The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  At the end of basic training, the army decided the best way to use my skills was to station me as a secretary in an administrative base. I knew I’d scored high in the army classification tests in twelfth grade. I had peeked at my printout sheet during one of the appointments in basic training, noticing, also, that it said “Yemen” under family origin even though I was born in Israel and so were my parents. For weeks, I cried over my assignment. I had been working as a prolific journalist from the age of fifteen, and my test results were high enough for me to have become a pilot had I been a man. Surely there was a better way the army could have used me; I could have been a writer for the army magazine or a reporter for the army radio station, two sought-after positions I was a natural candidate for, yet I was unable to apply, eliminated in an initial selection process rumored to be impelled by nepotism. Not to mention I couldn’t type properly, file, or make coffee. I wasn’t even a high-ranking officer’s secretary, but everyone knew that to be in those offices, you had to be thin, pretty, and preferably blond, because you were the face of the Israel Defense Forces.

  Since its creation in 1948, Israel has never had a Mizrahi prime minister and only three Mizrahi chiefs of general staff, with the first one coming into the position thirty-six years after the founding of the country. And while you’d be hard pressed to find a Mizrahi pilot (considered the most elite position one can attain in the IDF, as the air force’s slogan claims “The Best for Pilotage!”), it was apparent that most drivers, janitors, quartermaster clerks, and sentries in the army were of Mizrahi background.

  After a year as the army’s worst secretary and after giving up on the army entirely (arguably, it gave up on me first), I found myself in one of these lowermost positions, pressing buttons that opened and closed the gate to the base.

  A friend from school came to visit one day. Ilanit was an officer now: it was evident in her step, her newly acquired poise—her confidence boosted by those rectangular pieces of metal sewn on her shoulder straps that indicated her rank. The pity in her eyes was palpable. While she was there, I got into an unnecessary argument with one of the janitors and he yelled, “Shut up, you dumb freha.”

  Ilanit’s cheeks reddened. “How dare you?” She fumbled for words. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Yeah,” the guy said. “She presses buttons at the gate.”

  “She’s a writer!” Ilanit said, but the guy snorted and walked away, waving in dismissal.

  “It’s fine.” I pulled her away. “I don’t care.”

  I was in khaki like everyone else. But I was on the bottom rung of the army ladder, and I was Mizrahi, and a girl, and it was the only slur that fit.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  “YOU’RE A SIMPLE girl,” a guy I met on a beach in Sinai once said to me, with a paternal smile. My (Ashkenazi, kibbutznik) boyfriend, Gilad, and I had come to Sinai for a vacation after completing our army service. We slept in a straw hut by the sea, struck up conversations with strangers, made friends with other backpackers in the huts next door. This man—educated, well-off, Ashkenazi, and slightly older—was one of them.

  “I am not simple,” I snapped. “You don’t know me.”

  “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he said.

  I glared and said nothing.

  “I just don’t get it. Why would he think of me as simple?” I asked Gilad later.

  He flipped a page in his book. “Who cares about this guy?”

  The World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang by Dan Ben-Amotz and Netiva Ben-Yehuda describes the freha as “a simple girl, vulgar, uneducated and lacking in class, who dresses according to the latest fashion.” All that effort and still, to this man, I couldn’t be anything else. With or without the hippie clothing, with or without the kibbutznik boyfriend.

  * * *

  —

  “I AM A simple girl from HaTikva neighborhood,” Ofra had said in an interview once, unchanged by her fame or fortune. “A Yemeni girl with legs on the ground who enjoys life, loves her parents, and thanks God.”

