I also asked her then, at the hospital, to recite to me the lyrics of a lullaby she would sing to me in “Yugoslav,” her mother tongue, as I thought of it, the language in which she counted, and which gave her that accent I could never imitate. (German, Russian, English, and French accents I could imitate well and used to amuse her, causing her to laugh to the point of tears when I did so.) I wrote down the lyrics in this Yugoslav language, at a time when Yugoslavia no longer existed, and “Yugoslav” was a politically incorrect term. I wrote them in Hebrew letters. And I fear she did not recall them in full, or perhaps I did not quite get all the lyrics and was too shy to ask her again and again to repeat them.
Both my parents were liberated by the Soviet Red Army. If this has left me with a soft spot for the name itself, it’s no wonder that my parents always retained their affectionate sentiments toward the USSR. Hanna told me more than once about the Red Army commander whom she ran into at the German village where she spent her first night free from captivity after two years. One soldier, an ignorant dolt, suspected her of being German. His commanding officer realized that such a ragged skeleton could not possibly be German. “Germania Vashaya,” (Germany is all yours) he said to her as a gracious liberator, startled by her apperance (she guessed) but managing to conceal it.
Once, perhaps twenty years ago, we watched a strange film together—French I think. I don’t recall its title or content. But it had a sentimental scene of Red Army soldiers dancing and singing. Before going into battle, or after it, or unrelated to battle—I have no idea. “I cried so hard, I don’t know what got into me,” she said, surprised at herself after that scene. She was not accustomed to crying. I suppose we both knew why she cried. Disillusioned with her dream of the USSR, longing for that dream, angry at the dream and its destroyers and at innocence at large, she still felt grateful to the peoples of the USSR for their courage, their valor.
As Abraham Hass, my father, was rushed half-paralyzed to the emergency ward, he heard the doctor’s Russian accent and immediately said a few words to him in Russian. The doctor was surprised.
Perhaps the doctor supposed this mustachioed, dark-skinned man was Iraqi. Many mistook him for a Jew of Iraqi descent or some other Arab nationality, especially in his younger years. And he never even managed to pick up the guttural “a” and “h” sounds. He told me how he said to this doctor, “The Red Army liberated me, and that I shall never forget,” half-paralyzed, eyes shut, head bursting with an untreated condition of high blood pressure, which the doctors were amazed to discover. “And the doctor said to me,” he went on telling me with his eyes shut, “that if that was so, then not everything was bad about the Soviets.” My father must have had it wrong. The doctor could not have said “Soviets,” but for Abraham Hass his liberators had always remained “Soviets” : an imagined identity that for him was objective, an ideological and moral identity, not ethnic. An entity of a mission, devoted to internationalist, not nationalist ideas. Like tens of millions or even more, he imposed this ideal of his on reality. Many years after 1956, when their murderousness became undeniable, he found it difficult to acknowledge the reality of these oppressive regimes, cynical, hypocritical nomenclatures, nationalism in the guise of anti-imperialism, reigns of terror, inequality, and stark exploitation of workers. He did see “mistakes,” of course, in those regimes, found fault with leaders, spoke of “petrified thinking” inside the party, believed that reforms were possible. He believed in democratization, quarreled with those who remained official Stalinists over certain issues, felt close to the Italian communists. But he saw no structural failure in a system that pretended to implement communist ideology and presented it as a scientific formula for grasping the reins of power.
His shouts on the telephone woke me up to the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968: “They have gone too far!” or something of this sort. The house fell into mourning.
In 1977, when I spent a few months in Romania—under the most insanely tyrannical regime of Eastern Europe in the 1970s and ’80s—he came for a visit. I saw his denial mechanism swing into full action. On the train from Bucharest to his hometown, Suceava, he spoke about the fascists of the 1940s, about poverty and exploitation back then, about the West that does everything in its power to undermine any attempted change, as in Chile, about the involvement of the CIA, about provocateurs. This was how he avoided my reports of oppression and massive human suffering at the hands of the Romanian Communist Party in its reign of terror.
Gradually he overcame his mental obstacle, his tunnel vision. After all, he could not deny the fact that, in the name of the Communist Party and internationalism, Ceaucescu reigned supreme as a tyrant-emperor over a terrified, impoverished, and ill populace with the full collaboration of a hypocritical, opportunistic nomenclature sporting its red flag.
I wish I could recall my father saying something very clear about the moral responsibility of anyone regarding themselves as a Marxist leftist for the existence of the monstrosities created in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and North Korea, and the various Pol Pots that such regimes produced. By “leftist” I mean anyone for whom the equality of human beings is a supreme value, and nationality a fact rather than an ethical issue; those who—despite repeated defeats—have not given up seeking ways to end the exploitation of most of humanity from which certain minorities profit, amassing wealth and pleasure; those who—in spite of defeats and contradictions—have not surrendered their faith in and support of popular struggles; those for whom principles are signposts in the path of thinking, action, and conduct rather than rigid religious-like laws that sanctify all means. But my memory founders regarding even one such conversation. He had made comments whose integral mass was much greater than the sum of their words, and from which I would like to conclude that he did carry on such an inner dialogue. “Now,” he said, after the collapsing Eastern European regimes did away with the last remnants of his denial of reality, “the time has come to give new terms to those old feelings.” On another occasion he said that “the failure of the socialist experiment does not exonerate capitalism and its inherent exploitation.” He also said in Russian, “Davai snachala!” (Let’s start over).
