The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Soon enough the shop, thank God, was restored to its former state and was again filled with customers. On more than one occasion the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps Luna had been right and that it wouldn’t have been so bad to take her out of school so she could help him in the shop. But he’d dismiss the idea right away. The world was becoming increasingly modern, and he wasn’t prepared for his daughter to be an ignoramus like her mother. She needed to have an education.

  He himself regretted that he had attended only a Talmud Torah religious school. He felt that he could have been someone important, maybe a doctor at Bikur Holim Hospital or a lawyer, or perhaps—and this was his secret dream—a Haganah commander. He would have wanted to be a confidant of Ben-Gurion, to work with Eliyahu Golomb, the leader of the Jewish defense effort. These men were the salt of the earth!

  If he’d had an education, he certainly wouldn’t have been a shopkeeper content to talk about mundane matters with Franz the fat newspaper seller. He would have conversed with dignitaries on matters of paramount importance, people like David Yellin, who, following the murder of his son in the riots at the beginning of the year, together with his wife Ita returned the medal of honor they had been awarded by the English bastards. How he admired Yellin, who’d said, “I consider this medal of honor to be a medal of dishonor.” Ach, what people we have in this country, and here I am, stuck in the shop all day with Matzliach the troncho and Avramino the boor.

  The thoughts didn’t stop running through his mind, drilling away until his head was ready to burst. Gabriel took off his apron and walked through the market toward Jaffa Road. The heady smells of the market filled his nostrils, but instead of pleasing him they only intensified his headache. He arrived at the newsstand, and as he had done every day before his illness, bought a copy of Haaretz.

  “And how are you today?” the fat newspaper seller asked his favorite customer.

  “Thank God, blessed be He,” the favorite customer replied as he scanned the front page.

  “See what those bastards did? They wouldn’t let the boat dock,” Franz said, and Gabriel’s eyes lit on the headline announcing that a large ship with many immigrants on board had been turned away.

  “Sons of bitches,” Gabriel hissed. “They’re sending those poor people to Beirut. They do whatever they want, the bastards.”

  Gabriel returned to the shop. He despised the British more every day. He couldn’t stand their haughty presence as they walked through the market in groups in their pressed uniforms, as if they were the lords of the land. Some had come to Palestine from remote villages, simple country boys who’d shoveled cow shit in their English villages, and here in Palestine they behaved as if each of them was the son of the king of England.

  But how long could this situation continue? There was a war in Europe, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, and yet in Palestine it was business as usual. How long will we go on burying our heads in the sand? he wondered. It’s lucky there are people volunteering to fight the Germans, just as it’s lucky there are people trying to drive the British out of Palestine.

  No, he didn’t mean those Stern bandits, but the good people of the Haganah. He knew that half the people in Ohel Moshe supported the Etzel and Stern’s Lehi underground organizations, but there was another half, people like him, who supported the more moderate Haganah. He didn’t believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. He believed in words.

  * * *

  A letter from America had finally arrived. Rosa couldn’t contain herself and ran to the shop so that Gabriel could read it for her. Nissim, who went by Nick in America, wrote that he’s doing very well in the “shmattes business,” and thank God, because his eldest son will soon be married and his family is growing. And how is everybody in Jerusalem? he wanted to know. How is her husband Gabriel and how are her daughters? How is Ephraim and what is he up to these days? Is he working in Gabriel’s shop or has he opened one of his own? And following the letter a big package will be coming by sea with clothes for her from his factory, so she’ll see how well he’s doing, and clothes for the girls and her husband, may he be healthy, and also for Ephraim who was a little boy when Nissim fled to America, and now he’s a man and surely has a wife and children.

  Rosa’s heart lurched. It had been two years since the British police took her to the Russian Compound for questioning, and she hadn’t heard a word from Ephraim. She didn’t have anybody to talk to about him. Gabriel had only to hear his name and he’d get angry. He didn’t like the Lehi. When they’d tried to kill Morton, a British CID officer, on Yael Street in Tel Aviv and instead killed Schiff, a Jewish police officer, Gabriel was so incensed that she covered her ears to protect herself from his virulent words. “They’re killing Jews as well, they have no limits! They should all be thrown into Acre Jail, all of them! They’re not Jews, these people. Jews don’t behave like that!”

