by Ari Shavit
Apart from the Jewish Agency’s three metal beds, the tiny apartment was empty. But within days, the crates the Spiegels had sent from Carlsbad arrived: blankets, towels, bed linens, crocheted tablecloths, pots, pans, silverware, two tea services. An electric stove, a mechanical meat grinder, a coffee grinder, a poppy seed grinder. The heavy Czech furniture that could not fit through the door of the miniature apartment was exchanged for light, modern Israeli-made tables and chairs. When Erno Spiegel became the bookkeeper of the just-founded Cameri Theater, more furniture was added: armchairs, a sofa, an icebox, a radio. Within one year the empty public housing unit became a warm home enveloped in the aroma of goulash and paprikash and poppy-seed yeast cakes that Anna prepared in her tiny kitchen.
For Erno Spiegel, work was everything: a source of income, a safety net, therapy. Work kept away bad thoughts and memories, he told his wife. Every morning at eight he would put on a suit and tie, don a hat, and take the bus to the theater’s office. Every afternoon at four, the bus would take him home. After a light meal he would rest and listen to the news on the radio and read the centrist Maariv newspaper. Then, at his desk in the hall, he would audit the accounts of private theater productions for which he was well paid. This was how there was enough money to add another room and to buy Yehudit a piano.
Anna Spiegel was a housewife. In the mornings she cooked spicy Hungarian dishes. In the afternoons she took Yehudit to private piano lessons. She was particular about her looks and her daughter’s looks: she sewed, ironed, and embroidered their clothes. Once a week was laundry day. Once a month was seamstress day. Every once in a while, she would take a Hebrew lesson at the Ulpan or attend a gathering of mothers at the women’s club. Unlike Erno, Anna never stopped talking about over there. And about the great miracle that happened to her family and to all other Jewish survivors when they came here from over there.
Yehudit attended the housing estate’s kindergarten and elementary school, first in the adjacent neighborhood and then in the housing estate itself. Almost all the children in her class were the sons and daughters of Ashkenazi immigrants, almost all of them Holocaust survivors. From time to time someone would say, “Daddy screams at night.” From time to time someone would say, “Mommy is sick again.” They would discuss the number tattooed on a mother’s arm, the number tattooed on a father’s arm. Partisans, ghettos, concentration camps. But all these shadows could not obscure the miraculous events taking place around them. In 1953 Israel began to drain the swamps of Lake Hula in the Galilee. In 1954 it was digging the first parts of the National Water Carrier that would eventually bring water from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev desert. In 1955 oil was discovered in Heletz, not far from the Gaza Strip. In 1956 Israel won the Sinai campaign. So in the housing estate’s school there were no doubts anymore. It was absolutely clear that the children wearing blue and white for Israel’s ninth Independence Day were the children of hope. And Yehudit Spiegel was the most striking among them. There was nothing Yehudit couldn’t do. Sports, scouting, English, French, piano. She was the head of her class, the leader of the youth movement, a medal-winning athlete. In her pleated blue skirt and embroidered white shirt, eleven-year-old Yehudit Spiegel was the daughter of triumph. Triumph over Mengele and Auschwitz and Birkenau. Triumph over the damned Germans. Triumph over the horrific past of the Jews. In the name of Erno Spiegel from Auschwitz-Birkenau and in the name of Anna Spiegel from the labor camps she would go forth and conquer the world.
So when I choose the place that evokes the Israel of 1957 more than any other, I don’t choose my hometown of Rehovot or a kibbutz or a moshav or a new town. Nor do I choose Jerusalem, Haifa, or central Tel Aviv. I choose the Bizaron housing estate.
In 1957, there are nineteen blocks in the Bizaron shikun. In every block there are sixteen families. Most are European: Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs. Almost all of the parents are survivors of death camps, forests, ghettos. Like Yehudit, many of the children were born immediately after the war, in the ruins of Europe. The families are small—no grandfathers, no grandmothers, no uncles or aunts. Every family has only one child, at most two. Behind every living family lurks the shadow of the larger family that has ceased to exist. Over there, Mr. Teicher had another wife. Over there, Mrs. Cohen had two other daughters. Shoshana’s mother is in bed all day long because her little brother and her baby sister never came back from the camps. In the tidy, clean apartments of night watchman Weinstock and Labor Party functionary Katz, whose wife suffers endless bouts of migraines and fatigue, no one is allowed to raise a voice, to horse around, to disturb the wives. The demons must not be woken. Although they are only in their thirties and forties, almost every parent in the housing estate is bereft of a father or mother, of a family that is no more. Almost every child in the housing estate knows that his or her parents have a past that one should not ask about. The Bizaron housing estate lives its life under a silent mountain of death.
