Later still, summer will come, bully its way in as it does in our country, with its cruel heat and glaring sun. My mother will pine away until she becomes a shadow, a faded replica of her younger self, and I will miss her all the time, even while she’s around. And every time the doorbell rings, my baby brother’s eyes will light up and then dim right down when someone who isn’t our father walks in.
I will spend those months making deals with God, promise to forgo writing on Shabbat, to stop stealing from my sister, to wait the appropriate length of time between meat and dairy, until the futility of my prayers will dawn on me and I will feel stupid and hollow—like a cavity inside of me once filled with God has split open and the emptiness is gnawing at me like my hunger on Yom Kippur.
I will have a new boyfriend, Yariv, an only child to older Holocaust survivors whose house is even ghostlier than mine has become, and he will be sweet and effeminate and gay—I will somehow know that already then—and I will not love him the way I loved Danny.
By the time Danny comes, I will have discovered how easy it is to skip school, and I will hang out in parks to kill time, sit on benches and write poems about Aba, about wanting to die because then I could be with him. I will write because writing will be the only thing that makes any sense at all.
Danny will show up at recess, just for a short visit. Like many people who come back from a prolonged stay in the land of plenty, he’s gained weight. Excited to see him, and flustered, I will blurt out to a group of kids, “Danny is back. He got fat,” and then turn to see him standing behind me—perhaps coming to speak to me—and he’ll be smiling that default smile of his but his face will be frozen in a wounded expression. And there will be nothing in the world I can do to fix this either.
I will watch Danny walk away, disappear into his parents’ car and back to his new life in America, watch him with heart crumbling, but also with envy, a new yearning to be in his place. I will wish I was the one leaving, because that would be better than being left behind.
A SIMPLE GIRL
IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, after an impassioned campaign led by my brother and me, my mother had pirated cable installed in our house. One day, two burly men, unshaven and smelling of cigarettes, climbed on our roof and tinkered with the antenna. We weren’t the only delinquents; everyone on the street did it. Israeli television operated only one state-owned channel, which had just begun broadcasting in color and offered limited programming for about ten hours a day, most of it dreary. The only show we watched religiously was Friday night’s Arabic movie: tear-jerking Egyptian melodramas featuring voluptuous, smoky-eyed, big-haired starlets my mother often scolded for their bad choices. More often than not, I preferred reading books to watching television. The arrival of illegal cable changed everything; it broadcast twenty-four hours a day, screening movies and miniseries rented from the local video store, and some late-night erotica I snuck downstairs to watch after everyone fell asleep.
One afternoon, during my mother’s daily nap, I turned on the TV and was delighted to happen upon the 1979 Israeli flick Shlager (The Hit), showcasing Ofra Haza and the song that launched her career, “Shir HaFreha” (“The Freha Song”). I sat cross-legged in front of the screen, mesmerized by Ofra’s younger incarnation. Fresh-faced and still unknown, she looked a little bit like family, like one of my more beautiful cousins.
In the years since the movie was released, Ofra had gone on to become wildly famous, winning second place in the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest (another television event we watched dutifully). Later, she would become Israel’s biggest musical export, even to this date, selling millions of records around the globe and earning a Grammy nomination. Later still, a tragic figure whose story would haunt fans long after her death.
Even without a developed Yemeni identity, I knew enough to be proud of Ofra Haza. The young singer from HaTikva Quarter—the impoverished neighborhood in south Tel Aviv—youngest of nine children born to Yemeni immigrants, was my community’s Cinderella and one of few Mizrahi artists who made it into the heart of the Israeli canon. Ofra’s humble beginnings gave me hope, for I wanted to be a singer and an actress when I grew up, just like her. I was already in the school’s choir and had taken several drama classes, and I had the right genes. I may have never heard of a Yemeni author (which made my other dream, that of becoming a writer, seem a bit far-fetched), but everyone knew that Yemenis were great entertainers. The three times that Israel won the Eurovision contest, it was represented by Yemeni singers. Despite the glaring recording-industry bias against artists of Mizrahi descent and the radio’s systematic exclusion of Mizrahi music—a genre inspired by Middle Eastern and North African musical traditions and rhythms—those Yemeni singers were seen as great ambassadors for Israel’s image. European viewers went crazy for their “exotic” looks, their dance moves, and their kinky Yemeni curls. Our singing voices and our cuisine—spicy, doughy, often yellow with turmeric and fragrant with fenugreek and cilantro—were our greatest contributions to Israeli culture.