  If only she could see Ephraim just once, to hear that everything’s all right. There were rumors that Yitzhako, Sara Laniado’s son from Sukkat Shalom, was also with Stern’s people. Perhaps his mother knew something.

  That afternoon she went to Senora Laniado’s house and knocked on the door.

  “Welcome, Senora Ermosa, welcome, come in, come in,” Sara said. Rosa went inside. Three steps led from the street to the tiny room where the Laniado family lived. It was windowless, the air was stifling, and a sour smell filled her nostrils. Sara’s sick husband was lying on a bed by the wall, and as she entered, he sat up to welcome her. “There’s no need, Senor Laniado,” she said. “Don’t get up because of me. I won’t be staying long.”

  Sara made her a cup of tea with bizcochos, and they sat at the table in silence. Rosa didn’t know how to start, and Sara, who realized why Senora Ermosa had honored her with a visit, waited for her to speak first.

  “So how is it in Rehavia?” Rosa asked, trying to create small talk.

  “How can it be?” Sara replied. “Not even a donkey works the way my lady works me.”

  “Sano que ’stas, may you be healthy, those Ishkenazias are worse than the Ingelish women,” Rosa said.

  “My lady is worse than Pharaoh! Nothing pleases her. Whatever I do isn’t clean enough for her. She’d make me lick the floor if she could.”

  “Tell me,” Rosa said, realizing that the conversation was going nowhere, “what’s new with you? How is everything?”

  “Well, you can see that my husband’s in bed and I’m the breadwinner, so what can I say?

  “And the children?”

  “Thank God, they’re all married.”

  “Yitzhako too?”

  “No, not Yitzhako.” Sara lowered her voice to a whisper. “Yitzhako, may God protect him, is with Avraham Stern, like your brother Ephraim. They’re there together.”

  “How do you know?” Rosa asked.

  “Yitzhako told me. And not only them, our Mimo from Sukkat Shalom is there too. God be praised, we’ve got a fine group of them. There are maybe twenty or thirty of ours in the Stern group.”

  Rosa was astounded. Sara, this simple woman, knew more than she could have imagined. She decided to put propriety aside and asked Sara bluntly, “Vizina querida, I haven’t heard from my brother Ephraim for two years. Perhaps your son Yitzhako has told you something about him? How he is? Is he married? Does he have children?”

  “Married!” Sara laughed. “That lot marry the Land of Israel. They don’t have time for a wedding with a woman.”

  “Tell me,” Rosa pled, “has Yitzhako, may he be healthy, told you anything about Ephraim?”

  “He doesn’t say much,” Sara said. “I only see him every now and then. He comes quietly, sleeps a while, and leaves quietly. May God protect him.”

  “But how, how did my brother Ephraim get to the Lehi? He was a borracho, a drunk. Why did they take him?”

  “It was Mimo who took him. He met Ephraim wandering by the central bus station in Tel Aviv. And that’s it, they’re making life a misery for the English. Did yo
u hear about the robbery at the Anglo-Palestine bank in Tel Aviv?”

  “It was them?” Rosa was stunned.

  “They steal money from the English to buy rifles and fight them.”

  “My husband says,” Rosa said, sighing, “that they’re worse than the Ingelish. He says that Jews don’t behave like that.”

  “There are none worse than the English!” Sara asserted. “I won’t tell you I’m happy that my son’s a bank robber, I didn’t raise him to be a thief, but the money doesn’t go into his pocket. He hands it over for the Land of Israel, so even God in heaven justifies it. Every Saturday evening I listen to Stern on the radio on the Voice of Fighting Zion station. He’s a good speaker, may he be healthy. Every word is the naked truth.”

  “May God protect my brother and your son,” Rosa said before she took her leave. “If by chance Yitzhako comes to see you, tell him I ask, I beg him to tell Ephraim that I want to hear from him. I want him to show his face in my house so I can see that he’s well, and if he doesn’t want to come to me, tell Yitzhako, I’ll go anywhere at any time. Por favor, Senora Laniado, por Dio, please do that for me.”

