herself and the child, Maria gassed them both. The nine-month-old baby died. The bereaved mother survived and was put on trial for manslaughter.
The Gutmann mother and daughter paid no heed to these horror stories, however. ‘For God sake, tell me why you never write? Even if you wanted to stop, why didn’t you let me know?’ an exasperated Assia wrote to Steele. But it was neither friendship nor romance that Assia was looking for with Steele. What she wanted was his help in finding a place for her in one of the London art schools. ‘Friendless, miserable and lonely, this is the only thing I’m looking forward to,’ she wrote to him and assured him that he need not worry – she was not trying to impose herself upon him: ‘If your feelings have changed – I shall always try and understand.’ If she came to England in September as she hoped and planned, she promised, ‘I shall never call on you or ring you up, unless you want me to.’ Lisa Gutmann was no less offended than her daughter by Steele’s withdrawal and, without Assia’s knowledge, sent a letter to him via Keith Gems. ‘I can’t understand what happened with you. You get Asja [sic] absolute down. That girl is waiting and waiting for a letter from you, and every day this is disappointment,’ she wrote in her Germanic English. ‘I didn’t think you would forget us so quick.’
In June, on her own merits and with no help from Steele, Assia was admitted to the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art and began preparing for her trip. She planned to study art and interior decorating, ‘so that I shall end up with painting lampshades and china,’ she noted ironically. Her parents agreed to finance her trip to London, but not because they were committed to or even interested in her artistic promise. They were sending her to London expressly to find, and to marry, Steele, thereby acquiring the British passport by which she could in turn bring her family to England. It was the only way, given the immigration restrictions, that the Gutmanns could get there from Palestine.
On Monday, 22 July 1946, Assia took a day off and travelled to Jerusalem to apply for a passport. There, she chanced upon a friend who invited her to a café next to the luxurious King David Hotel. The southern wing of the hotel had been requisitioned to house the offices of the Secretariat of the Palestine Government and the British Army Headquarters. At about eleven o’clock, six members of the Jewish underground organisation IZL, disguised as Arab porters, carried seven churns of milk, each containing fifty kilograms of explosives, into the basement of the hotel. They placed the churns in the food storeroom and then slipped away. Twenty-five minutes later, in the middle of Assia’s coffee date, a shattering explosion was heard. Assia saw all seven floors of the deluxe hotel’s southern wing tumble down into clouds of dust. The death toll was enormous: 92 dead, 58 injured. The disaster only strengthened Dr Gutmann’s conviction that there would never be peace in the Holy Land and that his family must get out of Palestine as soon as possible.
Twelve years in Palestine had failed to create a Jewish identity for Assia and throughout her life she had no strong feelings about her Jewish heritage one way or the other. In September 1946, with her faith in the future, Assia took the train to Port Said, where she boarded the ship to England. She never again set foot in Tel Aviv.
Five
First Marriage
London, 1946–Vancouver, 1952
The SS Andes was launched in 1939 as the flagship of the Royal Mail Line, but this splendid passenger ship made no more than a few cruises before the war effort had it converted into a troop carrier. Six years later, with the war over, it carried British servicemen to their families back home. Decorated with the royal crest, the SS Andes seemed to Assia a step towards glory. Emerging from her stifling cabin on the lower deck, she adopted the airs of a lady accustomed to a floating grand hotel, a kind she had only seen in films. Promenading on the upper deck, she looked fresh and well groomed, while most of the passengers were wind-blown or seasick. Men were falling for her, showering her with tokens of attentiveness. ‘She was like a goddess, the belle of the ball, and her attractiveness had less to do with her striking good looks, than with her personality,’ observed Mira Hamermesh, as she recognised the beautiful stranger from the Tel Aviv bus. ‘She gave the impression of a girl with everything in store for her.’ They sunbathed together in shorts on the upper deck and discussed their plans in a mixture of English and Hebrew. Apparently, both of them were heading for art schools in London: Mira to the Slade, Assia to the Polytechnic. John Steele’s name and existence were not mentioned.
On a foggy autumn morning they docked in Liverpool, and Assia and Mira took the train to London. Mira’s cousin was waiting for her but there was no welcome party for Assia, since she had not notified Steele. In the weeks that followed, Mira found it difficult to fit into her friend’s busy schedule. There was one brief tête-à-tête they had during which Assia fancied a choker that Mira was wearing and talked her into lending it to her for a grand party she had been invited to. The following day Assia vanished and Mira never saw her favourite piece of jewellery again. ‘She was like a mythical creature, emerging from nowhere and dissolving into thin air once you tried to touch it.’ Although a full-time art student, Assia preferred the shops and the pavements of Oxford Street to the confined classrooms of the nearby Polytechnic. She wandered about London in a daze; she had always dreamt of such magnificence and her visions were suffused with her father’s tales of the marble palaces of Moscow and her own memories of the glittering avenues of Berlin. Tabeetha had groomed her perfectly for t
hat kind of life and the sites seemed as familiar as if she had been born there.
From her daughter’s letters home, Lisa Gutmann realised that Assia had not established contact with John Steele. She was exasperated and grumbled to Celia that she had not sent Assia to England in order to spend the little money they had on treats and pleasures. She ordered Assia to either marry Steele, or return home immediately. But going back to Palestine was out of the question for Assia; she would never return to a place she considered a dungeon. Once out, she would not lock herself in again. Celebrating her independence from the bonds of her mother’s tyranny, Assia played for time and when the ultimatum was not lifted she pleaded for mercy; she could not be coerced into a union that held no affection, no passion, no compatibility and no future.
A year and a half had passed since Assia and John last saw each other and it had been quite some time since their correspondence had come to an end. Steele was living at his parents’ home in Shortlands, Kent, and was working in London as a government-sponsored trainee under a resettlement plan for veterans. He passed daily over London Bridge, in the great jostling black-clad throng of workers, on the way to his office at Alexander Young Ltd, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Mitchell Cotts. In the bleak old building, surrounded by rubble and bombsites and never properly heated, Steele was bored to death writing letters about shipments of lavatories to Bombay.