In the movie, just before Ofra breaks into “The Freha Song,” she asks her date, a boring-looking, suit-wearing Ashkenazi man, to dance with her, and he replies with contempt, “Are you some kind of a freha whose head is between her legs?” Even at eleven, I knew what frehas were—knew I didn’t want to become one. The freha looked a lot like the starlets in the Egyptian movies we watched every Friday. She wore dramatic makeup and elaborate accessories (“Wherever the lights are, that’s where I’ll go, with the nail polish, the lipstick, and other show-offs”). She wasn’t very smart (“I don’t have a head for long words”), liked to party (“I want to dance, I want to laugh”), was promiscuous (“I want during the days, I want during the nights”), and knew, deep inside, that she would never escape the poor neighborhood she came from (“At the end of every freha hides a small housing project, a husband, and air pollution from a thousand directions”).
I also knew that the freha was Mizrahi—not just because in the movie she was portrayed by a Yemeni actress, or because the term originated from a name common among women of North African descent (derived from the Arabic word for “happiness”) but also because I had seen frehas in my neighborhood, older girls from the technical high school down the street who sat on the barricades holding cigarettes with thin manicured fingers, laughing loudly, their bodies bursting from their tight, revealing outfits and their gaits assured and all-sex. I had seen them on the outskirts of Sha’ariya, in the newer additions to the traditional Yemeni neighborhood where both of my parents grew up and my grandparents still lived. Sha’ariya made me uneasy, alive with aspects of my identity I wished to distance myself from: the loud Mizrahi music blaring from car windows, the elderly women in their headscarves who squinted at me when I walked by with my cousins, asking in their peculiar syntax and thick accents, “Bat mi at?” Whose daughter are you? Similarly, the teenage frehas I had seen there, loitering by the falafel stand or at the park, always surrounded by lusting boys, brought to light a part of me that I was conditioned to reject. Though I thought myself better than them, smarter, more versed in the ways of the world, I secretly admired the confidence with which they carried themselves, as though they knew something I didn’t, something about boys, or their bodies, or sex, or about how to be happy. They were only a couple of years older than me, but they appeared to be women already, while I was still a girl.
“The Freha Song” had swept through Israel in a frenzy, remaining at the top of the charts for five weeks. Even after this big break, and despite singing mainstream pop that did not fall under the Mizrahi label, Ofra struggled to find lyricists and composers willing to write for her. Eventually, her manager, Bezalel Aloni, began writing her music, and later in her career, Ofra composed her own songs. Her fans voted to award her Israel’s Singer of the Year for five consecutive years, and her albums broke sales records, but the radio rarely played her music. “I don’t know why they don’t give me a chance,�
� she said in an interview. Bezalel Aloni, less diplomatic, simply said, “The radio is for Ashkenazi singers.”
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
“I CAN’T WEAR that,” I told my high school friend Yael. She was offering to lend me one of her short, tight skirts for the night. We were going dancing at the Liquid Club in south Tel Aviv, a large, smoky hangar that played new wave, pop, and punk. The evening had just begun and I was already far outside my comfort zone: I was wearing Yael’s stylish button-up blouse, and my curly hair was huge after I allowed Yael to blow-dry it upside down while I was bent over the sink. I didn’t know what one did in clubs. I didn’t know how to talk to boys. I didn’t own the right clothes and I couldn’t dance—unless, of course, I was at a wedding with my family and traditional Yemeni music started playing. Despite my aversion to popular Mizrahi music with its undulating voices and corny lyrics, my body had a visceral reaction to Yemeni beats, to the sound of tin drums, like a buzz coursed through it, compelling me to rise to my feet.
