Odessa, Odessa

by Barbara Artson

  Hannah reminded Roberta how she cut the hair off her Shirley Temple doll and how Roberta tried, without success, to reassure Hannah, who erupted in tears of grief and rage. “Don’t worry. It will grow back.” They hooted, sounding a bit like owls, barely able to catch their breath due to their hiccupping laughter when the conversation turned to how Roberta cut the hair off Hannah’s first boyfriend’s leg while seated at the couple’s feet, ostensibly cutting out paper dolls. He and Hannah were too deeply engaged in conversation and necking to notice the “surgical procedure” until he reached down to scratch the tingle it created.

  “His name was Charlie, wasn’t it?” Roberta inquired between giggles.

  “I can’t believe you remember his name,” countered Hannah. “I dated him for a month or so before I met Bert. I haven’t thought of him for decades. I wonder whatever became of him. As I remember, he was a good guy. I seem to recall that he may have served in the Korean War.”

  “Yeah, he was cute and so was the other guy you dated after him. Arnie? Arnie something-or-other, right?”

  Hannah said that Arnie came before Charlie and that she never dated anyone else after Bert.

  As a teenager, Roberta confessed, she used to sneak into their shared bedroom closet after Hannah left for work to “borrow” a blouse or a sweater or a skirt to wear to school, and then she’d restore it to its proper place—by counting hanger placement—before Hannah’s return in the evening.

  “Did you really think I didn’t know that? Don’t you remember that I confronted you after I found a stain on my favorite dress?” Hannah challenged. “It was a gray crepe dress with a lace bodice. But since we’re making confessions, Robbie—” Hannah admitted that she could have been a better big sister. She disclosed that because she had to work so hard to get anything, she just couldn’t be charitable.

  Hannah described how she babysat every Saturday night. And how she worked all summer throughout high school—picking tomatoes on a farm.

  “I’d be picked up at five in the morning and then dropped off with my face caked with dirt and sweat. I did it so I could buy a pair of ice skates, and then Daddy made me buy black ones two sizes too big so that I would ‘grow into them.’ And to make matters worse, because they were so big, I skated on my ankles, and they called me a klutz—even Mommy. I couldn’t bear giving anything to you for nothing,” Hannah sighed. “I felt bad, but I just couldn’t do it. It felt to me that you got off so easy.”

  Roberta reminded Hannah that she was just a kid herself. She thought that it might have been hard for her because their mother always insisted that Hannah let Roberta tag along. Roberta said all the right things to Hannah, trying to assuage her guilt, and yet, at times, she had felt that her sister could, indeed, have been more generous. She recalled the venom she’d felt when she announced to Hannah that she was going to be rich when she grew up and wouldn’t give Hannah a dime.

  “I cringe now when I think of how I tattled on you when you did something wrong,” Roberta continued. “Not that you really did anything wrong. You always did the ‘right’ thing. Got the good grades. Made honor roll. No one ever called you a nudnik. You were one hard act to follow, Hannah.”

  “You won’t believe this,” Hannah continued where she’d left off, “but you know what I still feel guilty about? About not giving you my Girl Scout uniform and that my friend Ruthie gave you hers, even though she was four inches taller than even me. It came down to your ankles. I felt ashamed when I heard her tell you that you could have her uniform. She said she wished she had you for a little sister. God, I was so humiliated. And then Mommy went ahead and gave you mine anyway, without asking me.”

  “Yeah, not a good way to build a sibling relationship,” reflected Roberta. “But do you remember? When I was cutting off all of your badges—and, God, you earned every badge in the book—I made holes in the sleeve. But hey, Hannah, I can’t believe you still feel bad about it. I mean, should I feel guilty about pushing your Shirley Temple doll’s teeth down her throat? Because I don’t, you know.”

  The conversation shifted to the raison d’être of their journey. Roberta reread the letter from Reuben. Several months had passed since it arrived. She silently wondered what she would find when she met this stranger—her mysterious cousin—face to face. She worried that he might be one of those right wingers.

  “I mean, what if he’s for building more settlements? Or the wall? Or what if he’s Orthodox and wears all that religious paraphernalia? And worse yet, what if he likes Bush? Now that, I really couldn’t tolerate.”