Yet the housing estate is not gloomy. The pedestrian paths between the long trainlike housing blocks are busy with enterprise and action. Most fathers work as junior clerks in government or trade union offices, or in small private firms. Most mothers augment the family income with part-time jobs. But in every corner there is enterprise. One opens a notions store, another becomes a stationer. One works as a plumber and one as a photographer. Mrs. Shapiro uses a special blender sent from America to make carrot juice that she sells on the estate. Mrs. Levy imports a Singer sewing machine to make fancy dresses for the ladies. One Holocaust survivor is a milkman, another is a policeman. There is a shoemaker in the housing estate, an egg seller, and a bookbinder. One neighbor is a cosmetician, another repairs pantyhose. At No. 20, an attractive young woman sells her body to men. At No. 26 and No. 30, they sell black market butter. In winter, when the kerosene seller rings his bell, everyone gathers with metal jerry cans in hand around his horse-drawn cylindrical red tanker. In summer everyone gathers around the square blue cart of the iceman who wins the children’s hearts with merry squirts of ice water. Those lucky enough to have a bathtub at home fill it on Thursdays and throw a carp in to make gefilte fish for Shabbat. And every summer evening the immigrants sit on their balconies to read Maariv or the Labor Party’s Davar or the Hungarian-language Uj Kelet. At night the Russians drink vodka, the Poles play cards, the Czechs listen to classical music. From one year to the next, a neighborhood coalesces. Within less than a decade, a hodgepodge of devastated Jewish refugees who reached Bizaron in the hectic summer of 1949 becomes a stable community.
Political allegiance is mostly to Labor. When Minister of Labor Golda Meir comes for a visit, the housing estate greets her warmly. When Prime Minster David Ben Gurion gives a rousing election speech from the back of a truck parked on Victory Road, the housing estate is ecstatic. No wonder: for the Bizaron housing estate, Labor is not just a political party, it is a great omnipotent mother. Labor built the estate and assembled the refugees and gave them shelter and protection. The housing estate’s medical clinic, social club, and sports facilities are all Labor-related. Most of the housing estate’s men work in Labor-related offices and institutions. On the other side of Victory Road there is a housing estate whose middle-class Middle European residents vote for the Progressive Party. A half a mile away live Oriental Jews who worship Menachem Begin and vote for his Herut Party. A mile away is a Socialist Mapam housing estate. In bloc number 20, several Russian Communists live a life of debauchery. But at the heart of the Bizaron housing estate, Labor has a solid loyal majority. Even the state of mind is that of Labor: restrained nationalism, moderate socialism, pragmatism. Nobody gets too excited, nobody is too righteous, nobody insists on being absolutely just. They have seen it all. They believe in the hard work of laying down brick upon brick. But they also know that to get to the right place, one sometimes has to take a circuitous route.
There are a number of institutions in Bizaron: a cooperative minimarket, a medical clinic, a synagogue, a library, a sports field, a social clu
b. But the most important of all is Habonim, the builders’ school. The two-story school is very much the center of life and the melting pot of the estate. Here the sons and daughters of Europe’s survivors study math, English, Hebrew, the Bible. But far more important, they become Israelis. They learn about the heroic pioneers who drained the marshes of the Harod Valley, about the wonders of orange growing, and about the remarkable victory in the War of Independence. They learn about the Jewish National Fund’s forestry efforts, about the breakthroughs of Israeli science and the achievements of young Israeli industry. The Yiddish-speaking, Polish-speaking, Hungarian-speaking, and Czech-speaking adults of Bizaron see the Habonim school turn their offspring into Israelis.
