Newcomers in an Ancient Land

by Paula Wagner

  “Gingit, don’t forget you promised to take these bags through customs for us,” they pleaded. “Just say the jeans belong to you.”

  “What do you mean?” I balked, vaguely aware of something amiss.

  With no time to lose, the sailors turned to a girl standing behind me and thrust their bulging bags alongside hers on the conveyor belt that led to a large shed marked Customs.

  “Hey baby,” they cajoled, “will you take these bags through for us, pretty please?”

  “Okay.” She smiled innocently.

  “These jeans belong to you?” questioned one of the customs agents, his voice suspicious.

  “Oh no. Those guys behind me asked me to take them through.”

  “Is that so?” At the shrill blast of his silver whistle, a phalanx of blue-uniformed officers surrounded the sailors before they could scatter.

  “Busted!”

  In the ensuing pandemonium, the remaining agents stamped our passports, waving us through to freedom with a warning: “Get out of here before those beni zonot get you into trouble!” It sounded like the same phrase I’d heard the passenger and the waiter use at the beginning of the trip—ben zona—son of a bitch, only plural. My Hebrew vocabulary was swelling already, but not with the words I expected.

  Still, a wave of guilt washed over me as the police handcuffed the sailors and shoved them into their cruisers, blue lights flashing. What would happen to them? I was too naïve to grasp the gravity of the situation. The sailors’ harassment had been irritating but hardly criminal in my eyes. They were just young boys, recently out of the army, having a bit of fun while doing a dirty job. Nothing in the glossy brochures I’d read about the Promised Land had prepared me for cops and contraband, and although the other girl had given them away, I somehow felt I’d betrayed them. With the romantic ramparts now behind me, the hot tarmac burned the soles of my feet through my sandals while, from above, the sun bored a hole into my head. This was hardly the arrival I’d expected.

  Exhausted from our all-night vigil and the merciless heat, Naomi and I could barely keep our eyes open as we dragged our bags through the gates of the muggy port, in search of the Central Bus Station, where we’d been told to look for the bus for our respective kibbutzim.

  Long before leaving California, we’d agreed to go to separate kibbutz programs in an effort to emerge from the chrysalis of twinhood. But here in this foreign land, the task felt especially daunting. Attending different ulpanim would be a first step on the path to separate selfhood. Although I feared the rupture of the invisible membrane that had connected us since birth, I also knew that staying together would hobble us. Like fledglings on the verge of leaving a comfortable but outgrown nest, the time had come to test our wings in solo flight.

  I tried to console myself with the knowledge that Naomi’s kibbutz would be only a few miles down the road from mine. But in this unfamiliar land without personal phones, that distance felt immense.

  Finding the Central Bus Station at last, we bumbled our way to the Egged bus for Hazorea and Ein Hashofet and clambered aboard among passengers holding clucking chickens by the feet with one hand while cracking sunflower seeds with the other, leaving pyramids of shells under their seats.

  “Egad, we’re on Egged!” croaked Naomi, but I was too tired to laugh.

  As the dusty bus lumbered south, I tried to take in the landscape through my drooping lids: farmers on tractors cultivated green fields dotted with fish ponds beside tidy villages of stucco homes with red-tiled roofs. By contrast, a gritty woman in a windswept black abaya waved her arms at some scraggly black goats on a stony patch of land beside a makeshift tent whose folds flapped in the wind like tattered black flags. Several dusty plastic water jugs sat on the ground, but not a blade of grass could be seen. I guessed the woman to be a Bedouin. Instantly, the bleak scene sealed itself into a black hole behind my eyes, and I knew I would never forget it. Was this all that remained of the woman’s ancestral lands? The question rose unbidden in my mind.

  The bus made an unannounced stop to pick up several hitchhikers—Uzi-toting soldiers who looked as young as I was. Road signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and oddly spelled English flashed by like frames in a movie, but I couldn’t keep them in focus. Nothing felt real. Had I landed on another planet?