  “Well, you could be just as concerned, my dear sister, should he turn out to be one of those lefty extremists, you know, the ones who espouse Palestinians über alles. The ones who always blame Israel no matter what. The ones who claim Hamas as innocent victims? Those who can’t see Hamas’s provocative acts even when they themselves claim responsibility for the devastation, like last year when they suicide-bombed the bus full of innocent victims and then the bus station the next week? I say a pox on both their houses. If only there were good guys wearing white hats and bad guys wearing black hats, whom we could easily assign blame to.”

  “But don’t you mean guys wearing white yarmulkes and black yarmulkes?” Roberta smirked, obviously pleased with her gag.

  The sisters’ politics diverged somewhat, with Roberta leaning center left and Hannah center right. Roberta felt strongly that because so many of the Israeli immigrants were survivors of the Holocaust, they above all should bear in mind what had been done to them and should not repeat the persecution.

  “To me, it comes down to what it means to be a human being, a mensch,” Roberta continued. “Yes, it’s true that both sides claim Israel as their legitimate homeland from biblical times, and it’s also true that Jews have a justifiable grievance because of the historical injustices they’ve suffered, going back to medieval times, but it’s because of those injustices that they should go to all lengths not to perpetrate injustices against others. I have to say, sometimes I’m ashamed of my own people.”

  “Even if some of those very same people threaten Israel’s very right to exist—like Hamas? It’s in their charter. And others claim that the Holocaust never happened—that it’s a figment of the Jews’ imagination?” Hannah argued. She detailed what Roberta knew only too well, how in the 1930s and ’40s, the Jews were kicked out of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Ukraine. “And where were they to go?” she asked.

  “Look, Hannah, I am well aware that we are a people who have been evicted, convicted, cremated, enslaved, and perjured, but I also know that there are now over four million Palestinians and their descendants who were extruded from Palestine and are now living in intolerable conditions. Those kids have never known anything but this awful existence. What do they have to look forward to? So they strap a bomb on their bodies and become martyrs.”

  They had both read early Zionist history and knew that, in 1882, the first wave of European Jews immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Many of those very early immigrants wanted nothing more than to be left alone to study their religious texts and practice their faith and be supported by Jewish charities throughout the world. Then, with a surge of nationalism and the purchase by the Jewish National Fund of large tracts of land from absentee Arab landowners, followed by the eviction of Arabs from the homes they and their families had lived in for centuries, the seeds of the current violence grew.

  “But tell me, Robbie, what did the Arabs do for their own kind? None of the Arab states granted citizenship to the exodus of Palestinian Arabs who did resettle in Arab nations. The Arab community used them as political pawns. And one last thing, look what the Israelis made of the land. Once barren and parched soil with nothing growing on it is now fertile and productive.”

  Roberta contended that when the early Zionists arrived in Palestine in 1897, there were hundreds of humble Palestinian villages, like Jaffa and Ramleh and Der el-Hawa and Haditha. And there were farmlands
and olive trees and orange groves—and more than half a million Arabs and Bedouins and Druze living there. “There were people living in Palestine for centuries, unlike what Golda Meir claimed! Nothing there, indeed!”

  The noise of the landing gear’s release brings the sisters’ discussion to a close. Soon, the giant wheels of the plane thump to the ground and then hop and abruptly grind to a halt on the tarmac moments later. A breathless silence ensues, cut short by relieved applause, and then, as though the worrisome incident never happened, the passengers quickly turn to the task at hand, that of assembling their personal belongings in the overhead bin and scurrying to the baggage claim area to be the first to collect their remaining suitcases.

  With each turn of the carousel, a dozen or so perturbed passengers scrutinize the mass of brown, black, red, green, and blue bags that rotate before them like a mirage that tantalizes the parched throats of wanderers crossing the desert. Some bite their fingernails in nervous frustration, several grouse to themselves, others complain to their companions or to any stranger who happens to be standing close by. Quite a few stand sulking silently at a distance. Roberta thinks that this pattern of behavior reveals as much about the individuals’ personalities as does a Rorschach inkblot.

