Newcomers in an Ancient Land

by Paula Wagner

  Picking our way past dung heaps, Gidon proudly showed off a herd of Holsteins hooked up to gleaming milking machines. Ooga, ooga went the machines, and moo-moo went the cows, their large heads plunged into feed bags. The scene made me smile, but Gidon’s expression was dead serious as he described the many challenges of running a dairy: the daily monitoring of each cow’s input and output; the types and cost of equipment and feed; the many uses of manure; even the intimate details of artificial insemination and how to deliver a newborn calf.

  Despite the kibbutz principle that all work was of equal value, the refet obviously carried special status, which Gidon clearly enjoyed. Not only did it produce enough milk for all the members, it also supplied neighboring communities. The collective system apparently welcomed profit when it came to outside business.

  Gidon seemed friendly and pleasant, and although I couldn’t quite tell what he and my sister saw in each other, I liked him. He was certainly nicer than her previous boyfriend in the US, who kept finding excuses to keep her from leaving. The week before our departure, her passport had suddenly gone missing. We had turned our apartment upside down, but it was nowhere to be found. Exasperated, I blamed her for being so disorganized. After a huge fight, I made good on my threat to leave without her, riding the Greyhound alone as far as Chicago. For the first day I felt incredibly free. But by day three, I missed her so much I found a phone booth and placed a call. As if by magic, her passport had somehow reappeared, so I relented. When she arrived in Chicago, we patched things up and shared a happy visit with our grandparents.

  It never occurred to us that her old boyfriend might have hidden her passport in order to keep her from leaving—only to “find” it conveniently at the last minute. What a creep! Her choice of guys had always baffled me. Now I wondered if she might be on the rebound with Gidon.

  Over my next few visits to Hazorea, I would learn more about Gidon, who had already finished his three and a half years of compulsory army service and become a full-fledged kibbutz member. From that I calculated he must be about ten years older than we were. Besides his talent for tending cows, he was an accomplished folk dancer. Lithe and nimble, his feet whirled to the complicated rhythms of Israeli folk dances, the traditional entertainment on Friday nights. Naomi already knew some of the steps, but I felt too shy to join the circle of dancers.

  Gidon seemed to have boundless energy, but taking a break from the dance floor one Friday night, a pensive look replaced his passion. That’s when I noticed a series of numbers in blue ink on the inside of his forearm—the telltale tattoo of a Holocaust survivor.

  Naomi filled me in on this dark chapter of Gidon’s childhood. Born in Prague in 1935, he had spent four years in a concentration camp from age six to ten. Although he and his mother had somehow survived, by the end of the war, his father and grandparents had all been killed. Outwitting bayonet-toting guards, Gidon and the other children had learned to survive by stealing an occasional moldy potato from piles of snow. Ironically, the roles were now reversed. Although the kibbutz provided for all his needs, Gidon sometimes couldn’t resist the urge to filch extra food from the communal kitchen pantry while making his own rounds as a night guard, a rotating duty shared by all the men on the kibbutz.

  Classified as displaced persons at the end of WWII, Gidon and his mother had been resettled in Canada, where they learned English and set about rebuilding their lives. Gidon was finally able to attend a real school for the first time at age eleven. He had joined a Jewish youth movement in his teens and made aliya to Israel by age twenty. By the time we met, Gidon had added Hebrew to his knowledge of English and native Czech. Originally named Peter Hart, the little boy who survived the Nazis had become Gidon Lev, an Israeli citizen. I could not begin to imagine a childhood so different from my own.

  Gidon

  The Refet at Hazorea

  Chapter 17

  RENÉ

  My first Christmas in Israel was a workday like any other. Only the small minority of Christian Arabs observed the holiday at all, and even then without the commercial fanfare I was used to at home. The mere mention of the holiday seemed taboo for Jewish Israelis. For them, decorated trees, twinkling lights, and heaps of gifts only served as a painful reminder of a long history of pogroms and persecution in the Diaspora.

