by Roger Cohen
The air of the earth is sweeter, lighter, softer because your spirit now resides in it, whispering in the damp breezes of our winter. How gentle you were, gentle in thought and action, your hand in mine always so soft and searching. How kind you were. To the family you loved, to the “treasures” that are your six grandchildren, to your many friends and often to people you hardly knew. Kindness, you thought, was a much undervalued virtue. Another was humility. You understood the meek of this earth.
Mama, you were strong in the end. It is said that people struggle against cancer. But you did not struggle. You defied the illness with your courage, mocked it with your dignity and overpowered it with your fearlessness. I cannot imagine that anyone ever went more graciously—more calm and open-eyed—into the light.
I am sure that all of you here remember June’s infectious laughter, full of the beloved sunshine of her native South Africa, bearing her away to the point where she had to wipe the tears from her eyes. I know that you all recall the childlike brightness of that neat, trim, fragrant figure in the moments when the world smiled on her. I do not doubt that you noticed how at ease she was with children, how she sang along with them, and how they loved her. And I am certain that we were all disarmed, at one moment or another, by the silvery thrust of her self-deprecating intelligence, erudition and wit. Asked by her doctor the other day if she had been afraid during a moment of incoherence brought on by shortness of breath, she shot back: “No, I thoroughly enjoyed it.” That, too, was my mother.
But there was, of course, a darker side, just as this day has been one of sun and shadow. As some of you here know, my mother suffered for most of the last two decades of her life from manic depression, a desperate, often incommunicable condition in which despair and agitation alternate. Each state, in its different way, could lead to misunderstanding and disaster.
The scraps of paper in her handbag—holidays untaken, courses untried, ideas unrealized—testified to an intermittent whirlwind of torment. But behind almost all these notions—however illusory, however desperate, however flawed—there lay some generous intention. To be happy together, all of us, as a family; to help somebody; to learn; to give. She was always, in her heart, on the side of the angels.
And I am certain that through her extraordinary stoicism, dignity, and patience, she wrestled down the demons—monsters we cannot even begin to imagine—and vanquished them in the end. That was her most painful and her greatest victory. In gaining it her spirit became so strong that this final passage was almost painless.
Her strength, as she often said, came in the end from love. Her life was about love. The love she felt for Sydney, her husband, father to Jenny and me. This love was uncompromising and greater than any suffering. However hard the world, she persisted. Of Sydney she felt, as Browning wrote, “I shall but love thee better after death.”
My mother loved and gave with an immense heart and held fast to her truth. When the spring comes, as it will, I will feel her beside me in the brightness of the new leaves, leaves as delicate as the blessing of her memory.
Benaim, who knew more of the two facets of my mother than anyone present apart from my father, approached me afterward. “Thank you” was all he said. June, in death, had brought her psychiatrist to tears.
In the ensuing weeks, my father wrote to me a couple of times with an openness and generosity that had the consoling power, after the years of reserve, of a hand outstretched to a drowning man. In the first he said, “My beloved boy—I know with certainty that great achievements and many triumphs lie ahead of you—but in my heart the four minutes of pain and passion during which you so perfectly encapsulated Mom’s noble struggle and ultimate triumph, will always remain your finest hour.”
And then, reaching into the core of his being, my father said this:
Now that Mom’s life is spent, we are each of us left with the pain and turmoil of personal accounting. I agree with you that this should be a time of gentleness. For Mom there was always a need for tenderness and gentle compassion, and all of us are left with stark memories of our failure to satisfy this innocent, almost childlike requirement of her psyche. Your expanding memories of Mom have become infinitely precious and important; I share with you the vision of a light which is the obverse of her tormenting darkness and which in some miraculous way has become completely dominant since her death. I hope and pray that this vision of her will be an enduring source of strength and inspiration to you in all the years ahead, ever cherished and unsullied.