  Rosa didn’t tell a soul that she was trying to make contact with Ephraim, certainly not Gabriel. She could already guess that he would tell her she was putting herself and the girls at risk. From that day on, she started keeping up with the news, asking Rachelika to read her the headlines. She learned from the paper that a reward of one thousand pounds had been put on Stern’s head and that he was the most wanted man in Palestine.

  On Saturday evening, when Gabriel and the girls visited Shmuel and Miriam after Havdalah, Rosa said she didn’t feel well and stayed home. She turned on the Zenith radio and searched for the Voice of Fighting Zion. Stern’s voice rang in her ears: “A worthy way ending in failure is unfit. An unfit way ending in victory is truly worthy.” He’s right, she thought to herself. To drive the cursed Ingelish out of Palestine you have to do things that aren’t written in the Torah. She wondered what her Ephraim, her little brother, was doing to drive the Ingelish out of the country. If only she could tell him how proud she was, how much she supported the path he had taken. She’d tell him it didn’t matter what Gabriel said, it didn’t matter what the Haganah said, what most of the Jews in Palestine were saying. There was only one way to talk to the Ingelish: Force! Only force would drive the bastards back to their Ingeland!

  A year later, when a British CID officer, Thomas James Wilkin, murdered Avraham Stern in cold blood in an apartment on Mizrahi Street in Tel Aviv, Rosa would grieve bitterly. Even Gabriel, who wholeheartedly opposed the actions of Stern and his people, was shocked. “Shooting a man in the head in cold blood?” he said to Rosa who was holding on to a chair for support, her body gripped by weakness. Having listened to Stern on the Voice of Fighting Zion almost every Saturday evening, she felt as though she had lost somebody close and wept for his pregnant widow Roni.

  “Whatever he did,” Gabriel said, “he’s still a Jew, and one Englishman isn’t worth a single hair from the head of a Jew,” and with that he ended the conversation. Rosa was broken by Stern’s death. His voice each week had been her only connection to Ephraim. Now she could only find consolation in Sara Laniado.

  “I have to see Ephraim,” Rosa said one day. “I have to know he’s all right. Dio mio, I can’t bear the worry. My heart aches just from thinking about him. He’s probably living like a dog, running from one place to another.”

  “That’s how they are,” Sara said, “living in holes in the ground, in the dark, in secret. They mustn’t be seen, and that’s why, Rosa, you should forget it. Now they’ve murdered Stern, they’ll go even deeper underground. Now even my Yitzhako won’t come here. Paciencia, Rosa, paciencia, the British will soon go back to their own country, and with God’s help you’ll see Ephraim again.”

  * * *

  The school year ended and the summer break arrived. Each year the girls couldn’t wait to visit their Aunt Allegra’s house in Tel Aviv. Before the journey, Gabriel would pack a big bag of goodies from the shop and leave it in the care of Matzliach. A taxi would be waiting by the big gate to Ohel Moshe to take them to the railway station on Hebron Road. Not long ago, when they’d visit Tel Aviv, they’d walk to the central bus station on Jaffa Road with their suitcases, but the shop’s renewed prosperity had vastly improved the family’s finances, so this time Gabriel bought first-class train tickets.

  A few months earlier, after days of stalemate, Gabriel’s relations with his daughter had resumed their normal course. In the end it was she who went to him. He had just finished work one evening and was locking up the shop when she appeared by his side as if from out of nowhere. She stood there with lowered eyes, not saying a word. He understood that this was his proud daughter’s way of asking his forgiveness. He stood facing her, waiting for her to make the first move, and she collapsed in his arms, weeping for his forgiveness, promising that never, never again would she lie. He hugged her and kissed her and cried with her, his heart melting and waves of love flooding him.

  And yet there was one thing he still needed to know: why she had lied.

  “I get bored, Papo, I can’t sit on a chair for so many hours. I’ve got ants in my pants and I have to get up and walk. When I’m staring at the blackboard for so long, everything turns black, everything’s blurred. I can’t see anything and my head aches. I look at my homework book and all the letters get mixed up, and then I can’t stay in the classroom any longer. So I went to the principal and told him that you need me in the shop.”

