Newcomers in an Ancient Land

by Paula Wagner

  Chapter 9

  WORK

  The following day brought another reality check. From early Sunday mornings to Friday afternoons, the ulpan work/study program would keep me running six days a week. The languid days of crossing the Atlantic and Mediterranean faded quickly as I plunged into my new schedule:

  5:30 a.m.: Rise, rush to pee in the outdoor bathroom, and rinse my face in cold water

  6-8:30 a.m.: Work in the dining room

  9 a.m.-1 p.m.: Study Hebrew

  2-4 p.m.: Rest

  4-6 p.m.: Teatime

  6-8:30 p.m. Evening shift in the kitchen

  Friday afternoon / Shabbat: day off

  Saturday was a blessed day of rest. Although the six-day workweek looked grueling at first, I soon came to enjoy its rhythm. Each day’s name was also its number. Day One was Yom Rishon; Day Two was Yom Sheni, etc. with Shabbat as the peak of the seven-day cycle. Although Ein Hashofet was secular, the Jewish calendar was observed as a matter of culture. With only a single day off, I still felt more rested than after a full weekend at home where almost everything ran 24/7. Plus, every two weeks or so, I could visit Naomi in Hazorea where we’d compare notes and compete for who had learned the most Hebrew.

  Soon I had settled into my morning routine. Well before five a.m., a clutch of fat gray doves chortled their raucous reveille at my windowsill. Hoo-hu-hoo-hu-hoo, hoo-hu-hoo-hu-hoo, they cooed, sounding more like old men clearing phlegm from their throats than gentle turtledoves. At first the birds spooked me, but as I’d soon learn, their hullabaloo could be heard throughout the entire country like a national alarm clock.

  Barefoot and shivering, I pulled on my baggy kibbutz work clothes and ventured across the stony ground to the outdoor bathroom, which reminded me of camping, only with a roof over my head. But I didn’t want to complain. Like the other huts for the ulpanistim, my tsrif had been built by the early chalutzim, who had thought them a luxury after sleeping in tents, a sacrifice Avram loved to emphasize.

  The October air smelled of dust and pine pitch. With the winter rains yet to come, the dry brown needles pricked my feet. When the torrential rains began in earnest, I would have to make a mad dash, then race back to my room to lace up my clumpy boots and tame my unruly hair before joining the silent procession of shadowy figures heading toward the dining room.

  At the hadar ha’ochel, I downed a mug of steaming tea and some dry toast (tznim) before my shift. The crew consisted mostly of kibbutz women with their hair pulled up in buns, makeup-less and uniform in their beige work clothes, and a few European girls whose ponytails, earrings, and motley clothes distinguished them from the kibbutzniks. Like me, they were international ulpan students. But a code of silence seemed to govern the early morning, and I felt shy to break it.

  Tea finished, a stocky woman with a no-nonsense apron tied firmly around her ample hips and belly showed me my job: to place six sets of utilitarian white plates, mugs, knives, forks, and spoons on each of the forty tables, ensuring they all had salt, pepper, butter, sugar, and jam.

  “And don’t forget the tziburiot—one in the middle of each table,” she warned, pointing to a stack of mysteriously empty stainless-steel bowls, whose use I couldn’t fathom. Was this like setting out an extra wine glass for Elijah the Prophet, as we did every year at Passover, just in case he dropped in from antiquity?

  By six-thirty a.m., the hadar ha’ochel was humming with shouts and conversation as kibbutzniks filled the tables I’d barely finished setting. Now the aproned woman motioned for me to push an agala (cart) laden with various dishes around the tables.

  My brain whirled, and my hands flew as I doled out bread (lechem), milk (chalav), café, té, hard and soft-boiled eggs (baetzim—raka or kasha), yogurt (leben), tomatoes (agvaniot), cucumbers (melafafonim), porridge (dysa), pickled herring (dag maluach)—which only the Polish members seemed to relish—and something bland called dieta, for those with dietary restrictions. By the end of my shift, I’d learned almost the entire vocabulary of a typical Israeli breakfast.

  When all but a few diners had left by eight o’clock, I still had forty tables to clear. Surveying the room, I noticed the mysterious tziburiot, no longer empty but overflowing with the detritus of breakfast: eggshells, bread crusts, soggy cereal, fruit and vegetable peelings, slimy yogurt, and spidery herringbones. So that’s what they were for! I dumped the slop into a large garbage pail affixed to my cart. Then I hoisted six chairs apiece onto forty tabletops and swept the floor beneath them with a king-size push broom.

  “Now comes the fun,” quipped a blonde girl about my age, apparently another ulpanista, though we’d both been too busy all morning to exchange more than a glance. I stared at her in disbelief.

  “Yes,” she giggled. “Now we get to wash the floor.” She uncoiled a fat hose from a cupboard in the wall, twisted the round metal handle, and directed a geyser over the stone tiles as I watched in awe. Next, she handed me a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush with a long handle.

  “Splash the soap around and start scrubbing, but be careful not to slip.”

  Whoosh! I tossed the contents of the bucket, and a glistening rainbow of bubbles slid out across the floor.

