by Alice Nelson
Rose and Max began to research other places they could live. They had heard about a different kind of collective settlement called a meshek shitufi. It was like a kibbutz in many ways, but the nuclear family was preserved. Farming was collective but children lived with their parents. There was a place near Tiberias that needed new members, a small farming settlement established by German refugees several years before.
Jacob was a year old when they moved to the meshek. Less than a year later Leah was born in a tiny hospital in the nearby town. It had been a miscalculation, the second child. Of course they had wanted more children, but later, when they were more settled, when Jacob was older. Leah was born four weeks early, squalling and red, her eyes yellow with jaundice. She was sickly from the beginning, refusing to take the breast, alarmingly small and thin. It was her own fault that she could not sustain this child, Rose was convinced. She was always hungry herself. Food was scarce and there were strict rations in those days. One hundred grams of meat per adult per month. For weeks when several of their crops failed there were only eggplants to eat.
In their second year at the meshek, four men were attacked by Arabs. They had been on overnight guard duty, clustered around a small fire at the north perimeter of the settlement. Rose had never seen so much blood, flesh ripped open, the soaked red cotton of the men’s shirts, the wounds that would not stop bleeding despite their frantic swabbing, their hastily made tourniquets. There was no doctor on the meshek, and in the hours they had to wait for help from the next town, two of the wounded men died. One of them, a young Polish man who had fought with the partisans during the war, died with his head resting on Rose’s knees, a whimper coming from him that sounded like a small child, like one of her own children crying. The young man was wearing a woollen scarf that Rose had knitted for him the previous winter. He had been overwhelmed when she had presented it to him; Rose had been a little embarrassed by the immensity of his bewildered pleasure. He had looked so thin and cold, his clothes so inadequate for the winter, that she had used some of the wool her mother had sent her to knit sweaters for the children to make the scarf for him. The young man had marvelled over it as if it were a miracle, and tears had filled his eyes when he tried it on in the dining hall. No one had been kind to him for a very long time, Rose realised. She knew little about his life, but someone had told her that his parents and sister had been killed at the beginning of the war, when he was only twelve years old. He must be the same age as she was, Rose calculated as the man lay there with his head in her lap, his cries suddenly exhausted. He let out another soft moan and his head rolled sideways.
After the bodies were taken away, Rose removed her blood-soaked dress and buried it in a corner of a field. She could not stop thinking of the sound the man had made as he died. It could have been Max.
Things were not the same after the attack. They were such a small band of settlers, so woefully unequipped, so close to the border. There was a fear among them that had not been there before. Rose was unable to look out across the land without seeing the possibility of danger. She could feel herself becoming fretful and anxious, a panic in her every time Max was rostered on for guard duty.
That winter a disease took hold among the chickens, wiping out the entire flock. Four of their best milk cows were stolen one night. There were arguments among the leaders: some wanted to change the structure of the meshek, to move from collective farming to individual allotments. Three families left –two for South Africa, another for Tel Aviv. Towards the end of the winter, both the children came down with the flu, Leah’s illness turning into a chest infection and then a terrifying fever. Rose had never heard a child scream so much. She and Max took it in turns sitting up with Leah at night, sponging her with a wet cloth, rocking her writhing body. The meshek’s only truck was broken down and there was no way to get to town to the hospital.
Early one morning, Max came home from guard duty to find Rose sitting at the kitchen table in her nightdress. She was bent over, with her head resting on the table, her eyes glazed with exhaustion. Jacob and Leah were curled up on the floor asleep at her feet, the stiff wool blanket from the bed draped over them. Rose raised her head and looked at him. It was not yet light outside. ‘It’s time to go home,’ she said.
Rose spoke sometimes about the humiliation of their return to New York. Her mother had wept to see her leave home, she told Marina, but Rose wept every day of their passage back. On the ship, she willed the journey to pass more slowly, wishing they could be suspended at sea forever. The press of waves, the tilting horizon through the small window of their cabin; she wanted to stay cocooned in her bunk.