This was a sort of private code in our family, and I am not sure of its origin. I seem to remember their quoting Shmuel Mikunis, the Russian-born former secretary general of the Israel Communist Party, who said this after 1956, or perhaps 1968. I do not remember and have no one to ask about it, but whenever we meant it was time yet again to push the Sisyphean boulder uphill, we would say—spurring ourselves on in what seemed self-irony—“Davai snachala!”
In my memory it was easier for my mother not to suppress that which the so-called socialist regimes had created in her name. “I was a fool,” she said when we spoke about the Communist Party, about the USSR. Sometimes she said, “We were fools” of herself and her peers. Unlike Abraham, she did not seek extenuating circumstances.
But on the last May Day of her life—in 2001, as the eighth month of the Second Intifada began, forty days before she died, (when, as had become my daily custom, I sneaked away from the ritual shooting in Ramallah between Israeli soldiers and armed Palestinians to visit her at the home for the elderly in Motza where she spent her last three years)—she waited for me outside her room. She was already breathing very heavily, but could not understand why I was so upset and worried about it. The reduced supply of oxygen to her brain accounted for her drowsiness, I suppose, her growing confusion and failing short-term memory. As always, I bent down toward her easy chair to kiss her soft, smooth cheeks. “Turn your other cheek,” I used to tease her about her embarrassment at the many kisses. As she turned her other cheek, she looked up at me and said, excited: “Do you know what day it is? It’s the first of May.” She did not have to tell me what that day meant to her. Her belonging to a transnational community, transcending time and borders, a sense of belonging and honor to all those struggling for self-evident matters that had once been not at all self-ev
ident, and as such were not self-evident quite yet.
My memory—impaired as I have already hinted—tells me that she mistrusted dogmas quite early on and thus taught me to distinguish between leftist essence and the authoritarian shapes it took in communist-Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist movements. Her early attraction to socialist feminism, and her rancor at phallocrats—including leftist ones—equipped her with better tools than my father to begin asking questions. Familiarity with the domestic suppression of women party members cracked the communist tradition of male-leader worship (and of female leaders who did not assign any significance to male suppressive dominance). I do not know how much she dared argue at party cell meetings. I suppose not too much. But her dissidence was reinforced by her objective condition as a woman aware of the suppression of women in a conservative communist party. This helped me balance the natural and contagious tendency to believe in a paradise (such as that portrayed in Soviet children’s books and films).
Her last week in the hospital taught me how much feminist thinking had empowered her. The doctors tried to explain her exhaustion, confusion, internal bleeding, breathing difficulties, insomnia, constant nightly sighing, talking to herself. For hours she was hostile to me, rehashing a mother’s old resentments toward her daughter, hours of invoking old suspicions of me and my intentions. Two to three days later these were all gone, to my relief, and I was once again her “Amiritza” and “Dushitza” (“little soul” in Yugoslav). I was constantly on guard to prevent any invasive treatment by the doctors. This was the least I could do. “Help me die,” she had asked more than once. I do not remember whether she repeated this in the end, at the hospital. But I asked, “How? Force a pillow over your face?” I do not remember when or where, but I do recall her waving her hands as was her habit whenever we argued, as though saying half-joking, half earnestly: “Stop it already, you nag.”
When she was tired of lying in bed, I helped her sit up. Her feet hardly reached her slippers. I vividly remember one of those occasions at the hospital, sitting and talking, her eyes shut. She often spoke with her eyes shut. To help her concentrate, she always said. Behind the screens we could hear other women in the room talking: they discussed dishes they prepared for their grandchildren, talked of this singer and of that TV anchor, and in between it all they spoke of the Palestinian “murderers.” I spared her the report of a suicide attack that took place at a Tel Aviv dancehall on the day I took her to Hadassah Hospital. All of a sudden she started carrying on about the success of the feminist movement and ideology, saying that the twentieth century could be seen as the century of transformation thanks to feminism and the upheavals it had generated in social patterns.
Did she not recall Bergen-Belsen even once during that week, and therefore refrained from talking about it? She did mention her murdered mother and sisters, but in a painful context other than their death—that of her childhood. I had always assumed that Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz—for her and for others—was a memory that is non-memory, namely ever-present as a counterpoint to immediate thinking and speaking, inevitably and constantly resurfacing. I was proven wrong—both about her and about my father, who also refrained from mentioning Auschwitz. Perhaps because each of their respective Auschwitzes was so present, it was not recalled. Or recalled but still sparing me? Her whole lifetime she tended not to spare me. I mean, she spared me no harsh thoughts or painful memories (although now I realize how many she avoided and how many questions I missed). So why spare me on her deathbed, which she recognized full well?
“Are you scared?” she asked me, eyes open wide, startled and curious in her hospital bed. Her motherly concern for me mixed with her own fear of the end.