  “Now we have to get the suds off,” continued the girl, whisking the soapy water off the tiles with the suction of a rubber-bladed, long-handled squeegee called a goumy. But the process was not yet over.

  “Now you get to do the rinsing,” she commanded, thrusting the hose into my hands. Gripping the nozzle gingerly at first, I took aim at the far corner of the dining room and sent a surge of water to my target. A jolt of power shot through me, like breaking a taboo. Never had I imagined that flooding a floor could bring such pleasure! Whirling around, I directed the water wherever I willed it, swirling the suds toward the floor drains with a flick of my wrist.

  “Not done yet,” giggled the girl. “We still have to goumy off the rinse water, then wipe the wet spots and replace all the chairs.” Goumy was apparently a verb as well as a noun.

  My heart sank at the thought of hauling all those chairs down again, but the efficiency of the goumy in wiping away the water restored my satisfaction. Within minutes, the tiles were almost dry.

  When it was finally time to devour my own full breakfast, I was ravenous! I chopped two large tomatoes, two medium-sized Persian cucumbers, and two hard-boiled brown eggs onto my plate as I’d seen the kibbutzniks do. I topped my salad with creamy yogurt, wolfed down four slices of toast and jam, tasted the stinky pickled herring, and chased it all with three cups of tea. Then I tossed my leftovers into the tziburit, mimicking kibbutz etiquette.

  By the end of that week, my back had stopped aching, and my biceps had swelled from the daily workout of lifting two hundred and forty chairs. Along with a swifter pace, I’d picked up the vocabulary of the morning routine and mastered the art of washing a kibbutz dining room floor. Indeed, washing a floor had never been so much fun!

  Chapter 10

  THE ULPAN

  The ulpan classroom buzzed like a Tower of Babel with students from everywhere—Iran, Australia, Sweden, England, Morocco, the US, and South Africa—chatting in their own languages when their faltering Hebrew failed them. Most were being sponsored by Ha’Shomer Ha’Tzair—the Young Guards—the Jewish youth movement of Mapam, Israel’s secular political party on the far left. A few were new immigrants, sponsored by the Jewish Agency. But no one besides me had come alone, unattached to any group sponsor. Apparently the Feins had facilitated an exception for me, although the ulpan was already in progress.

  Dortsia, the instructor, was an older woman with a short solid body and wiry white hair who walked with a limping gait that even the extra thick sole on her right shoe couldn’t fix. I wondered if she’d been assigned to teach because her disability made physical work more difficult. Still, as a founding kibbutz member, she appeared to command fierce respect. Her welcome to me was part warmth, part warning: I would have to work hard to catch up. I promised I would, yet I worrie
d. Unlike me, many of the other students could rattle off whole sentences, having learned to read in Hebrew school. But I soon realized their level of literacy was an illusion—they often had no idea what the words meant, so when it came time to practice a conversation, they were tongue-tied. My problem was just the opposite: I was quick to learn by ear, but my eyes struggled over the foreign squiggles that ran across the page from right to left. I quickly rose to the top of the class in spoken Hebrew but still stumbled over reading.

  The evening kitchen shift was boring but in some ways better than the hectic morning shifts in the hadar ha’ochel. Mindlessly scrubbing the gunk from giant steamers bolted to the floor on rotating steel frames gave me time to digest the events of the day. As with washing the floors, kitchen efficiency seemed to hinge on the mastery of water and drains. Once I learned that, I had the drill down. The mostly older women workers gossiped while following their well-worn routines. Absorbing their chatter, I picked up new expressions along with kibbutz news.

  One evening, after I’d been at Ein Hashofet for barely a month, I tried making small talk with a woman whose English was even less proficient than my Hebrew. Despite my stumbles, her patience created a gentle rapport between us. After awhile she stepped back from the sink, as if taking my measure in the dim light.

  At last she said quietly, “At nefesh adina.” I had no idea what this meant, but from her tone I thought it must be important, so I silently memorized the syllables in order to look them up in my Hebrew/English dictionary at the end of my shift.

  Back in my tzrif, I leafed through the pages of my small, blue leather-bound pocket dictionary until I came upon the translation at last. To my astonishment it read like a fortune cookie: You are a sensitive soul. Barely believing this could be correct, I read further: an expression usually meant as a compliment. I had never thought of sensitivity as a positive trait—only a negative one for which Dad had often faulted me as a child. You’re too sensitive, he’d pronounce when I’d burst into tears at the sound of his rich tenor voice singing songs like “Little Robin Red Breast” while stroking the piano keys with his thick yet deft fingers. The lyrics about a poor bird “who died out in the cold, the cold, the cold” would set me gushing. But the disappointment in his large brown eyes would only make me sob harder.

  Now I saw sensitivity in a sudden new light—more of a blessing than a curse, a strength of character instead of a flaw. If I could just learn to harness it, maybe it could serve me. At that moment, I knew I’d never forget this simple but priceless revelation from an unknown woman who had sensed something in me that I couldn’t see myself. Peeling off my damp work clothes, I sank into bed in a wave of warmth more comforting than the comforter itself.