When they docked in New York it seemed impossible to believe that they had really left Israel. If she refused to disembark from the ship, Rose thought desperately, she could reverse it all and will them back. Their failure, she knew, would cast a shade over every part of their lives, would taint whatever future they tried to create.
They had stepped out of their American lives, never planning to return to them. When they came back it was too late to pick up where they had left off – those paths were closed to them now. A return to medical school was impossible for Max with a family to support. A friend of Rose’s father gave him a job selling advertising. Max hated the work, the slickness and pushiness that was required, the ceaseless persuasion needed to make a sale. He was a quiet man, reticent and gentle. It was entirely the wrong career for him, Rose told Marina, but it was the only one that had presented itself. Still, Max was diligent and determined and he wrung a living out of it. There was no other choice. He created a false self, a screen he pulled down every morning when he stepped on to the train for Manhattan, his leather briefcase in his hand. It pained Jacob as a young man, Marina knew, to realise how much his father dreaded his work.
Rose and Max rented a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old clapboard house in Queens. It was all they could afford. The streets were lined with squat row houses and peeling ironwork fences, weeds growing up through the cracked concrete of driveways. It was an enclave of decrepit suburbia, utterly disconnected from the city.
Marina had taken the train out to Queens with Rose a few years before to see if the house was still there. The neighbourhood had reminded her of a seaside town in winter. There was a cluster of palm trees on the corner of the street; they were stunted and short, like trees growing beside a freeway. Those trees had felt like a small mockery to her, Rose told Marina. A daily reminder of what they had lost. When she walked Jacob to school each day she would circle around an extra block so she could avoid the palms.
‘I know it’s silly,’ she said to Marina as they sat together on the train home after they had gone to look at the house. ‘I didn’t have a claim on a word as grand as exile. America was my own country, after all. To everyone else I’d simply been away for a spell and come home again. A kind of extended holiday. But exile was the only word I could think of to describe the way I felt. I thought so much about my grandmother in those days, how often she’d cried about missing Poland. It became a joke among us as children – how sentimental she was about even the direst Polish dish. When she talked about Poland, it was like she was describing a mythical realm. Not a real country at all. We didn’t really have any way to understand what she had lost. When I came back from Israel I wished I’d been kinder to her. But I was envious, too. It’s irrational, but her loss felt more legitimate than mine. She’d fled persecution; we had just chosen to leave. We’d left our lives in New York, and if there was a banishing from Israel we’d brought it on ourselves. I had undone what my parents wanted most for me: to know what it’s like to be born in a place and to stay there. To not have to leave.’
Eventually Rose and Max remade their lives in New York. One of Rose’s former piano teachers found a part-time job for her in the music library at Queens College. A neighbour watched Leah while Rose shelved books and sorted sheet music in the dim stacks of the library. Piano notes floated down from the practice rooms on the
second floor. Rose was only a few years older than the students. How she must have envied them. Marina had asked her once if it had not been too painful to work at a music college, to spend every day so close to her own forsaken future. It did not do to think like that, Rose told her. She had work, she had her children, her husband. That was enough.
Rose had tried to preserve some of their Israeli life in New York. They would speak Hebrew around the dinner table every night, she decreed. They must not lose the language of their country; the children should be fluent so that they could return one day. But after a few months in New York, Jacob and Leah wanted to speak only English. They were American children now, not Sabras as their parents had planned. Ungrateful American children. It was an insult that Rose used when she was angry with them, a twist to the word in her mouth. Eventually their Hebrew slipped away, resurrected haltingly, temporarily, when Jacob was studying for his bar mitzvah.