The evening before I took her to the hospital, she said to me, sitting in her “Voltaire” easy chair, “Just you wait, I’ll recover a bit and tell you what it’s like to die.” I laughed and cried. I could not protest and tell her she was not going to die. And I could not persuade her to speak—for the record—about “how it feels to die.” I could not tell whether this was one of those conscious, jocular sparks she sometimes let out or an odd product of her confusion. Just like her words to the hospital doctors: One morning, as several doctors and interns gathered around her bed, she looked at them with distant curiosity. “ What is this, a general assembly?” They burst into laughter and thought she was perfectly lucid. And she, I think, told me her opinion of doctors, but in Yugoslav that I had not learned. On her last day at the hospital, a doctor (a Palestinian who had studied in France, so they conversed in French) still tried to poke around her vein for some blood test. She observed him and his attempts with an anthropologist’s distance. “All this hocuspocus,” she said, “just to keep me alive.” He gave up trying.
We went back to her Motza nursing home with Tirza Waisel, who had come especially from London to be with Hanna. They met in the Tel Aviv feminist movement twenty-five years earlier. Their forty-six-year age difference notwithstanding, Hanna had become her soul mate and mentor. Thus Tirza was like a younger sister to me, sharing those last pains, and today she is perhaps the only person left besides me who misses Hanna and Abraham (who, separately, became her special counselor on matters of class and class struggle).
I was able to participate in the annual Women in Black demonstration on June 8, 2001, at Jerusalem’s Paris Square. “Go on,” Hanna urged me, when I told her I was leaving her for a while for that purpose. In the previous large demonstration of Women in Black—in December 2000, I believe—we still participated together. But this one I went to alone, after a terrible night of moaning and insomnia and muffled cries, from which I had escaped, leaving Tirza to stay with her. I leaned down to kiss her. She raised her head and looked up at me. From her Voltaire chair (in which her feet were sure to reach the floor and her back always straight): “Still that same blouse …” she said in French.
Was she scolding me or making an anthropological observation? I had been in Ramallah when the doctor summoned me to her. I hadn’t thought of a change of clothes….
I was at the demonstration when Tirza called, excited, to tell me that Hanna was sitting on the balcony, calm, and had even been fed a few teaspoonsful of ice cream.
I think Tirza was still hoping Hanna would recover. When I got back I found her there, her face very smooth, smiling lightly, enjoying the sun. I told her about the fairly large turnout at the demonstration, and she seemed very attentive as she remarked, “Great” (in Hebrew).
She had known enough demonstrations in her lifetime not to have illusions about the possible effect of one or even ten thousand such events. In the last eight months of her life—the first eight months of the Second Intifada—she suffered great pain both in body and in mind, and was distressed with what seemed to her a worthless existence.
So she did not quite realize how severe the situation had become, nor did she want to. Fortunately she was spared thoughts of forcibly collaborating with the herd that follows its bomb-throwing generals. She had told me several times in the past that she had made a mistake by immigrating to Israel. She also said this after returning from yet another “migration” of hers, a ten-year attempt at correcting a mistake. At the age of sixty-nine or seventy, in 1982 or 1983, she decided to move to France. I interpreted this as another one of her escapes. Ever since I was a little girl I remember her running away: to her study, to the Scottish Hospice in Jerusalem, later—when she received her pension from Yugoslavia—to travel in Europe, staying at cheap family hotels, riding trains (with her walking stick) to visit Moyra McCrory, an Irish writer in Liverpool whom I had known on the kibbutz, from there to London to visit feminist activists. The Sabra and Shatila massacre found her and my father in some anti-Nazi fighters’ reunion in Europe, a communist organization that was a microcosm of contradictions, dreams, and lies. They packed up and hurried back to Israel, gave up their vacation plans. Several months later she packed her bags again and went to Paris. She characterized her escape streak with two jokes: A Jew—Romanian,
say—wants to emigrate from Romania, so he goes to a travel agency. Israel? No. Too many wars (or Jews). The United States? Too capitalistic. The USSR? Are you out of your mind? South Africa? Racism over there is a bit much. Finally the Jew asks the travel agent, “Say, haven’t you got another globe?” The second joke is about another Jew—say another Romanian—who immigrates to Israel. After a few months he misses Romania and goes back. This happens again and again. Somebody asks him, “Can’t you make up your mind? Where do you feel best?” And he answers: “En route.”
Not long ago I was asked whether it was true that after—and because of—the Sabra and Shatila massacre she resolved to leave Israel. My memory provides no answer. All I knew was that she wished to die abroad, to shift her personal history: to go back to the diaspora, to her a kind of homeland that had expelled her. Vanish there.
She came back to Israel in 1993, eighty years old, having almost obtained permanent resident status in France (or was it citizenship? I no longer remember). Suddenly she had discovered what a stranger she was there as well. I teased her: “You realized you won’t die that easily, and remembered you have a daughter who will take care of you.” But the escape option was always natural for her: “Don’t you feel like leaving?” she tried to talk me into dropping everything and going away a few years ago, just when I felt more attached to the country than ever, through my living and working in Gaza and the West Bank.
Diary of Bergen-Belsen Page 10