  After about forty minutes, a wide, fertile valley opened up on my left. The bus pulled to a stop at a sign pointing to Kibbutz Hazorea on the right. The moment of our long-awaited parting had suddenly arrived. Naomi quickly gathered her bags. I followed her down the aisle toward the front door, feeling as if my own skin were peeling away. Brave as I’d been in initiating our trip, I hadn’t bargained on losing a part of myself. Overwhelmed, I hugged her awkwardly, unsure if Naomi shared my feelings. I only knew I felt bereft without her.

  As the brakes wheezed and the door hissed open, the driver peered at us strangely.

  “Good luck!” I stammered. Then she was gone.

  Choking back tears, I lurched back to my seat as the bus rolled on. A ghostly emptiness now filled the spot where Naomi had been sitting minutes before. The twisting road narrowed as the bus climbed the hill to Ein Hashofet. The feathery branches of dusty pine trees stroking against it comforted me vaguely. Still, the short ride felt like an eternity. Feeling sliced in half, I could hardly believe I was still alive.

  When the bus drew up to the gates of Ein Hashofet, I stumbled off in a daze. Suddenly all the events leading up to this instant seemed obliterated like stars caught in the sun’s glare. Despite all that had led me to this moment in this time and place—my summer job in San Francisco, the Greyhound trip across the US, Esther’s wild farewell, the seventeen-day voyage on the Theodore Herzl, even the arrival in Haifa that morning—I felt utterly lost!

  Port of Acre aka Akko

  Dining Room at Kibbutz Hazorea

  Chapter 7

  KIBBUTZ EIN HASHOFET

  My next job was to find the Feins. They were expecting me, but had no idea exactly when I’d arrive, so there was no one at the gate to meet me, and I had no idea how to find them. Heat and fatigue only increased my confusion. Passing through a large iron gate, I followed a meandering path past rows of identical stucco bungalows distinguished only by personalized front gardens.

  I found myself thinking that this young country and I were almost the same age—Israel having been established by the UN just three years after I was born. Now our adventures were converging, our eyes fixed on a utopian dream of building a socialist state embodied by kibbutzim like Ein Hashofet and Hazorea. The creed of Zionism still rang with redemptive hope—the return of the Jews to their biblical land, the rise of a strong and self-sufficient people from the ashes of the Holocaust. 1963 was relatively peaceful—the previous wars in 1948 and Suez in 1956 having passed into glorified history. The Six-Day War of 1967 was a nightmare as yet undreamed with its scourge of territorial occupation, a cancer whose endless rancor would come to consume both Palestinians and Israelis. In the relative innocence of 1963, neither Israel nor I could imagine a future in which our dreams might be dashed. And so, as I stepped through the gates of Ein Hashofet, my sense of personal and political mission converged.

  The nearby sounds and smells of a barnyard gave me hope of finding someone besides a sheep, chicken, or cow, but not a single worker was in sight. Had they all gone home for the day already? I stopped outside a chicken coop, hoping to get my bearings. A slight breeze blew up, but before I could welcome it, a vortex of soiled feathers anchored to bits of manure swirled up like miniature parachutes. The musty scent of animal feed and methane fumes made me sneeze and wheeze all the more. Gasping, I rushed down another path with a border of fragrant pink-and-white oleanders that soothed my senses as I discovered more stucco duplexes, lush lawns, and porches jammed with succulents, canvas chairs, kids’ toys, bicycles—but still no people.

  I glanced at my watch: four o’clock. As I would later learn, the afternoon hours between two and four constituted a sacred hafsaka or siesta, p
roviding respite from the searing summer heat and a reward for early rising in winter throughout Israel. Still physically exhausted and emotionally raw from parting with Naomi, I too longed for a nap. Not having seen Avram and Frieda or Ruth and Naomi since I was four, I had only the black-and-white photos of that trip and my parents’ stories to go on. Now I wondered what they would be like—and what they would think of me.

  At last a man approached, so I mustered my courage to ask if he spoke English.

  “Of course,” he replied in a clear American accent. Embarrassed, I remembered too late that Ein Hashofet had been founded by American and Polish settlers.

  “I’m looking for Avram and Frieda Fein,” I ventured. The man smiled.

  “Ah, Avram and Frieda. They were among the founders here in 1937. Follow this path and you’ll find them in the third bungalow to the left of the hadar ha’ochel.” The hadar ha’ochel? I could barely swallow the word.