  “And where did you go when you left school?”

  “I went to the Pillars Building with my friend Sara to look in the shop windows, to the YMCA tower to view our Jerusalem from above. We took a bus to Beit Hakerem and walked around. What pretty houses there are there, Papo, and what gardens!”

  Astounded, Gabriel listened patiently to Luna. From the moment he allowed her to speak and tell him the truth, she talked and talked as if making up for lost time, a waterfall of words gushing out of her mouth. He was alarmed by the idea of his daughter roaming the streets.

  “Did you go to the Old City as well?” he asked, concerned that she might be concealing some of the truth.

  “I don’t like the Old City, I only like the New City. I like the pretty houses in Rehavia and Beit Hakerem. I like the cleanliness and the people. They’re all well dressed there. I wish we could live in Rehavia.”

  Why shouldn’t they live in Rehavia? Gabriel thought. He could afford to move his family there, and perhaps Luna was right. Perhaps it was time for a modern neighborhood where doctors and professors from the Hebrew University lived. It wouldn’t do his daughters any harm to learn a thing or two about the customs of educated people.

  From the moment they entered Tel Aviv, Luna’s heart opened. How she loved the boulevard where her aunt and grandmother lived, the cafés on Hayarkon Street and the promenade, the outdoor cinema at the community center. She especially loved the beach. She’d get sunburned and turn as red as a beet, and all of Rosa’s warnings and Gabriel’s begging were to no avail. She gave herself up to the sense of renewal and burned her skin in the sun each time anew.

  There wasn’t a single day in the week in Tel Aviv that Luna didn’t go to the beach. Even Rachelika and Becky had enough of the sun and sand and preferred to stay in their aunt’s house or window-shop on Allenby Street. But Luna always went, and when she couldn’t persuade her sisters to join her, she nagged her cousins incessantly until they gave in.

  “That one, may she be healthy, when she wants something she’ll run through a wall,” Rosa said to her sister-in-law.

  “Paciencia, querida Rosa. She’ll soon find a husband and then she’ll be his problem.”

  Allegra’s sons, Raphael and Yaakov, were very attached to the lovely Luna and loved going to the beach with her, taking pride in their redhaired cousin who always turned heads.

  But on this occasion the vacation ended badly. Luna’s white skin was burned
fiery red. Her body was badly blistered and hurt like the devil. And so they were forced to cut their trip short and return to Jerusalem. Gabriel brought a jug of sour cream from the shop and ordered Rosa to spread it over Luna’s body. They shut themselves in the bathroom and Rosa started spreading the cream onto Luna’s back, but her mother’s touch burned Luna even more than the blisters and she screamed and yelled until poor Rosa came out with tears in her eyes. On seeing his wife whom he had almost never seen shed a tear, for the first time Gabriel sympathized not with his beloved daughter but with his unfortunate wife. For years he had seen how Luna tormented Rosa, how she behaved toward her as if she was worthless, and he hadn’t intervened.

  * * *

  With God’s help Luna completed her studies at the Ohel Moshe School. Gabriel was sure that the girl would ask to work with him in the shop, and he decided that she would until she married.

  But to his surprise Luna came to the shop and announced, “I want to continue studying at an English school.” Gabriel was torn. Only recently he read an article condemning Jewish children learning at mission schools. “Dozens of boys and girls, Ashkenazi and Sephardi and from other communities,” the article said, “come home from the mission schools in the Old City and Ratisbonne. It has become an epidemic.”

  Uncharacteristically, he consulted Rosa, and as usual she couldn’t offer any good advice. On the one hand, she was shocked by the idea of Luna going to an Ingelish school, but on the other, maybe the Ingelish would be able to turn the hooligan in her house into a lady, and that was what she told Gabriel. But in the end the one who finally tipped the scales was Rachelika. “I’ve heard they’ve got good teachers there,” she told her father. “And they teach Hebrew. And it would be better for Luna to go to a mission school than roam the streets.”