In their last weeks in Israel, Rose had tried to regard the country in a way that would help her to remember it for Jacob and Leah. She had no camera so she tried to hold every detail, every scent and taste in her mind. The cast of the light over the valley in the late afternoons, the particular green of the olive leaves in the summer, the curves of the Judean hills, the almost unbearable sweetness of a ripe fig. She had always seen Israel in this heightened way, Rose had told Marina. After centuries of banishment and longing, Israel had become a kind of myth. Before they had moved there it had seemed a country half-dreamed. They could hardly believe that the land itself was a physical place. The first thing she had done when she reached Israel, Rose said, was to find a patch of dirt and put her hands down in it. Once she had returned to her American life, Rose realised that her own stories of their years in Israel felt like fairy tales to her children, too. Soon her nostalgia for the particular kind of halva she had loved from the market in Tiberias, or for an Israeli date, so different from the wizened, imported ones available in New York, would become the subject of loving eye-rolling. Her children would learn about Israel as she had – at Hebrew School on Sundays. They would know the country from the Torah, from books and from stories. They would not remember it.
Rose and Max returned only once, for two weeks’ holiday the year before Max died. It was still their country in the way that it was every diaspora Jew’s country, but it no longer belonged to them. Staying in their hotel on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv, they were tourists now, walking along the promenade and marvelling at all the changes, joining a day trip to Masada with a group of Americans. Everything felt like a false echo of their old life there. Back in the hotel room at night, Rose turned to the wall and wept. She could not help it. She had thought that this trip back would be full of happiness, a joyful homecoming. But being in Israel again only felt like a cruel taunt. They had planned to visit the meshek, but Rose could not bear to go. How could she sit there and drink tea with all their old friends who had stayed behind? Who were living on in their primitive houses and farming their country and fighting for it; who were bringing up their children as proud Israelis, letting them go to war, letting them die defending their land. ‘How can I sit with those people and talk to them about our safe American lives, our spoiled American children?’ Rose had asked Max. ‘How can I?’
Nearly half a century later, Rose presided over her American Shabbat table, her grey head bowed and her eyes closed as Jacob recited the prayers. Her fingers rested lightly on the back of the chair, liver-spotted and bent now, a swelling around her joints. There was a cragginess to her features, something haggard but dignified. And still in her face the shadow of her old beauty.
Marina watched the familiar tableau: Leah talking intently to Ben, their heads bent together, Jacob cutting the plaited loaf of challah into thick slices. How hungry she had always been for her husband’s memories, his history. Apart from the years in Israel, the life of his family had continued in a predictable unfurling. When Jacob was seven years old, Rose’s mother died and the family moved into the apartment to live with her father. Jacob and Leah grew up in their mother’s family home, their childhood resembling Rose’s. They sailed wooden boats in the Central Park pond just as Rose and her brothers had done as children. In wintertime they rode their bicycles to the Museum of Natural History, or walked with Max to the library to choose books. The children adored everything about their father: the solid heft of him, his wool caps and sweet pipe-smoke smell, his abiding calm. Max never lost his delighted sense of wonder about the world, Jacob told her, his intense interest in everything that crossed his path. He was capable of spending hours playing with his children, never tiring of their games and stories. When he came home from work, Leah and Jacob curled in against him on the sofa, a cradle for each of them under his arms. How Marina would have loved such a father for herself. Sometimes there was a swift flicker of jealousy when she thought of Jacob’s childhood, and then a quickening of shame. How could she begrudge any child such a safe, cocooning love? It was what she would want for her own child, if she had ever had one.
Her own father, Yoav, hovered outside her memories. She had only one photograph of him, and sometimes when she looked at it his face startled her. He was so unknowable, so mysterious to her. If Gizela could seem like someone dreamed, someone fantastical, she had no grasp on her father at all. He had left so little trace in the world. Dov, four years older than Marina, remembered their father teaching him how to make a fire on the kibbutz. ‘A Hirsch fire,’ he had said proudly as he showed his son how to build a careful pyramid of kindling, how to coax the flames into life. She and Dov had clung as children to this memory of their father and the reference to his own family, to a lineage of Hirsch men and women who no longer existed. Her father was killed the summer after the fire-lighting lessons, when she was four years old. Apart from Marina and Dov, he was the only Hirsch. The only one to have come out of Russia after the war, arriving in Israel at the age of twenty-one.