  Ofra was known for her gentle manners and great constraint. She didn’t party, she didn’t date. Her makeup was subtle and her attire conservative. If anything, Ofra Haza was the anti-freha. There was something almost unreasonably pure and innocent about her. She found joy and purpose in simplicity, in being grounded, in being connected to one’s roots—qualities I had failed to appreciate or possess. I had spent a lifetime proving to unimportant people that I was complex, slipping into yet another patronizing label, that of a mishtaknezet—a Mizrahi who’s trying to “pass” as Ashkenazi, as if being cultured, educated, and articulate were qualities reserved for Europeans. It had been so much work to keep apologizing when I hadn’t fully understood the accusation. I couldn’t see that by striving to prove myself different, I was estranging myself from my heritage, my history, myself.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  IN MY EARLY thirties, I started working at a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver. Mona’s was a hub around which the Middle Eastern community in the city assembled, a new Middle East to which I—the Israeli, the Jew—was graciously permitted entrance. At Mona’s I looked like everyone else. “You look more Arabic than I do!” Mona often said with a chuckle. The music they played, the food they served, the language they spoke were familiar and comforting. The family quickly adopted me, and I celebrated holidays and birthdays with them. I was half a world away from my country, and for the first time since I’d moved to Canada, I felt at home.

  The groups of young women who came to Mona’s to dine and dance and smoke water pipes often looked like what I imagined the actresses from the old Arabic movies would have looked like today. They reminded me of the teenage girls from Sha’ariya, exhibiting that overstated expression of womanhood that made me—the late bloomer who couldn’t walk in heels, who found skills such as applying eye shadow or blow-drying one’s hair inscrutable and foreign—feel like an impostor.

  During my six-year stint at Mona’s, their magic started rubbing off on me. It was around that time that I also began discovering my own Arabness, my way back to the Yemeni identity I had rejected as a teen, as though my body retuned itself, gave up the fight. Perhaps feeling at home in my own skin had made me more at ease with my femininity too, made me care less about what people might think or what they might call me. Or perhaps it was the acceptance of oneself that comes with age. Some days, I wore miniskirts to work, revealing blouses over push-up bras, long dangly earrings or large hoops, dramatic, ornate jewelry, sometimes even gold. I learned to apply makeup, had my eyebrows threaded at the Iranian aesthetician they recommended, cut my hair at the Lebanese hairdresser who specialized in curly Middle Eastern manes. I strutted with my trays across the floor, hips swaying, and belly danced to Arabic pop much like the Mizrahi music I had once snubbed, embracing the sensuality of the dance, allowing the natural movement of my body to take place, for my body to take up space. Never had I spent as much time on my appearance as I did while working at Mona’s. And though I did not pull it off as well as my young tutors did, never with the same effortlessness, during those years at Mona’s, I felt more beautiful and womanly than ever before.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  THE LATE DR. Vicki Shiran, a Mizrahi scholar, activist, and poet, wrote once about the twinge she feels when she hears the word freha. “I see you,” she wrote, “a Moroccan woman standing embarrassed, and behind your back the shimmering ugly face of the Israeli mob who took your beautiful name and made it synonymous with a vulgar woman whose heart is rough…Took your name and used it to mock my daughters and your granddaughters.”

  It’s been forty years since “The Freha Song” took over Israel, and probably twenty years since anyone has called me by that slur. Things have changed in Israel: the disparities between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi have narrowed, partly because of inter-marriages; popular Mizrahi music
has found its way into the heart of mainstream radio; and activists have begun calling the media out on their under-representation of Mizrahi characters, demanding to see more brown-skinned people in advertising and entertainment, and not just in the role of frehas, arsim, criminals, and workingmen. Young Mizrahi poets have sidestepped the gatekeepers by crowdfunding their own books and launching their own poetry readings, and in 2015, Erez Biton became the first Mizrahi poet to win the Israel Prize for Literature. Subsequently, the Israeli government asked Biton to head a new committee that recommended adding Mizrahi content to the school curriculum. Still, only 9 percent of the academic staff in Israel are Mizrahi, and most key positions in places like the Supreme Court and the media are held by Ashkenazi. And while Israeli slang has evolved and changed, freha shows no signs of waning.

  In recent years, some young professional Mizrahi women in Israel have decided to reclaim the term. They created a Facebook page defiantly named “Who Are You Calling a Freha?,” its cover photo asserting, “This is not Europe.” Their About section reads, “Do you love wearing animal prints but they twist their face at you in university? Do you enjoy rhinestones but people call you freha?” and their photos showcase women with long manicured nails dressed in bold fashion statements.