  Roberta and Hannah ogle the same large black travel case making its unremitting rounds, as if their scrutiny will somehow transform it into Roberta’s missing piece. But with each loop around the carousel, the ribbon-bedecked bag—the plaid one Roberta attached to its handle for easy identification—is not to be found. She is close to tears as the carousel grunts to a halt, and it becomes obvious that her case will not materialize. She and her sister join the growing line of peeved passengers queuing up at the El Al customer service counter, where flustered agents strive to appease the disgruntled crowd. An elderly gentleman standing next to Roberta complains loudly to his wife. He talks over her attempt to placate him. The more she tries to pacify him, the more strident and disruptive he becomes until, unable to restrain herself, Roberta blurts out, “You know, sir, we are all in the same predicament, and you’re not making it any easier for yourself or for the rest of us. So why don’t you just cool it.”

  Stricken, he turns on his heels, mumbling to himself something about “pushy broads,” and sits down on a bench by the far wall.

  “Sorry about that,” his wife whispers to Roberta. “He gets very nervous when traveling. He’s really a sweet man, but when the unexpected happens, he can’t handle it. I try to intervene, but being a Holocaust survivor—if you know anything about that, you’ll understand—he has a need for predictability. When something out of the blue happens, he goes a bit meshuga.”

  The luggage, they are told, has inadvertently been placed on a plane destined for Greece and won’t arrive until the following day. The unhappy El Al agent reassures the crowd that the airline will deliver their precious goods to their hotels the following day and further mollifies them by handing out small blue faux-leather pouches designed for first-class travelers, containing diminutive tubes of toothpaste, compact toothbrushes encased in plastic, razors, eye shades and earplugs, mouthwash, and shaving cream. They are equipped, it seems, solely for male passengers. Roberta is about to point out their gender bias but, thinking better of it, shrugs her shoulders and joins Hannah, who is in the taxi queue. All she wants is to be taken to the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. And to sleep for twenty-four hours. Or more.

  The compromise Roberta and Hannah reached was that if Roberta agreed to fly economy, Hannah would consent to stay at a good hotel in a deluxe room with a view of the city. Not, however, Hannah asserted, in the deluxe deluxe room with a view of the blue Mediterranean. “I mean,” she justified, “how much time will we spend looking out the window? We’ll just be sleeping and sightseeing and visiting with our relatives.”

  “Ha, I still can’t believe we have Israeli relatives. And here we are not knowing a word of Hebrew.”

  Chapter 15

  MEETING THE MISHPUCHA

  Promptly at noon the following morning, the sisters are jolted awake by the insistent ring of the telephone. Groaning and knocking her glasses off the bedside table in her attempt to locate the phone, Roberta removes the receiver from its cradle.

  “Hello?” She looks at the desk at the opposite side of their spacious, white-walled room, squinting as she strives to read the illuminated hands of the clock.

  A deep baritone voice, speaking in heavily accented English, responds, “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I hope it’s not too early, but I’ve been up since six this morning cooling my heels, as you would say, and couldn’t wait another minute. This is Reuben, your cousin. I’m downstairs in the lobby. Rivka told me to wait until you called, but I couldn’t.”

  Roberta can hardly get the words out between her own disorientation and exhilaration and Hannah’s impatient attempt to pull the phone out of Roberta’s hand. “Oh, no, no, no, not at all,” Roberta responds. “We’ve been here eagerly awaiting your call,” she lies, “but didn’t want to bother you. We’re both so eager to meet you and your family. I can’t believe we’re here. Just a minute, Hannah is so anxious to talk to you, she’s tugging at the receiver. Here.”

  “Hello Reuben, it’s Hannah. Oh my! I can’t tell you how, how . . . pleased . . .” Hannah hands the phone back to Roberta, unable to contain the whimper coming from her throat.

  Roberta and Hannah leap out of bed and hastily discuss what to wear as they apply their makeup, in tandem, at the bathroom vanity. They decide on dark linen pants and short-sleeved blouses rather than the more revealing sundresses they packed, reasoning that should they visit the Wailing Wall, they wouldn’t want to offend the Orthodox men at prayer. Or perhaps even their cousin. At least that was Hannah’s thinking. Before leaving their room, she elicits a promise from Roberta that she will not get into a political discussion about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with their relatives, adding, “Roberta, promise that if we do go to the Wall, you won’t insist on standing with the men. You’re a guest in this country, so it’s not the time for activism. Show respect. Sometimes you remind me of Daddy, always with his confrontations. So, you’ll promise, right?”

