The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  I TELL:

  The word legend comes from the Latin “legere,” which means “to read.” The word fiction comes from the Latin “fingere,” which means “to form.” From fingere we also get the word fingers. We form things with our fingers. The word history comes from the Greek “istor,” which means “to learn” or “to know.” I believe in original etymology. I believe that fiction is formed truth. I believe that history is a way of knowing all of this. I believe that legend is how we read between the lines.

  Proof? There was no proof Al Jud really marked the grave of the NILI spy. But I think that this does not matter. Certain kinds of stories don’t need legs of proof to walk on, don’t need water facts to drink. Unlike the spy, the story of Al Jud made its way out of the desert, and it lives among us still. No, there was no proof. Shimon danced the water dance, and Avra was a thief. And we lean against the date tree, because the absent body offers so little to hold us up.

  Chapter 5

  ZOHAR

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  My father Zohar, and his twin brother, Moshe, grew up in Petach Tikvah. Petach Tikvah was the center of the citrus-growing industry in Palestine. When they were very young, Shimon began taking the twins (my father and uncle) out to the orchard with him. The family would joke that the boys knew how to graft before they knew how to walk. Of course this is absurd, but it shows just how immersed their lives were in the orchard. Unfortunately, it also shows how poor the family was. The twins had to leave school and begin to earn money at a very young age.

  I WRITE:

  Zohar was seven years old and nobody’s fool. He knew that Piki Kleinman was the biggest boy in school—almost seventeen, or some other astronomical number. And he knew that when Piki Kleinman asked you to do something you did it, even if it meant peeing on your neighbor’s dog, or giving some pretty older girl flowers. For Piki, of course. Piki Kleinman, who was the biggest boy in school, was also the most handsome boy. He was always courting the prettiest girls in Petach Tikvah, and one of his favorite mating rituals was getting the little boys to bring his dates little gifts from him. Flowers or candy lifted from the British soldiers’ store on the corner of Pardess and Amnon streets.

  Zohar had already peed on a neighbor’s dog, a brown puppy terrier, at the behest of Piki Kleinman. Piki Kleinman wasn’t watching. He wasn’t anywhere nearby, even. But he had told Zohar that if he peed on the puppy he would take him with him into the orchard, which was quite an honor considering that everyone knew that Piki Kleinman always tended the groves alone. Zohar hadn’t asked any questions.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Petach Tikvah was not a quiet place to grow up. Even when my father was a little boy, he saw his share of violence and fighting. In 1917, the battle between the invading British and the retreating Turks passed through Petach Tikvah. My father and his twin were only two years old, but he remembered hearing the story of how the family had run all the way to Jaffa, to an aunt’s house, to escape the war.

  Later that same year, the British passed the Balfour Declaration. It included the following crucial statement: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The Jews in Palestine were of course overjoyed at this proclamation, but the Arabs felt that they had been double-crossed. They had previously been led to believe (by Lawrence of Arabia and other British officers sympathetic to the cause of Arab nationalism) that Great Britain would “view with favor the establishment of a national home” not for the Jews, but for the Arab people in Palestine.

  In 1920–1921, in response to rising Jewish immigration, the Arabs reacted with a series of sporadic attacks across the country in which many people, both Arab and Jew, were killed. The worst of these “riots” began in Jaffa on May 4, 1921. On that day, a group of Jewish Communists marched through the center of town immediately after a Zionist labor parade. The Arab nationalists saw the strong show of Jewish political presence as a challenge to their claims. They erupted in fierce riots, which, for the first few days, were contained within the Jaffa area.

  ORANGE GARDENS NEAR JAFFA, WITH THE PLAIN OF SHARON AND THE MOUNTAINS OF EPHRAIM

  I WRITE:

  Now Zohar held the flowers carefully, by the middle of the stems with both hands. He held them straight in front of him, not even bending his elbows one bit. Pink petals and white petals. And thorns. Zohar thought that they were roses but he wasn’t sure.

  He delivered the flowers to the girl with the red hair and seventeen and twenty-one freckles on the backs of her hands. Zohar knew how many freckles she had because one day Zohar and Moshe had counted them. It had started with the Purim parade. The redheaded girl was dressed up as Queen Esther. The twins were dressed like court jesters and were roly-polying this way and that, making everyone in the entire school laugh, jumping up and down, doing somersaults and their favorite trick, looking at each other and making silly faces, and funny synchronized movements with their hands and feet, as if the other were a live mirror out of control. But then their teacher clapped her hands and the twins had to “attend the queen.” Each had taken one of her pale, speckled hands and led her in his best courtly manner in a procession around the school yard. Afterward, the twins had become obsessed with the question, How many freckles are on the hands of the redheaded queen? Moshe, the more practical twin, said at least forty-five. Zohar’s estimations went much higher. Fifty, sixty, eighty, even. Finally, the problem was solved when Zohar and Moshe spied on the redheaded queen in her own backyard. They hid under a bush to the left of a bench that she sat on to do her family’s darning. As her hands went up and down with the needle, they counted one freckle for the in, and one for the out, until the entire hem had been completed.