The picture she had of him was a black-and-white photograph from the archives of the kibbutz where she was born. There were several kibbutzniks in the picture, wearing shorts and smiling. Some of them held farming tools; one woman clutched a chicken in her arms. They were so young. Orphans and survivors, most of them, fresh from the war. How could they be smiling, Marina always wondered. How could any of them be smiling? In the photograph they looked like teenagers at a summer camp. She did not remember this cheerfulness from her childhood.
Her father was standing at the edge of the group, his arm resting over the shoulder of the man next to him. He was smiling, too, and squinting slightly in the bright desert light. No matter how many times Marina scrutinised his features, she could see nothing of herself or Dov in his face. No familiar lineaments, no shadow of recognition. Sometimes she wondered if her father might have been like Jacob’s father. A sturdy, sensible grace to him, a listening air. He could have shepherded the four of them. Dov might not have died. Her mother might not have been lost to her.
Marina glanced out of the window at the glimmer of trees in Central Park. A run of green against the still-light sky. Often in summer she longed for an earlier darkness, a blotting out of the city. The table had been cleared and Rose and Ben had brought out the Scrabble board. She could hear the whistle of the kettle from the kitchen, the clink of cups as Leah prepared the lacquered tea tray. There was always tea after the meal, even in summer. It was part of the tradition of those Friday nights.
There was no photograph of her mother in the kibbutz archives. Gizela had lived in Israel for more than a decade but had somehow avoided photographic chronicling. Her mother was given to slipping away, to removing herself. Marina could never understand how she had endured for so long living in close quarters with others, how she had been able to bear a communal life. Sitting at Rose’s table, watching the candles melting down and looking around her at the crowded bookshelves, the blue velvet love seat with the camel-hair rug folded over its back, the framed family portraits, the violets in their pots on the windowsill, Marina
wondered if there had been a room like this locked away in the core of her mother’s memory. An apartment in Prague, the sound of church bells and the rap of shoes on a cobbled street drifting up through a window. An old piano, a walnut writing desk, a silver-plated menorah. The same Hebrew words, a woman’s pale hand cupped around a flickering candle, a plaited rope of challah. A lost world. When she was growing up there was barely a discernible trace of her mother’s history, no memory that veered deeper into the past than her arrival in Israel in 1951 at the age of eighteen. Whatever she and Dov knew about their mother’s life had come to them as a barely drawn portrait, a truncated outline: six years in Prague, seven years in Suffolk, five years in New York, the years in Israel and then back to New York, a widow with two young children.
When they were children, the word Prague became a talisman for Marina and Dov, a secret charm that might hold the key to Gizela. Because there were only shreds of their mother’s personal history available, they became obsessed with the city itself. The leaden Vltava River, streets full of narrow doorways, stone buildings that seemed to contain a darkness, a swirling winter mist over it all, the Bohemian mountains disappearing into an ashen sky. Street names they could hardly pronounce, bottles of cherries, yew trees in a green square of park. The two of them were sure that the buried colours and sounds of their mother’s childhood must still be alive in her, but not once could they evoke any hint of recognition. For several weeks they regaled Gizela with names and recipes and stories they had dredged up from books in the school library. Czech words, the names of railway stations and public squares, pictures of the Palace Gardens and the squat-pillared bridge, memorised phrases. She and Dov offered all these things up to Gizela, watching her face for some small flicker of recognition. A shame burnt in Marina when she thought back to it: how could they not have known how painful this prodding must have been for their mother? The world of her childhood, and everything it contained, had been razed in her absence, and the life she had lived since was not the one intended for her. Another country, another language – everything had been forcibly transposed.