  The elevator doors open onto the large, well-lit lobby with a brown-and-yellow checkered pattern on its highly waxed marble floor. Standing near a massive, luminous wooden console in the center of the lobby, Roberta and Hannah observe a rather husky, ruggedly handsome man in his late sixties, nervously pacing back and forth and intermittently peering at the elevator doors. He bears a striking resemblance to what they remember of Uncle Stewart but for the shocking head of curly auburn-and-white stippled hair and his Goliath physique. His full white beard is neatly trimmed. He wears no yarmulke. No tzitzit. Nothing that would identify him as a Jew, no less an Orthodox Jew. When he smiles, the fissures on his well-worn face are liberated. The sisters walk silently toward this strangely intimate stranger, and he toward them, as if drawn by an invisible magnet. They soon find themselves enveloped in their cousin’s brawny arms. A chorus of subdued sobs breaks the stillness. The dance of embrace and tears, interspersed with laughter and arms-length inspection, persists for well over five minutes, to and fro, until Reuben takes both women by the hand and guides them to the parking lot and to his black Peugeot.

  “Todah rabah, thanks very much for coming. You’ll never know how much this means to me and Rivka.”

  Standing around an oversized ebony coffee table, Roberta and Hannah are surrounded by concentric circles of large, small, young, old, blond, brunette, redheaded male and female folk. Relatives all. Laughing. Crying. Talking. Questioning. Interrupting. Opining. Interrupting. Arguing. Interrupting. Eating. Drinking. And interrupting.

  The table is laden with bowls of yogurt, hummus, black olives, pickles, chopped liver, tabbouleh and tomato salads, baba ghanoush, platters of sliced cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs, oranges, knishes, pita bread, kofta kebabs, feta cheese, and dolma. Bottles of scotch, rye, bourbon, seltzer water, diet Coca-Cola and ginger ale lin
e the sideboard, guarding their posts like silent sentinels, along with paper plates, napkins, plastic forks, knives, and cups. A hint of burnt coffee permeates the celebrants’ nostrils. This is breakfast in Israel on a mid-Sunday morning.

  Reuben and Rivka smile with pleasure at the assortment of family members gathered in their living room, especially at Hannah and Roberta, waiting to be seated.

  “First, meet my Rivka, my wonderful wife,” exalts Reuben. “She’s the ur-mother of this brood and the ultimate woman of valor. And here are my jewels, and I don’t expect you to remember their names. I sometimes call them by the wrong name. My oldest, Shoshanna, and her two boys—Say hello, Shosh. Then Hadar and her husband, Asher, over by the window. And Zechariah, our son. Standing by the door, Tamir and his wife, Tova. And Tamir’s twin, Nehemia, and his wife, Sarah. We’ve been very busy as you can see, but not to forget our youngest. Come, come,” Reuben shouts enthusiastically to his youngest daughter, Batya, her husband, Ari, and his six grandchildren. Standing somewhat removed from the crowd but for a gaggle of children ranging in age from toddler to teenager, a young couple, perhaps in their thirties by Roberta’s reckoning, leans against the wall, their eyes riveted on the foreign guests. A kippah covers the beginnings of a bald spot on the young man’s head; the fringes of his tzitzit can be seen peeking from the bottom of his white shirt covered, in part, by an unbuttoned navy blue silk vest. The woman, clad in a long-sleeved black dress that reaches to her ankles, hair tucked beneath a scarf that frames her heart-shaped face, stands close by, holding a sleeping toddler. She is prominently pregnant.

  “Come and meet your American cousins. Your great-grandfather, Shmuel Keter, and their grandfather, Mendel Kolopsky, were brothers. You remember I told you Saba changed his name when he moved to Israel. So, Batya, you need to hold up the wall? Look,” he says to Hannah and Roberta, pointing to his six grandchildren. “Aren’t they gorgeous? Jonah, Elijah, Ilan—the older boys—and Esther and Miriam and the sleeping princess, Rachel—my little granddaughters. Come, kinderlach, come sit on Saba’s lap.” Like feisty puppies released from the confines of a cage, the girls depart their parents’ side and scramble helter-skelter onto their grandfather’s lap. “I only wish my brother Meir, may he rest, could have been here to see this. And someday, when you go to Paris, you can meet Rebecca and her husband, Jacques.” He doesn’t mention the absence of Shoshanna’s husband, who was killed while sitting in a café drinking coffee several years ago.