For myself, I did have a fleeting dream of a few tranquil years carrying me into the sunset. I still hope for that in a mental and bodily sense. But I know that my spirit will not soon be released from those cruel demons that tore so relentlessly at the entwining fabric of love between Mom and me. I did strive within the feeble limits of my human fallibility to preserve and cherish and sustain her. But alas—for Mama ultimately, death was the only angel that could shield her from despair.
My beloved boy—the matchless eloquence of your writing speaks vividly of how painfully you had to probe and what anguish heaped with torment you have suffered. I hope with all my heart that before too long the turbulence of your spirit will subside and you will reach to tranquility in your inner self.
We were too undone to ask for the urn with my mother’s ashes. I do not know where it ended up. The girl from Human Street who married the boy from Honey Street left no trace of her anguished passage across the earth, from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere. After her high school records from Barnato Park, after her medical records from the Holloway Sanatorium, her very physical remains vanished, too. In the end the only way I knew to recover her and quiet the turbulence she left was word by word. “Once you write it down,” Hemingway noted, “it is all gone.” From an early age, I had grown used to deploying my imagination as a defense. I told many other stories from many other datelines before I realized, returning to the place where I began, that the one story I had to tell was hers.
CHAPTER 10
The Lark Sings and Falls
Rena, I will call her, my cousin in the Holy Land. I had to find her, wherever she had gone. We shared the same great-grandfather, Isaac Michel, the founder of the OK Bazaars whose vast Johannesburg estate my mother roamed in her youth. We were both the descendants of uprooted South Africans who tried to reinvent themselves in strange lands, children of displacement.
In Hebrew Rena means “melody.” The lark sings—and then falls.
The manic depression that tormented my mother, June, also afflicted Rena Levin, who knew the violent swings from light to dark and back again. She lived alone in a small studio on Shlomo Hamelech Street in Tel Aviv, a few blocks from the beach. She was tall and athletic, a good swimmer, with straight light brown hair, a half-shy smile, an infectious giggle, and irresistible rosy cheeks. Her features were fluid, shifting between beauty and plainness, as if prisoners of some prolonged adolescence. She would appear lovely or ungainly depending on the light or angle or her mood. Her sweet sincerity was constant, her eyes inconstant, brilliant or dull by turns even before the medication changed them. She lived at the cusp. Her voice was soft and low and calm. She was mystical. She looked for signs. Certain things were meant to happen.
In Tel Aviv, Rena felt freer than in the Jerusalem of her childhood, where the influence of the haredim, the “God-fearing” ultra-Orthodox, keeps growing. She liked to wander through her shabby neighborhood, listen to the breeze rustling in the palm fronds. The city was a mess. Cables from satellite dishes and telephone lines twisted into outsize tentacles. Washing hung on small balconies or pegged to lines in windows, as if on a Neapolitan backstreet. Plaster peeled off cracked facades. Leaves coated in a film of dust were gray-green.
Still, you could sit at Café Shine and order your avocado and mozzarella sandwich on pita and listen to the Jews debating their real estate deals and their dogs in a language that had been near-dead a century ago; and chat with the ex-Mossad agent now teaching Tibetan medit
ation and healing; and watch the long-legged Russian babes transposed to the Holy Land with their designer jeans and bejeweled sandals stride past a camp survivor in a wheelchair with her blue-tinted hair and tartan blanket and Romanian caregiver—and might find yourself considering that the place had a ramshackle charm, a blend of languor and zest that was satisfying.
Style, Flaubert suggested, was the “discharge from a deeper wound.” Was this the secret of Tel Aviv’s aura, a proud collective overcoming of Jewish injury? Ugliness is not an insurmountable obstacle for cities whose energy offsets it.
Down Gordon Street, past Café Marco, across Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, over to Frishman and onto the beach: Rena always felt her heart lift at the sight of the sea and the feel of the cool currents of air coming off the water. She liked the thwack-thwack of the beach tennis games, one player as hitter, the other a wall. She loved the liquid chatter of children lifted on the breeze, as light as a white sail cutting across the bay. At dusk, the sun plunged into the sea after a moment of brilliant resistance on the westward horizon. The heat eased. The air in Independence Park was fragrant. Then, like a fingernail, the moon would rise over the Mediterranean.