  At home we’d always celebrated both Chanukah and Christmas, so at first I thought I’d miss the twinkling tree and pile of presents underneath. But to my surprise, the utter lack of materialism with its constant pressure to buy, buy, buy brought welcome relief. What better way to honor the Prince of Peace? I thought. Secretly I sent a few token gifts—lightweight, flat, and unbreakable—to my family in California. Likewise, Naomi and I surreptitiously exchanged an earthen oil lamp and a soft wool shawl in a rose color as we sat beneath the symbolic boughs of evergreen she’d hung in her room. The scent brought back childhood memories of Christmas morning—the mad dash to open our gifts under the tree, strewing the living room in wrapping paper, and the ultimate letdown when the moment was over all too soon. Yet this hoopla-free Christmas with Naomi satisfied me far more in some ways. Ironically, Jesus seemed to retain more of his humanity in the land of his birth than at home, where he’d unwittingly become the patron saint of consumerism.

  Since Israelis celebrated Rosh Hashanah as the Jewish new year, New Year’s Eve would have been equally quiet, had the ulpan students not insisted on throwing a party. The kibbutz initially resisted the idea for fear of a drunken bash. But at last they agreed to provide some food—platters of cheese, salami, cookies, baklava, and juice—but no alcohol. I couldn’t understand how they could be so politically progressive yet so socially conservative—like my own politically liberal but socially restrained parents. Undaunted, a few students took the bus into the nearby town of Yochne’am and hauled back a case of Maccabee beer for what was shaping up to be a dorm party in a tzrif.

  By the time I mounted the front porch, the Maccabees were flowing and people were swaying to the beat of Chuck Berry belting out his Zydeco hit, “You Never Can Tell,” also known as “Teenage Wedding.” At home it had been one of my favorites, but here on the kibbutz, it seemed weirdly out of time and place.

  I didn’t have high hopes for the party, so I was hardly prepared to be swept off my feet by a cute young French guy in army fatigues. He’d only arrived on the kibbutz a week earlier, so we hadn’t yet met. His tanned biceps bulged from his rolled-up sleeves, and his pant legs were tucked into his boots. I guessed he was checking on the party while on night patrol.

  “Hello, shalom, bonjour!” he shouted in three languages over the din of the music. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  Was it the moonlight that threw bright streaks of silver over his dark hair? He had a sexy, devil-may-care smile and a charm that was hard to resist.

  “My name’s René; what’s yours?” he yelled again. “You like to dance?”

  Almost before I could answer, my feet started levitating and my heart expanded like a helium balloon heading straight for the stratosphere. The smoky room felt far too small to contain the emotions exploding inside me, so I dashed for the door as soon as the music ended. Like a magnet, René followed me onto the porch. Maybe night patrol could wait.

  My lungs stung in the cold winter air, but my heart was aflame. Even outdoors, talking over the noise of the party was a challenge in any language, but our bodies needed no words. René’s first kiss shivered on my lips like a hummingbird’s wings, fanning desire from deep inside my core.

  In the coming weeks, we found quieter moments to get to know each other when we weren’t making out. That we didn’t share a common language was not so unusual in a country of immigrants that sounded like a modern-day Tower of Babel. Compared to my fledgling Hebrew, René was fluent, but he still had a strong French accent (that was all the more romantic). Our comical mix of English, French, and Hebrew alternately accelerated my proficiency and/or confusion in all three.

  Beyond the dual attractions of
lust and language, I was fascinated by René’s life story. With his military service coming to a welcome end after almost four years in Israel, he had persuaded his commander to send him to the ulpan ostensibly to improve his Hebrew. In reality he’d been looking for any excuse to escape the tedium of army life. When the ulpan ended, he’d have to return to Kibbutz Dan, the outpost in the far north of the country on the Syrian border where he was stationed. Although he had numerous cousins in Israel, he longed to reunite with his own large family in France, once his military stint was over.

  Born in Lyon, France, on February 13, 1941, René was the fifth of seven children in a poor Jewish family. Growing up, he had shared a three-room cold water flat with two sisters, four brothers, and his hardworking parents, Haïm and Hannah. They hadn’t shared a common language either, besides broken French. So our situation must have felt familiar to René.