  When I watch Ofra singing “The Freha Song” now, I see there is something unconvincing about her delivery that I couldn’t see then, a little flinch in her eyes whenever she utters the words “Ani freha.” For a while, I wanted to believe it was subversive and brave of her to be singing those lyrics, an act of reclaiming the demeaning label as these young women in the Facebook group try to do today. But the song was never truly hers: “The Freha Song” was written by Assi Dayan, son of the legendary Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan and a tortured artist with a penchant for drugs and women—a privileged Ashkenazi man who knew nothing about the freha experience.

  Despite Ofra’s wholesome image, “The Freha Song” is one of the tracks most associated with her. But the song, and the controversy it spurred, was also a roadblock in her career. Officials at Galei Tzahal, the popular army radio station, considered banning it, concerned with its inappropriate content. Some Israelis found it racist and offensive. Toward the end of her days, Ofra refused to sing the song, distancing herself from it and from what it represented.

  * * *

  —

  OFRA’S DEATH IN 2000 from a disease later revealed to be a complication of AIDS shocked everyone. She was young, recently married, and at the height of her career. By then, I was living in Vancouver, working part-time as a barista, mostly stoned, and achingly lonely. It was in the days before social media, and I was becoming disengaged from my country, its pop culture, its gossip and news.

  Listening to Ofra’s CDs in my West End apartment in the days following her death—the West Coast granite skies migrating in through my sixth-floor windows—I found that I still knew all the words. Her voice stirred forgotten childhood memories, an old nagging ache. I had always held an irrational conviction that one day I’d meet her in person. Even after she sang for DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt and sat on Johnny Carson’s couch, she felt so close, so human and real, as though I could run into her at any minute on the streets of Sha’ariya.

  Now, I thought, I would never get to tell her what she had meant to me growing up, how much she had inspired me, given me hope, empowered me—because in a world where the actors on TV were Ashkenazi and the singers on the radio were Ashkenazi and the models in magazines were Ashkenazi, there was Ofra, the simple Yemeni girl from HaTikva neighborhood whose star shone brighter than anyone’s, who made it against all odds, and who looked like me, or like one of my more beautiful cousins. Like family.

  YOU AND WHAT ARMY

  ON MY NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY, I was lying on a yellowing patch of lawn in front of an army dormitory, waiting to be questioned by the military police. I was dressed in a khaki uniform that was a tad too tight, the button of my pants pressing against the folds of my belly. Around me, other girls in uniform were chatting and waving away flies. Others had fallen asleep.

  We’d been here since before dawn, when we’d rolled out of our beds for our 4:00 A.M. patrol to discover that two guns had gone missing. Soon after that, military police officers showed up at our dorm with grave faces, stretched bright orange tape at the entrance to our room, and declared it a crime scene.

  Now, a few hours later, it was a typical Israeli spring day, intensely bright and overexposed. The sky was a faded pair of acid-washed jeans. I leaned my head back on the grass, closed my eyes, and gave in to the warmth of sun on my eyelids, willing myself to fall asleep. The inside of my eyelids was orange and paper-thin.

  Slipping into a drowsy daze, I drifted back to my eighteenth birthday. On this day last year, my friends and I went to a beach party outside Tel Aviv. The day was warm and breezy, smelling of fish, salt, and teen spirit. I danced barefoot in the sand in a flowing red dress and drank beer I had purchased without having to lie about my age. I had just graduated from high school a few days earlier, after three turbulent years. I was nearly expelled twice, and had earned an unprecedented E in behavior and a reputation of being a teacher’s worst nightmare. With high school behind me, the air was sweeter, the beer colder, the boys better-looking.

  Back on the lawn, I opened my eyes, depressed by the stark contrast. I was nineteen and a soldier, trapped in a hideous outfit on a dreary army base. It had been seven miserable months since I joined the army, and I had seventeen more to go. This was the second-worst birthday I’d ever had. The worst one, my tenth, was a month after my father’s death.