Perhaps everything would be all right. Rena, in the presence of beauty, could convince herself at times. The conflict would find a resolution. Palestinians would stop blowing themselves, and anyone near them, to pieces. Buses would cease being metal containers liable to explode. Pieces of flesh would not hang from lampposts outside blasted cafés. The Second Intifada would not lead only to a sequel to the sequel. Dueling Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms would decouple themselves from the engine of myth, giving up some part of the past for the sake of the future. “Narratives” would be set aside. Her mind, which raced at night, would quiet itself, too. She would get off the awful medication, the pills she hated. She would see herself in her eyes again rather than some creature caught like a deer in headlights.
Her country, Israel, would set its borders at last; and she, in her own way, also, the frontiers within which she could balance herself and make her way. People, like nations, needed to know their limits. She was not a political animal, but she ached for an end to the conflict. By nature she was a peacemaker. Israel sometimes struck her as a borderline personality given to violent lurches that seemed incomprehensible in hindsight.
As she made her way back from the beach to Shlomo Hamelech, she watched the young women just out of military service with their sultry-sexy I’m-trained-to-shoot-you-dead air. The geraniums in window boxes were like little red torches. Was there a love so beautiful that she would be able to paint it purple?
Her eyes sometimes fixed on the spikes fitted near the top of lampposts. Beneath them was a sign: DANGER OF DEATH. Who, Rena wondered, would want to climb over these jagged protrusions into a tangle of wires, perhaps to steal somebody’s cable service? The wires twisted into a tangle she found hypnotizing. They reminded her of Leonard Cohen’s lines. She had tried, like his “bird on a wire,” like his “drunk in a midnight choir,” to be free.
She had gone to Canada in 2000 to do a two-year program for a master’s in music therapy. But she lost control. Voices whispered to her. Her fingers were painfully sensitive. Shadows slithered in the dark. She became Argus-eyed. Details leaped out at her—a student’s new glasses or shoes or gem-studded belt—and she could not stop staring. On a whim she decided to change her name to Renata, meaning “reborn.” She liked that! It was more international; she would not have to spell her name out to the friendly Canadians in their placid country. A nation could have too much space as well as too little.
Her family was not sure what to think or what to call Rena-Renata. It irritated her that they did not respect her choice. She had a right to choose her identity.
She babysat in rainy, overcast Vancouver to make some extra cash. One day, holding the baby, she knew the child had been abused by his parents. Rena had no doubts. She telephoned her father, Meyer (not his real name), who was on a sabbatical in London; thoughtful Meyer, who had offered her contraceptives—oral contraceptives, as he put it—when she turned seventeen and took up with Aron, her high school sweetheart. Her relationship with Meyer had survived her parents’ painful divorce a decade earlier. Meyer, a physician, wanted to know what evidence she had of child abuse.
“What can you see?”
“I’m observant, Dad. I just know it.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s like when you see toys in the rubble after a village has been shelled.”
“Huh?”
“The injury that has occurred is obvious.”
“But, Reen darling, are there bruises, scratches, marks, something abnormal?”
“Dad, those are external signs. This is something I feel inside. I had a dream last night. I saw a collapsed pier in the sea. On each of the posts a white gull was perched. Then the baby called me. When I looked back, black crows had taken the place of the gulls.”
Rena gave up her babysitting. She abandoned the course. Her family brought her home from Vancouver in 2001. Everyone seemed to agree she was delusional. She was twenty-six, two years younger than my mother when she broke down in London. She wanted to protect her family, be gentle with them. Meyer said something brave to his daughter: “Darling, listen to me, if ever you feel you want to kill yourself, you must tell me.” Meyer-Dude, as she sometimes called her father to herself, was a thoughtful guy. But how could she burden her parents with her suicidal urges? When she arrived home, in her journal that was a mix of inspirational questions and her own thoughts, she wrote:
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin: real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through. Then life would begin.