  While René seemed every inch a Frenchman to me, his nationality was more happenstance than heritage, as both his parents had immigrated to France in the early 1920s. Hannah was an Ashkenazi from Poland, while Haïm had grown up in a Sephardic community in Turkey. Whereas Hannah’s first language was Yiddish, Haïm spoke Ladino, a dialect of Old Spanish still spoken by some Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had fled the Inquisition of 1492. Like many first-generation children of immigrants, René and his siblings acted as interpreters for their parents, helping them pay their bills, make appointments, and navigate the bewildering labyrinths of French bureaucracy. But beyond their mutual need to escape from war, poverty, and anti-Semitism, Hannah and Haïm were apparently quite different in temperament and tradition.

  René’s family had survived World War II through a combination of luck, wit, and work as vendors at the local marché, Lyon’s outdoor market, where they had access to the few fruits and vegetables to be found. But with so many mouths to feed on so little money, Hannah had been forced to plead for credit or barter with the other merchants for bread, milk, meat, or fish.

  Running even a simple errand meant risking a gauntlet of occupying soldiers, so Hannah would wrap herself in an old woolen shawl and pretend not to understand their commands in German as she crisscrossed the cobblestone streets. Baffled, the soldiers would dismiss her as crazy but harmless. It was only after the war that she learned the fate of a brother, his wife, and their children who had stayed behind in Poland. They had all died in a concentration camp.

  Through René, I learned that Lyon had played a major part in the French Resistance. When word leaked out that the Gestapo planned a roundup of Jews and suspected collaborators, the Resistance fighters would send out a warning. Then Haïm would flee to the relative safety of Grenoble, where an extended family network could offer refuge. The war had also widowed one of Haïm’s sisters, leaving her to raise five daughters alone, cousins who now lived in Israel. René promised I would meet them as soon as we could arrange a trip to their kibbutz. It was these cousins who had persuaded René to follow them to Israel, where French Jews could do their military service instead of in the French Army, where they risked being sent to fight in Algeria during that country’s war of independence in the early sixties.

  But René’s childhood hadn’t been entirely bleak. He and his brothers had reveled in many escapades. They’d made a game of chasing each other over Lyon’s red-tiled rooftops and through its famous underground traboules, the tunnels used by the Resistance fighters to strike the Germans before vanishing into their labyrinth. Like Gidon, René also loved to dance. As a teenager, he and his brothers had flocked to the popular rock and roll clubs in Lyon. René and a female partner had even placed among the finalists in a European competition. But now he had to settle for Israeli folk music.

  René knew his family’s war stories by heart, although fortunately he had been too young to experience most of them directly. Without even meeting them, I began to feel a huge empathy for their hardships and heartaches. Having been lucky enough to grow up in America, I’d never considered myself a product of the war that had brought my own parents together. But the indelible impact of that conflict was beginning to dawn on me. Was it survivor’s guilt that drew out my compassion? Slowly I began to see how Israelis pinned their hopes for peace, prosperity, and security squarely on the shoulders of my generation of baby boomers. We were the very embodiment of renewal—of “life’s longing for itself,” in the words of Kahlil Gibran, the poet whose small but powerful verses I was coming to love.

  One night, René sang the refrain to a popular French song:

  Je t’aime, tu m’aimes, on s’aimera.

  Jusqu’à la fin du monde, puisque la terre est ronde...

  “Can you guess what it means?” he asked, then translated it into English.

  I love you, you love me,

  We’ll love each other until the end of the world,

  Just ’cause the world is round.

  Was René really saying he loved me? I had no idea if what I was feeling was love or lust or a wild entanglement of both. Maybe they were inseparable at age eighteen. But he seemed so sincere. I believed him.