At that point, my obsession with Ofra had simmered down to a mature admiration. In junior high I had removed Ofra’s wholesome posters from my walls and replaced them with Madonna’s. Hypersexual and provocative, Madonna was the mother of all frehas, and as a newly proclaimed feminist, I found her empowering. My horrified mother sighed wearily whenever I left for school dressed in lace and ripped stockings, neck laden with chains, arms dangling with silver bangles that tinkled loudly every time I flipped a page in my textbook, irritating my teachers. Thankfully, that phase was over.
Ofra, too, had matured and turned in a new musical direction. In 1984, she recorded Yemenite Songs, an album of remixed traditional Yemeni tunes, devotional and secular, in Hebrew and in Arabic—songs her mother, who used to perform at henna ceremonies back in Yemen, had sung to her growing up. Ofra appeared on the cover in a traditional Yemeni wedding gown, an ornate golden hood over her head. The record was met with bewilderment. Not until the album was released in England to great acclaim, and European clubgoers began hopping to the same Yemeni beats I had danced to at family weddings, did Israeli media take notice. Her subsequent Yemeni album, Shaday, sold more than a million copies worldwide and won her the New Music Award for Best International Album of the Year in New York in 1989.
My friend Yael held the skirt in front of me. “Why not?”
“Because I’d look like a freha,” I said. Animal prints were also out. Certain shades of lipstick, such as blood red and neon pink. Dangly, large earrings. Anything gold. Anything with rhinestones. Bleached hair, a popular trend among my fair-skinned friends, was an absolute no-no. A Mizrahi girl with blond streaks was as freha as one could get.
“That’s crazy. You’re not a freha,” Yael said with conviction. “So nothing you’ll ever wear will make you look like one.” Yael’s parents had come from Poland. She could wear anything.
For a moment, I reconsidered. Then I remembered how wearing the wrong things in junior high during the ill-fated Madonna phase got me attention from the wrong men—older Mizrahi men who wore thick golden necklaces and tight T-shirts and too much gel in their hair. In other words, arsim, the male counterparts of frehas and plural for ars, the colloquial Arabic word for “pimp.” They would inch by me in their cars, lean out the window, and say uninspired things like, “You’re a flower that needs a constant gardener,” and “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”
At fifteen, I had just developed a set of hips and an ass that drew more attention than I cared for, especially in contrast to the rest of my scrawny body. Those hips, if I wasn’t paying attention, swung from side to side when I walked, in a manner I soon discovered could be read as “asking for it.” I didn’t even know they did that until a boy at school pointed it out, laughing and bellowing, “Look at her meantezet!” using an Arabic slang word to describe my hip-swaying walk. I had a vague notion that the use of an Arabic word somehow made it worse. Ars and freha were Arabic words, as were many of the commonly used swear words in Israel. To add insult to injury, “HaMeantezet” was the title of a popular Mizrahi song, mocked for its shallow, distasteful lyrics. The song was about a woman—a freha judging by the depiction of her “see-through shirt and provocative skirt”—who “shakes her two butt cheeks” as she walks, driving the male narrator wild with desire. And I knew what they said about Yemeni women, how they were “hot” and “good in bed.” I’d heard the jokes meant to illustrate the stereotype, one of which included inserting corn kernels into a Yemeni woman’s vagina and watching them pop.
My hips and ass became obscene to me: they were doing something all on their own, something I had not asked them to do, something frehas did on purpose. I tried to take smaller steps to keep my hips from swinging, contain them somehow, make myself less shapely, less of a woman.
* * *
—
AROUND ELEVENTH GRADE, I realized that my best shot at not being mistaken for a freha was to aim for the other extreme. I became a hippie, which suited my romantic notions of a bohemian, artsy lifestyle, the kind of lifestyle I imagined a budding writer-slash-actor would lead. Earlier that year I had been accepted to a youth group run by Habima, the national theater in Tel Aviv, where we studied acting and watched plays. The year before that, I had been selected as one of a dozen young journalists to write for Maariv LaNoar, the most popular teen magazine in the country. I published articles, essays, stories, and poems, and soon was skipping school regularly, taking the bus to the magazine’s office in Tel Aviv, and traveling the country in search of stories.