At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Trees have roots. Jews have legs. So it was with my family, always on the move. Our preferred toast, when the time came around for the South African sundowner, was: “Absent friends and relations!” There were plenty of those.
Rena was absent. I never met her. Now there is no alternative but to imagine her, inheritor through the family bloodlines of the condition that plagued my mother.
She was in Israel, I was not. It might easily have been the other way around. Rena’s paternal great-grandfather—I will call him Max Levin—left the Lithuanian town of Panavezys (Ponevezh in Yiddish) in the early 1900s. Like Isaac Michel, our shared maternal great-grandfather, Levin sailed for Cape Town, one of the tens of thousands of Litvaks who headed from Lithuania to South Africa to escape the pogroms of the Pale of Settlement and seek opportunity.
At the time of Levin’s birth in 1875, Lithuania was part of Russia. He fought in the Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, only to witness the persecution of Jews on his return. By the time he emigrated, he was a convinced Zionist. No act of patriotism or sacrifice would secure Jewish acceptance in Europe. Levin settled in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, where, with his brother, he established a small trading company and served for several years as president of the Zionist Society.
Among the papers I was given by my family in Israel is an obituary that appeared in the Zionist Record of South Africa in 1917. It describes Max Levin’s last moments:
The final scene was heartbreaking, when the deceased, having expressed his last wishes to his wife and children, bade farewell to his friends in touching words. “My dear friends,” he said. “I beseech you after you have put around me the Talith, place over me the Zionist flag, and after my burial sing Hatikvah at my graveside and make a collection for the National Fund, and then I will rest in peace in my grave.”
A tribute from a friend reads: “His sincerity of purpose, his Zionistic aspirations were so pure, honest and true that one only needed to know him to acknowledge him as a genius and a symbol of the Jewish resurrection.… Truly was he called the Herzl of the Eastern Province.”
Twenty-one years after the publication of Herzl’s The Jewi
sh State, in the year of the Balfour Declaration expressing Britain’s favorable view of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” (with the pious caveat that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”), and thirty years before the United Nations passed Resolution 181 calling for the establishment of two states—one Jewish, one Arab—in Mandate Palestine, a forty-two-year-old Jewish immigrant of Lithuanian descent dies in a remote corner of South Africa and has his coffin draped in the blue-and-white Star of David (Israel’s future flag) and a prayer shawl of the same color. For this “Herzl of the Eastern Province,” a Zionist forged in Russian pogroms, the song that would become the Israeli national anthem is sung. In these small ways was an unlikely nation forged.
Emerging from the static ghetto into the Sturm und Drang of the modern world, Jews saw three principal routes to emancipation. The first was assimilation, the second socialism, and the third Zionism. (There was also conversion, a different story.) Levin did not believe assimilation was possible because it demanded of Jews that they regard themselves not as a nation but, if anything, as a religion; and that they place their faith in the ability of enlightened democratic institutions to protect them. He was no socialist.
My family chose assimilation for the most part. They were lucky enough to do so in South Africa and Britain, places that eluded the century’s horrors. Their wager on acceptance was not recompensed with slaughter as it was for the Jews of continental Europe. South Africa, with its vast black underclass, unfurled its opportunities for them before Britain enfolded them in a trading island’s tolerance.
My father loathed nothing more than messianic religiosity and intolerance. People forged their destinies. They were not chosen; nor could they deem who did not make the cut. In our case, as for countless other Jews, the price of integration was the loss of millennia of Jewish tradition. The Torah’s instruction gave way to the moral void of modernity, a hectic dance over absence. Many who were taken to the Nazis’ gassing facilities had no real idea what they were dying for. The place of Jewish identity had been taken by proud citizenship that, in Hitler’s Europe, proved revocable.