  A dark shadow eclipsed my sun. I squinted and made out a military police officer towering above me. He spat a list of seven digits, like shots fired from an automatic weapon. It was a mysterious jumble, a couple of sevens here and a couple of threes there, mixed with an eight, a nine, and a six. This thoughtless arrangement, which was impossible to memorize, was my number. My official army ID. My new name. Huddled closely against one another and uttered with a dash of disdain, the numbers sounded like an accusation. In a daze, I replied, “Yes?” and then quickly stood up, cleared my throat, and saluted. “I mean…Officer. Sir.”

  “Come with me.” He turned on his heel.

  I followed him to a dark dormitory room, temporarily converted into a police office. Inside, high-ranking officers in neatly ironed uniforms stared at me grimly. One of them spoke, demanding to know if I’d heard something—anything at all—during the night, if I had any idea who might have stolen the guns, if I’d noticed something suspicious over the past couple of days. “Anything, anything at all,” he said, almost pleading. I said no, again and again. They stared at me a little longer.

  The next day, a military police officer summoned me to an investigation. I was now a suspect.

  * * *

  —

  I JOINED THE Israel Defense Forces at eighteen, a few months after my high school graduation and the end of the first Gulf War. Saying I “joined” the IDF makes it sound as if I did it on a whim, like taking tap-dance lessons or signing up for a book club. Really, I had no choice. In Israel, the army service is mandatory, and I lacked the foresight to claim pacifism or lunacy and get myself discharged. Somehow, I romanticized the army service. When you grow up in a place that has never known peace, where the army is what you do—what everyone does—after high school, you can develop strange ideas about what the military is. You might tell yourself that it’s just like college days for Americans, or that it’s a great way to meet boys and get out of your parents’ house. You might push aside thoughts of war and occupation, forget that throughout history, millions of young soldiers have died in combat and innocent civilians have been killed by their bullets. You have to, because this is your life. This is your home.

  And so I pictured myself stationed in a secluded base in the south, where I’d meet a cute boy who’d sneak into my tent at night. I
dreamed of becoming an instructor in an all-male fighters’ unit, like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, terrorizing a group of hot men while watching their perfectly toned bodies gather sweat under my command.

  Instead, our basic training camp was in a female-only base in the desert, where the only thing to sneak into my tent was sand, coating my hair and skin and creeping into my orifices. We were assigned to tents and beds with sheets and scratchy blankets neatly tucked into them, the smell of desert dust and gunpowder sweetened by girls’ moisturizers and lotions. We were each handed an Uzi: we had to take it everywhere, sleep with it, wake with it. “Treat it like your boyfriend,” the sergeant, deceivingly diminutive and strikingly beautiful, said. That night, lying with the cold metal poking under my lumpy pillow, I cried myself to sleep. Outside the tent, the wilderness swarmed with unfamiliar sounds and wandering beams of light.

  We tumbled out of our beds at four o’clock every morning to days filled with repetitive drills and grueling duties: we scrubbed bathrooms, scoured the base’s grounds, washed mountains of dishes, and guarded the base at night. During the day, we ran. We sat in class. We did jumping jacks. In the evenings, we stuffed ourselves with chocolate and candy in the canteen and talked about sex and boys and our mothers’ cooking. Some nights, we were woken up from sleep for more drills, ordered to get dressed, clean our rooms, disassemble and reassemble our guns. Groggy and stunned, we scrambled to follow the sergeant’s orders while she timed our performance, which was almost always inadequate.

  By the end of the first week, it felt as though I had known the other girls in my tent forever, especially Shelly, a tough girl from the south with tragic eyes and fiery curls who slept in the bed beside mine. I had learned to fire an Uzi, surprised by the painful impact as it dug into my shoulder with each shot, leaving a purple bruise. I could take my Uzi apart and reassemble it within seconds, cleaning it until the barrel was smooth and gleaming when the sergeant inspected it, tilted up toward the light. I learned self-defense and first aid, and discovered that despite consistently skipping physical education classes, I could, when put on the spot, erect a tent in minutes and run for kilometers with a stretcher on my shoulder. I also learned that I couldn’t charm an officer, that I couldn’t get away with anything, and that I had to do what I was told. The army and I were all wrong for each other.