  Seeing my confusion, he added, “The dining room. You can’t miss it. It’s the biggest and most important building on the kibbutz. Where we meet, eat, argue, hold weddings—everything.”

  As I followed his directions, a shiver of anticipation shot through me. I couldn’t help wondering how it would feel to meet Naomi and Ruth again, now that we were no longer two sets of identical carefree playmates onboard the Mauritania, turning heads wherever we went.

  In my head I could hear my mother retelling the tale of how we met the Feins:

  You and Naomi were wearing bright Mexican jackets made of turquoise felt, with dancers embroidered on them in full red skirts and black sombreros. We were queuing up to board the Mauritania from New York to London. It was our first visit back to England, and you girls were only four. Suddenly, as if by magic, another pair of identical girls appeared behind us. And that’s how our friendship with the Feins began—completely by chance.

  Yet thinking of my mother stirred an unexpected sadness. Just as she’d left her own mother in sailing to America, now I’d also left her. Suddenly my mother and grandmother appeared in my mind’s eye like a pair of weeping ghosts, and my own tears welled up. In striking out on my own, I’d been seeking an independent path. Now I felt as if I were following in my mother’s footsteps with only a slight twist in the itinerary.

  Wild flowers on Kibbutz Ein Hashofet

  Chapter 8

  REDISCOVERING THE FEINS

  When I finally found the Fein Family, they were sitting conveniently on their front porch enjoying afternoon tea. They welcomed me with open arms, yet their manner felt reserved, almost as if a phantom had suddenly materialized before them, dragging their memories headlong into the present. Frieda’s gaze made me squirm, like a mother sizing me up for the teenager I’d become, and sensing trouble.

  Silently softening her mother’s judgment, Ruth beckoned me to a vacant chair on the porch.

  “Would you like some tea?” the twins chimed in unison. I tried jump-starting a conversation with the tale of Dad quizzing Avram about his soluuuu-tions. But Avram’s face remained blank. Our family’s cherished story didn’t register so much as a blip in his memory.

  Instead he shifted into the present time. “Ruth got married recently.”

  I tried to zoom over this chasm of time but couldn’t begin to imagine my childhood playmate married at twenty-three. With their long dark braids coiled in neat matronly buns, both Ruth and Naomi looked positively ancient to me now.

  The collision of past and present boggled my brain. Where were the exuberant nine-year-olds I had idolized on the Mauritania? Our childhoods seemed to have fled to some distant land, leaving us in the uncharted territory of adulthood. On my first day in the Promised Land, its promises diverged completely from the daydreams I’d nurtured during years of preparation.

  The milky brown English tea revived me—an enduring legacy of the British Mandate in Palestine. After a moment, Frieda disappeared to rummage in the living room, returning with an armload of family albums.

  “Ah, there you are,” she said, as if confirming my existence. And indeed, the familiar black-and-white photo showed two sets of twins lying side by side on a ship’s deck. The muscle memory of its rough wooden warmth testified to a brief, yet deeply shared experience. Yet now I realized how little we all really knew each other, then as now.

  “How the world has changed,” I marveled, seeing myself at age four, and the Fein sisters at nine.

  “Ah,” chuckled Avram, “the kibbutz has changed too since we founded it in 1937.” I prepared for a when-I-was-young speech, and Avram didn’t disappoint.

  “When we first settled here, the members lived in tents and dug their own latrines. Our first showers were nothing more than a room with four nozzles on opposite walls—one side for the women, the other for the men—everything collective, no partitions.” (Images of a naked Avram and a nubile Frieda flash unbidden through my mind.)

  “Then we built tzrifim out of wood—just shacks really, but a big improvement over the old tents. They’re used by the ulpan now, so you’ll have a room in one of them.”

  “How about a walk to show Paula the kibbutz on her way to her room?” suggested Ruth. I was soon to discover the Spartan comfort of a wooden tzrif for myself—stifling on hot days, freezing in the winter rains.

  I followed her along more winding paths through what looked like a large park. Firs, pines, and oleander bushes set off the modest stucco homes for kibbutz members, low-slung rows of single rooms in clusters of three or four, each with a front porch and its own patch of garden. The uncultivated land beyond remained rough and rocky. As we passed through the kibbutz, Ruth named off each area in Hebrew, urging me to try pronouncing their names. The guttural syllables lodged on my tongue and rolled like marbles in my aching brain. My first Hebrew lesson and I was not even yet in class!