  After Zohar gave the redheaded queen the flowers, Piki Kleinman appeared in the yard. He came right out of the orchard wearing a dark-blue work shirt and dirty dark-blue pants. His forehead—just above his right eyebrow—was bloody from a straight scratch parallel to the brow that Zohar knew was from the kiss of branches. And the backs of Piki Kleinman’s hands were also bloody from the bottom root thorns that everyone called pigs. The pigs were hearty wild-citrus stock and grew at odd angles and sapped the strength of the rest of the tree so you had to cut them. But when you went to chop them off, the thorns always cut you back if you weren’t wearing gloves, which no one ever did.

  The big boy winked at Zohar, motioned away with his head while saying “Yalla Kofiko,” which meant “Let’s go now, little monkey” in a blend of Hebrew and Arabic slang. Zohar understood that his services were appreciated. But he didn’t really want to leave now. So, instead, he left through the front yard of the house, and then doubled back around and hid in the bush by the bench where the couple was standing, and where the redheaded queen usually did her darning, and where the twins had so earnestly counted the freckles on the backs of her deft hands.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  But then the violence spread. My father told me that the fighting in Petach Tikvah erupted suddenly, “in the middle of a very normal day.” He said that it lasted for only several days, but that it seemed like “forever.” The experience was, for my father, as well as for all the other children and men and women of Petach Tikvah, one of extreme horror. The first afternoon of the fighting my father remembers having to stand in the middle of the main street of the town in a group with all the women and children. There were over two hundred armed Arabs on horseback, gathered at each end of the main street of the settlement. The village men, as well as some armed women, gathered around the rest of the women and children and stood there in a ring of protection until the Arabs went away. On the first day of the “Petach Tikvah riots” there were not many serious casualties.

  But then the worst thing happened. The next morning, May 9, 1921, the corpses of four “big, popular boys” were found at the edge of Petach Tikvah. They were found by the night watchman, and brought back
to the school yard and laid out there. My father said that every Jew in Petach Tikvah—children, women, and men—came to see the corpses. “We all filed by, one by one. I don’t really know why they took us children, I guess to show us the horrible extent of the fighting. It was truly horrible. There was much crying and screaming. Some praying.” My father said that the boys’ bodies had been “dishonored” in an awful way. Their bellies were slashed open from chest to groin. Inside of their gaping chests, on top of their innards, rested each boy’s pair of shoes.

  It was later ascertained that the four young men had gone into the neighboring Arab village with torches in the middle of the night. They were on horseback and were armed. People speculated that the boys were trying to scare the Arab villagers into leaving the town alone in the morning. Some said that they were just being dumb, others called them too brave, or not brave enough; some called them troublemakers, others called them heroes. There is a memorial in Petach Tikvah in honor of the four young men.

  That day, the riots spread, full scale, throughout the region. More people were killed. My father and his brother hid with their mother and other women and children in a half-dug-out shelter for more than twenty-seven hours. The British arrived to put an end to the violence. But before it was all over, forty-seven Jews and forty-eight Arabs had been killed.

  I WRITE:

  Zohar walked with the rest of the family and neighbors and friends to the school yard. His mother held his hand. His father was holding his brother’s hand. As they walked close, then filed by the corpses, Zohar saw the belly and he saw the shoes and he saw the blood and he saw the surprised expression on the older boy’s face. Piki Kleinman was surprised, yes, but it was the surprise of the dead, not of the living. A lopsided look that said that this big boy had discovered something grand and odd and horrible, not about life, but about the ever-after.

  The redheaded queen was in the school yard, too. She was kneeling down by the bodies. Her mouth was wide open but she wasn’t screaming. She had the boys’ blood on her knees. Her freckled fingers were spread out wide and she was patting the air back and forth with her palms in one weird continuous motion. Zohar did not sleep that night. He was, after all, a little boy, and such big thoughts left no room in his head for rest and sweet dreams. He lay awake for hours and hours. He saw the belly and he saw the shoes. And all Zohar could think was that the shoes were untied, and that Piki Kleinman would surely trip if someone kind didn’t quickly reach in there and tie them.

  Chapter 6

  ZOHAR AND MOSHE

  OR CHASIA / MARY

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Once a year, Avra would take the boys back to Jerusalem to visit her parents. Shimon did not go with them. He couldn’t afford to leave his work as an orchard manager in Petach Tikva. Avra would travel with the twins in the back of whatever vehicle was available. Over the years, they went by donkey-cart, horse-drawn carriage, truck, car, and eventually bus.

  Golda died in 1925. Eliezer did not remarry. When the twins were fourteen, they didn’t go to Jerusalem to visit Saba Eliezer. They didn’t go because that year, 1929, the Arabs rioted again throughout Palestine. Many people were killed, and more were wounded. Jerusalem, especially, was the scene of much discord. This is because the catalyst for the riots was a dispute over the rights of Jews to pray at the Western Wall. The Wall was officially owned by the Muslims of Jerusalem, but Jews were allowed to pray there. But when the Jews put up a screen to create separate prayer areas for men and women, the Arabs accused the Jews of violating the “status quo” and of threatening to take over the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which lay just beyond the Western Wall. Violence quickly erupted and spread.