  The market where Rene’s family worked

  Chapter 18

  BECOMING A COUPLE

  It wasn’t long before René and I were spending most of our time together. Except for our separate work shifts, we shared meals in the hadar’ochel, drank tea on my tiny porch in the afternoons like any other kibbutz couple, and shared my cramped mattress on nights when he could get away from his bunk in the soldiers’ barracks. He’d hang his Uzi behind my door before stripping out of his fatigues. Although we’d never had guns in my family, the weapon didn’t bother me. It was just part of the landscape in Israel—slung casually from the hitchhikers’ shoulders, shoved under bus seats, or leaned up against the walls of museums, shops, clinics, and shrines. Since the country was still officially at war with all its Arab neighbors, I saw them through the lens of self-defense. While I would have found them threatening at home, here in Israel, they made me feel safe, strong, and proud.

  With René, I felt tethered again, no longer floating as I had after separating from Naomi. His presence filled her absence and restored my sense of symmetry. I’d felt as awkward as a threelegged sack race around Naomi and Gidon while I was single.

  At twenty-two, René didn’t have a college degree, but I admired his accomplishments. He was an avid reader and knew the French classics. His Hebrew was still much better than mine, and he moved through Israeli society and handled money with ease. On our occasional outings to Haifa, he ordered lunch with the flair of a Frenchman accustomed to café life. The menu may have been the same simple food we ate every day on the kibbutz, but his confidence impressed me.

  One afternoon, we took a short trip to Akko (Acre), the old port city just north of Haifa, to explore the thick-walled Crusader castle with dank dungeons that dated back to Ottoman times. Half hidden among the narrow cobblestone streets, a souk sold finely worked Bedouin rugs, leather stools, copper trays, and painted porcelain coffee sets. The curve of a small brass pot caught my eye. I watched with awe as René bargained for it.

  Feigning disinterest by averting his gaze, he asked the merchant its price.

  “Eight lira,” replied the man, unsmiling. (Shekels were not yet the common currency.)

  “Outrageous. Three lira, tops. No more,” countered René.

  After much haggling, they settled on five lira. The man wrapped my new/old pot in newsprint as René explained the process to me out of earshot.

  “Never pay their first price. They always start high, so pretend you’re not interested. Walk away, then circle back and make a reasonable offer. If you meet in the middle, you have a deal. If not, let it go. But don’t start too low or you’ll insult the vendor. You have to establish mutual respect before you can trust each other.”

  René had grown up honing his bargaining skills in the marché of Lyon, whereas my family worried over money but never openly discussed it. I admired his confidence in this department.

 
; Market in the Old City of Acre/Akko

  Emboldened, I set eyes on a set of small porcelain cups to go with the coffee pot. I could almost taste the coffee in their rosy interiors. Soon a tarnished tray with fluted edges caught my interest. It didn’t look like much, but I’d polished enough of my mother’s English copper to bet that a bright luster lurked beneath its gray-green sheen. After another round of negotiations, René and the vendor shook hands, and the cups and tray were ours for a ridiculously low price.

  “Please sit down and share a coffee to seal our deal,” insisted the merchant. Beckoning a small boy out of nowhere, he dropped a few coins into his hand. It was getting late, but it would be rude to refuse.

  The boy darted away but soon returned with a gleaming brass tray. The cardamom-infused steam spiraling up from three thimblefuls of sweet black espresso made me think of Aladdin’s lamp. Behind us, the sun shot its last rays over the ramparts of Akko, and a cool breeze rose from the Mediterranean, sending shivers up my spine. In the harbor below, the tide lapped gently as it had for countless eons. On the horizon, the moon rose up from the sea like an alabaster egg. Sipping the coffee, we murmured our thanks and promised to return on our next visit.

  In this part of the world, personal bonds were every bit as important as the money that changed hands. Already, I treasured our shiny brass pot, tarnished tray, and demitasse porcelain cups. Each time we used them, I knew I’d remember the bearded merchant seated on his low leather stool in his white robe with its loose red cord around his ample waist, enjoying his own coffee like a sultan in his festooned shop.

  Arm in arm, René and I strolled along the raised seawall as the moon shimmered over the water. Had my ancestors felt the same powerful pull of these shores too? Taking a deep breath, I allowed myself to inhabit the specialness of the moment in that place and time and feel a sense of belonging in these new surroundings, so different from anything I’d ever known.