  “That’s the hadar ha’ochel.” Ha, I’ve already mastered that one, I thought, recalling my initial encounter with the man on the path who had led me to the Feins.

  “And that building with the playground is a beit yeledim— that’s where the children live and play. They don’t go home to their parents at night like in the States. They sleep there too. Over here is the machsan (storehouse) where you’ll get your work clothes. We may as well pick them up now for tomorrow.”

  Entering the building, Ruth pulled out khaki pants, shirts, and brown work boots from a nondescript heap. Another pile held blue work clothes. I got it. The work clothes were color coded—beige for women, blue for men.

  Next to the machsan sat a steamy laundry called a machbesa. “You’ll bring your dirty clothes here for washing at the end of the week and pick up fresh ones,” instructed Ruth.

  Leading me out toward the bus stop, Ruth mentioned the refet (barnyard), a museum, and a spring. I shuddered, dreading another flare-up of my allergies.

  “The museum honors the fighters of the War of Independence, called the Palmach. That was the army before the state was established. Both men and women serve, you know. I finished last year.” From schoolgirl, to soldier, from wife, to member of the kibbutz where she grew up, how predictable and settled Ruth’s life now seemed in contrast to mine. Beyond the expectation of getting a good education, my life hadn’t been guided by any fixed star, or so it seemed. Was that what I’d felt was missing, why I’d craved a direction, a sign, anything to tell me I was on the right path? Instead, I’d had to chart my own course. Yet ironically the Fein twins’ lives now seemed utterly constrained compared to the grand adventure I felt I was embarking on. It was all so confusing. Was marriage really the endpoint of it all?

  But I let these confusing thoughts go as we walked beyond a low rise, where water gushed over rocks to form a weedy pool, a small oasis in the otherwise parched October landscape. In contrast with the museum’s military history, the scene felt cool and serene.

  “That spring is the Ein in the name of our kibbutz,” explained Ruth. “Shofet means judge. The words together mean ‘well of the judge’ in honor of Chief Justice Br
andeis, the first Jew appointed to the US Supreme Court.”

  I willed my tired brain to absorb all this history. Each new word had a different taste and texture—some hard as jawbreakers, others soft or crunchy, some hot, some clinking like ice cubes against my teeth, all of them vying to be remembered. Like a two-year-old just learning to talk, I thrilled to their sound. Though I wasn’t religious, biblical poetry seemed to reverberate from the rocks and ooze from the water as I walked these ancient paths for the first time:

  Let there be light, and there was light

  Let there be land, and there was land...

  Ruth’s voice brought me back to reality. We had reached her family’s porch once again.

  “You’ll start the ulpan at nine tomorrow and study for four hours every morning, Sunday through Friday. Saturday is the only day off. For Shabbat. The sadran avoda [the work scheduler] will also give you your work assignment tomorrow, probably in the kitchen or dining room from six to eight thirty a.m. or p.m., maybe both on some days, depending on the need.”

  Before I could digest all this information, Frieda rose to collect our tea cups as a clock chimed five, a signal that our somewhat awkward visit was mercifully over. I was too tired to make sense of anything—Frieda’s cool welcome, the staid demeanor of the grown-up twins or, most baffling, Avram’s fogginess about a story that my own family had enshrined in memory. Bereft of Naomi, I felt thoroughly unbalanced. A wave of relief overtook me when Ruth offered to show me to my room before collecting me for supper.

  After seventeen days at sea, exhaustion had drained my excitement like a minus tide. My shoulders and legs shook as I hoisted my pack onto my back for the short walk to my room. I had no way to contact Naomi, but I couldn’t stop wondering how she was faring. We had floated apart like continents separated into different hemispheres. My chest heaved and my cheeks burned as I pushed down the hot tears constricting my throat. Still, I was too proud and unsure of Ruth’s sympathy to let her see me cry, sensing she valued stoicism over softness. But the irony of the moment impressed itself on my heart: having arrived in Israel at long last, I felt too exhausted and alone to celebrate.