In every immigrant society, as in every postwar society, the children are the crux. But in the Bizaron housing estate the children are everything. Like Leah and Zvi Brik, the thirty- and forty-year-old parents know they are the desert generation. Though they were saved from annihilation, they know that they will never reach a true haven. For them everything is temporary, fragile, and in doubt. For them life is waiting for the next catastrophe. But their children are something else. Like the Briks’ son, their children, too, are arrows shot to the future. For even though the bow was scorched and deformed in the great fire, it can still shoot a future-bound arrow. This is why the fathers will take any job to support the young and the mothers will buy them butter on the black market. This is why the children are sent to whatever private lessons they choose. Because the children’s education is the first priority: only what a person knows cannot be taken away from him. Everything in Bizaron is done in the name of the children, so that the children will be able to knock on the gates of a future closed to their parents.
The children get it and don’t get it. Only Yaakov’s father, Shmuel Gogol, comes to school once a year to say what the other parents don’t say. On Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, he tells the young students that from the age of seven he played the harmonica. In Auschwitz, too, he played the harmonica. The harmonica saved him. He was the harmonica player in the death orchestra that played music for those marching to work and those marching to death. All those years he played the harmonica with his eyes shut. Even now when he plays for the pupils of Habonim, he plays with his eyes shut. But the children would rather leave behind Gogol’s heartbreaking stories and harmonica music. They want to leave their fathers’ nightmares and their mothers’ migraines behind. They want to play volleyball, basketball, soccer, go to the scouts and have parties. They want to believe in everything that 1957 Israel tells them to believe in. That we are strong now. That we are the very best. That we will not be taken like lambs to the slaughter. That we will be tall and strong; we will be pilots and paratroopers, engineers and scientists. We will overcome the Germans and the Arabs and the barren desert. We will overcome our weakness and deformed genes and shameful history. Here, in the Bizaron housing estate, we will overcome ourselves. We shall be the new race of Israeli triumph.
So in the housing estate there is a growing gap between one generation and the next. Inside the tiny flats, one cannot escape the anguish. Although catastrophe is repressed, it is present. Black-and-white photographs of the dead are illuminated by memorial candles. But outside in the daylight there is great jubilation. When one walks between number 14 and number 16, one can hear the Fischer girl playing the piano and the Spiegel girl playing the piano and the Belldegrun boy playing the violin.
After they finish their lessons and chores, the children run to the kiosk to buy popsicles and soda pop. And as dusk descends they gather by the big tree on Victory Road to play tag and capture the flag. When the holiday of Lag BaOmer approaches, the children’s excitement mounts. They collect kindling and branches and plywood for their bonfire. And when the day arrives, the entire housing estate assembles around the enormous woodpile. The fire is lit. The flames grow taller and taller. For the parents, the smell of something burning is almost unbearable. But the children’s happiness is as high as the flames. And this year—after the 1956 victory—is the first year that the effigy of Hitler is replaced by an effigy of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. By now we have burned Hitler so many times that he’s totally burned out. So this year it is the nasty nose of the Arab tyrant that is ablaze, his vicious smile consumed by flames. As we triumphed over the damn Nazis, we shall triumph over the Arabs. For we are now part of a great beginning. We are the living proof that Israel’s new beginning is a great success.
In the basement archives of Tel Aviv’s City Hall I lean over the old thick file of house number 14 of the Bizaron housing estate. It’s a two-story structure built in 1949 by the Histadrut’s Shikun Ltd., the housing construction company for workers. The land was owned by the Jewish National Fund, and the plans were inspired by those of the working-class housing projects of 1920s Vienna and 1930s Tel Aviv. Although No. 14 is a long row house, it is variegated in order to give each unit several exposures and some privacy. In the plans, the 430 square meters of each floor are divided into eight units, so that each one will have 53.2 square meters. But in practice, because of the economic turmoil of 1949, the Shikun Company built only two-thirds of the designated building area. The drawings make a distinction between the 34 square meters of “the existing area” of each unit and the remaining 19.2 square meters of “area for the future.”