At first, my hippie-ness was mostly expressed through my fashion choices: long flowery skirts and dresses, trench coats, and vests. I perused the flea market in Jaffa for silver earrings, chiffon scarves, and harem pants. I stopped brushing my hair and came to school dressed in conversation pieces. If I wasn’t going to be popular, at least I would be memorable. Then I began catching up on music I figured I should listen to in order to grant my image more cred, music far more sophisticated than Madonna or Ofra Haza, like Janis Joplin, Carole King, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd.
When strangers asked—judging by my newly cultivated look—if I was from a kibbutz or a moshav, Ashkenazi strongholds in Israel (in the same way that developing, impoverished towns were predominantly Mizrahi), I took it as a compliment. When meeting new people, I casually mentioned my disdain for Mizrahi music, made references to Chekhov or Lorca, worked my writing career and love of theater into conversation, and flaunted my impressive vocabulary so they would know I had “a head for long words.” I shared progressive political views that were not necessarily in line with what you’d expect a Mizrahi girl to have, as Mizrahi traditionally vote for right-wing parties. At one demonstration I attended, a couple of men gaped at me: a Mizrahi hippie girl carrying a peace sign. “Look at this little sh’hora.” They spat their words with derision. “Who do you think you are?” I’d been called black before—once, by a disappointed boy Yael had set me up with, to whom she’d neglected to mention my Yemeni background. In a society that idealized a Western beauty standard rarely found within its vicinity—blond, light-skinned, blue-eyed—I looked all wrong. And yet, I had always been fair for a Yemeni. Fairer than many of my female cousins who had been taught by their mothers to fear the sun. Fair like my grandmother who, raised in a culture imbued by shadism, was admired for her light skin while her twin sister, Saida, was nicknamed “Aswada”—“black” in Arabic.
Bored and restless in school, I started doing freha impressions during class, to my teachers’ displeasure and to the delight of the back row. Making fun of frehas ensured, so I thought, that no one would ever mistake me for one. Lacking the confidence to sing onstage, I had long given up on my musical aspirations, but playing a role granted me a welcome hiatus from my unhappy, awkward teenage self. And the freha was an easy act: I combed my hair with my fingers to give it volume, chewed gum with an open mouth, blew bubbles, and dumbed down
my language. My classmates were entertained.
Then I wrote an entire freha monologue and acted it out in a couple of auditions for commercials and movies. The freha monologue got me the small part of a vulgar, angry wife for a Turkish coffee commercial. It made the judges for the coveted army entertainment group, which performed at remote bases to raise soldiers’ morale, laugh out loud. It got me past the first cut and into the second selection process, even after my nervous, stilted singing performance. This was no easy feat. Inconceivably, Ofra herself had never made it into the army group. “I guess she didn’t fit the style,” her manager said dryly.
Later, I performed the monologue on demand at parties. “Do the freha,” my friends would implore, and I would, enjoying the laughter, high on the attention—not once stopping to think about the girl I was mocking. My own inner freha began escorting me everywhere, my sidekick, always ready to make an entrance. While I was often insecure around new people, she was chatty and too stupid to care what people thought of her. Sometimes, in social situations, I’d slip into her momentarily for laughs, making a comment or an inarticulate observation accompanied by a hair toss. People who didn’t know me sometimes confused her for me, exchanging glances with their friends and rolling their eyes. And though I should have regarded it as the best compliment to my acting skills, I was mortified, and quickly made sure they knew I was kidding. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t her.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
PEOPLE IN ISRAEL like to say that the compulsory army service is the country’s biggest melting pot. Young men and women from different backgrounds and social and economic status are brought together, mixed, and blended at high speed. In reality, there is also a great measure of segregation, reminiscent of, and likely originating from, a tracking system that directs Mizrahi youth toward technical schools, gearing them for trade and service jobs as mechanics, cooks, and secretarial staff.
The Art of Leaving Page 3