  During this dangerous time, Avra and Shimon begged Saba Eliezer to leave the house on Rav Pinchas Street and come live with them in Petach Tikvah. But he refused to leave Jerusalem, saying, “I am one of the guardians of the Walls.” He kept close to home and thank God didn’t get into any trouble.

  JEWS’ PLACE OF WAILING, JERUSALEM

  In 1930 the violence died down, and the family decided to return to Jerusalem for a holiday. This year Shimon joined them. The four—Shimon, Avra, Zohar and Moshe—had not been to Jerusalem together since the babies were born. It was, in my father’s memory, a very special vacation.

  I WRITE:

  SUNDAY, THE DAY OF TRAVEL

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  On the first picture of the twins, Avra wrote their names by punching holes through the paper with a pin. Otherwise, she could not tell who was who.

  Avra was the first one into the carriage. She hoisted herself up into the back of the carriage and perched on the edge, her legs happily swinging. She was glad to be going to Jerusalem. She liked her new life in the open plains of Petach Tivkah, but the whole first month of the boys’ lives, while they were still in Jerusalem, she had whispered to them to breathe in extra deeply. She hoped that the city would be kind enough to coat them in the color of the early evening light, “so that you will be pink and gold and silver, so that you will glow, my sons.” She kissed their tiny cheeks and noses, whispering, “That’s right, breathe deep.” The babies, as if spurred on by their mother’s coaching, had breathed most joyously, most gratefully, that first month. They had lapped up their first pools of air as if aware of the high quality of the source. Avra had held her twins close to her breasts and quietly thanked the city for helping her nurse them.

  Now, of course, they were long past nursing. Avra winked at her boys as they scrambled up into the back of the carriage. They didn’t wink back; rather, they scrambled over her, racing each other for the best seat on the pile of blankets all the way in the back. Shimon, last to enter the carriage, neither winked nor smiled nor scrambled. He climbed slowly in and settled down next to his wife with a sigh. Avra took his hand and tried wordlessly to reassure him. As the carriage began to move, she closed her eyes and envisioned the house on Rav Pinchas Street, and her father, waiting for them there. “Home is reunion,” she said to herself, “and family a dwelling, too.” This thought made her smile as they rolled along.

  Shimon took his hand from Avra’s and wiped his sweaty forehead. Then he shifted on the bench and breathed deeply. He was both nervous and excited. Excited in anticipation of the vacation, nervous in dread that his wife, this sweet wife who was sitting by his side humming a very pretty tune, would once again fall prey to the spell of the city she considered personally responsible for her thieving habits (though, Shimon noted, she always blamed Jerusalem with a smile). The carriage jangled out of Petach Tikvah.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Now, in order to describe the character of my great-grandfather Eliezer (after whom I am named), I must digress. When I was thirteen years old, I asked my father what his grandfather was like. He told me that Eliezer had been a “very kind, very enthusiastic man.” And then my father had laughed out loud before telling me that when he was around my age, his grandfather had been obsessed with the story of a murder that happened in our family. This was the first time I had heard of any murder. As you can imagine, I was fascinated. With a smile on his face, my father told me that every time he and Moshe would visit their grandfather in the Old City, they would spend days with him “trying to solve the ancient crime.” That day, when I was thirteen years old, my father told me the following story. And this is how I learned about the murder of my great-great-great-grandfather Rabbi David Berliner Herschell.

  Rabbi David Berliner Herschell was my great-great-grandmother Esther’s father. In 1845, seven years after Esther and Yochanan married and moved to Jerusalem, Rabbi Herschell, a widower, emigrated from London to Jerusalem with his youngest daughter, Sophie, and her husband, Jacob Silverman. Silverman, an Austrian citizen, was a businessman. Soon after he arrived in Jerusalem he became the part-owner of a factory that produced phosphorous wicks. Rabbi Herschell and the Silvermans lived with Esther and Yochanan in their house on Rav Pinchas Street in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

  Herschell had a very imp
ressive lineage. Not only was he the son of the chief rabbi of the British Empire but he was also a direct descendant, through the intertwining bloodlines of three daughters, of the famous spiritual teacher, the Ari of Sefat. The Ari lived in Sefat in the fifteenth century. And it was there that the Ari taught the Zohar, or “The Book of Splendor,” which is the core text of Kabbalah. Rabbi Herschell considered himself to be a spiritual descendant of the Ari. He devoted his later years to the study and practice of mysticism. According to family tradition, during the last years of his life, Rabbi Herschell wrote a mystical treatise “in the tradition of the Ari.” But no record of such a work exists today.

  Soon after his arrival, Herschell became a very prominent member of the Anglo-Jewish Jerusalem community. Consequently, his deathbed was attended by the British Consul to Jerusalem, James Finn. James Finn was an avid diarist—he kept daily journals of consular affairs for the years he spent in Jerusalem. These diaries still exist today—they have been published under the title A View from Jerusalem, and are considered important historical documents. Much of what modern historians know about daily life in nineteenth-century Jerusalem comes from this source. I have supplemented what I remember from my father’s telling of the tale with Finn’s firsthand account of the tragedy.