In December 1951, the engineer Dr. Eliezer Fischer submits a request to add to his apartment a bedroom and a bathroom as per the original plans. In May 1953, the bookkeeper Spiegel submits a similar request. In August 1953, Wolf Dovrovsky does the same, as do Zalman Weinstock in September 1955 and Arieh Mendkler in May 1956. One by one the immigrants make good. No. 14 is well built. The walls are made of hollow blocks, the ceilings of reinforced concrete, and the plaster is waterproofed. The northern exposure has nice tall windows; the southern exposure has square windows and rectangular balconies. The architecture is modern but not forbidding, functional but not cheap. It is apparent that a real effort has been made here to give the best accomodations possible to as many people as possible in hard times. Even after they are enlarged, all the apartments resemble one another. At the entrance is a small hall with a kitchenette to the left and a bathroom to the right. Beyond the hall are two square connecting rooms, one of which opens onto the balcony. Access to the front yard is through the kitchenette. During the 1950s, most dusty yards gradually turn into gardens, with plum trees, guavas, chrysanthemums, and rosebushes. By 1957, the sands on which the shikun’s long housing blocks were built in 1949 are covered with green vegetation.
The land surrounding the housing estate is dotted with orange groves. Some are Jewish orange groves that bear fruit; others are deserted Palestinian orange groves that are dying. Closer by, new housing estates pop up one after the other. New factories pop up, too. Sypholux manufactures domestic soda fountains, Amcor makes Israel’s first refrigerators, Argaz assembles buses. A fenced-off plant of Israel’s military industry manufactures who knows what. In 1957 Bizaron is still encircled by breathtaking fields of wildflowers: autumn crocuses, asphodels, bellflowers, and anemones. But they are about to disappear. A wave of development is replacing them with more and more housing estates populated by more and more new immigrants who are rapidly becoming new Israelis.
I leave the municipal archives and drive to Bizaron. A great deal has happened here over sixty years. The neighborhood has gone downhill and uphill and now it is being gentrified. Yet the structures of the housing estate are pretty much as they were. Nineteen long rows, eighteen pedestrian paths, a school still named Habonim.
I walk along the path that separates what was No. 14 from what was No. 16. Here the children of 1957 used to play dodgeball and hopscotch and Simon Says. Here they rolled hoops with sticks and sprayed water on one another, until from the balconies their mothers called them home for supper. The news bulletin would come on the radio, then popular Israeli music, classical music, cantorial singing. As I look across the path, I can almost imagine the Sp
iegels’ neat living room, where Yehudit is playing the piano, and the living room of the Belldegruns, where Arie is struggling with the violin while his close friend Pinchas (Zukerman) masters it. Somewhere an accordion is playing, somewhere a heartbreaking harmonica. And while the Kovno ghetto survivor Abrasha Axelrod writes unforgiving poems in Yiddish, the Mengele twin Erno Spiegel is closing his account books. Dr. Fischer is drafting engineering plans for an overpass to be built in the desert, and plumber Zahlikovsky is playing cards with friends. The photographer Leon Teicher is developing photographs of his two beloved sons, one of whom will fall in one of Israel’s future wars. As night descends, the bedroom lights and the balcony lights are dimmed one by one. The children’s squeals are quieted. The forced Israeli gaiety and purposefulness of daylight hours disappears into the night. Carpets are being rolled up, armchairs moved aside, beds pulled out from living room sofas. As they finally lie down to sleep, the tenants of the Bizaron housing estate close their eyes. In their dreams—in their nightmares—they see their new neighborhood sinking into the sea.
And yet, walking along the path between what was No. 14 and what was No. 16, I realize that Bizaron is not a tragedy but a miracle. Israel’s 1950s are not defined by misfortune but by a fit of human greatness. Against all odds, most of the Holocaust survivors of the housing estate make it. Against all odds, Ben Gurion’s Israel pulls through. Ze’ev Sternhell will become a professor of political science. Aharon Appelfeld will become a great novelist. Aharon Barak will become one of the most respected jurists in the world. The children of Louise Aynachi will also do well. Arie Belldegrun will become an extremely successful doctor and investor in Los Angeles. Yehudit Fischer will become a professor of Hebrew literature in Boston. The surviving Teicher boy, Shlomo, will become one of Israel’s best dental surgeons. Yehudit Spiegel will become a psychologist and entrepreneur who, together with her husband, will launch a billion-dollar medical company. In the most astonishing way, Bizaron will have become a hub for Israel’s future meritocratic elite. Many of its sons and daughters will conquer their professional worlds. The Israel into which I am born in late 1957 does not only overcome its horrific past, it launches a radiant future.