  While kibbutz life would evolve beyond anything the founding fathers could have imagined, mechanical lifts for the chairs I hoisted in the hadar ha’ochel were still a dream. Likewise, the food carts I pushed had not been replaced by self-service salad bars and cash registers. Kitchens had not yet been added to individual homes, and anyway choosing to eat alone at home was still frowned upon as placing individual convenience over collective commitment. Children still slept away from their parents in their beit yelidim.

  But the ulpan remains a living institution—a source of extra labor, potential girlfriends, boyfriends, or new members for the kibbutz. And the hadar ha’ochel still draws members together to celebrate milestones or sort out their differences in the spirit of collective community.

  Chapter 11

  SHABBAT

  One Friday when I arrived for the last morning shift of my workweek, a tantalizing aroma of chicken soup wafted from the kitchen. Why is Friday different from all other days? I wondered, paraphrasing the traditional Passover question, Why is this night different from all other nights?

  Looking puzzled by my ignorance, my supervisor patiently explained.

  “We’re getting ready for Erev Shabbat—our special Friday evening meal. By the way, all the shops in town will be closed by four o’clock and the buses will stop running too, so you’d best arrive before sundown if you’re going anywhere.”

  “I was planning to visit my sister on Hazorea,” I confided sheepishly.

  “Then catch the bus by three. Of course you can always hitchhike, but you’ll be the last to get a ride. Soldiers get priority over civilians on Friday so they can get home in time for Shabbat.”

  I raced through my morning shift, setting the tables as usual but adding plates of unfamiliar sticky brown lumps that I eyed with suspicion until I snuck a taste, while clearing up. Amazed by the delicious sugary shards that melted in my mouth—something akin to brown sugar and peanut butter spun together—I asked another ulpanista what it was.

  “Chalva!” she smiled, wiping a few telltale bits from her own lips. “Made from mashed-up sesame seeds and honey.”

  Sampling a few more morsels, I surreptitiously wrapped an untouched portion in a napkin to herald a sweet Sabbath with Naomi that evening.

  While my secular family had celebrated Passover and Chanukah, we had never observed Shabbat or even Yom Kippur. Fridays were simply the end of the school week, while Saturday was for sleeping in as late as possible until Mom yelled for us to get up and do our chores.

  Dad ignored any organized religion on principle, a rebellion rooted in his adolescence. Crossing swords with his rabbi over the speech he was preparing for his bar mitzvah, the Jewish traditional rite of passage into manhood, Dad had stubbornly refused to make any changes. In the stalemate, his bar mitzvah had been cancelled. No wonder he had never sent his own kids to Hebrew school!

  As an adult, Dad’s rebellion had morphed into general alienation from institutional religion in general. But ironically, his heritage often crept into conversation, disguised in references to Jewish history, ethical codes of behavior, or the meaning of life, like a mantle he couldn’t fully shake. Consequently, he’d taught me far more about the Jewish values of social justice, compassion, and critical thinking than if I’d gone to Hebrew school. Still, the weekly rituals of Erev Shabbat and Shabbat (Friday evening and Saturday) were a revelation when I first arrived in Israel.

  Stolid as a stone in the bubbling brook of my enthusiasm, Dad had brooded over my aspirations for Israel in silence, but I had been too proud to beg for his approval. I could only guess at his reasons. Perhaps he worried I was simply too young. Although he still seemed all-powerful to me at the time, did he feel his power waning in the face of my determination? But I was grappling with my own internal contradictions—fleeing from Dad’s authority on one hand while trying to understand him through his Jewish roots on the other. In fact, we were becoming increasingly distant as Dad moved away from his Jewish identity, while I moved toward mine. Like two train travelers going in opposite directions on parallel tracks, we occasionally shouted at each other without hearing, as our destinies pulled us inexorably apart and our words flew away on the wind as if we didn’t even share a common language. I often thought of Dad as a man of music, while I was a girl of words. Now, a poem spiraled up from that thought:

  Dad was a man of music, but I was a girl of words

  He loved a staff of notes, but I loved a flight of birds

  He locked his heart in a room in his head

  I went in search of the key

  On foreign shores and distant lands

  From the desert to Galilee

  I gathered the mantle he dropped in the dust

  I mended its tattered hem

  Wrapping its threads over my shoulders

  Tunneling through history

  Seeking his heart through thousands of years

  Chasing his mystery

  Chapter 12

  VISITING NAOMI ON HAZOREA

  After my work shift, I rushed to my room to “make seder.” I was familiar with the word from Seder Passover service, but in modern Hebrew it simply meant to put things in order. Another variation, b’seder, meant okay, as in “is everything okay?” Kibbutzniks, to my mind, seemed
obsessed with order.

  I shook the pine needles out of my musty braided throw rug, swept the splintered floorboards, and bundled up my dirty clothes for the machbesa (laundry). The ritual of making seder every Friday symbolized not only the care of my humble new home, but in a larger sense, the creation of my new world. After working for six days, I looked forward to enjoying the fruits of my labors on the seventh day. It was not the literal sense of the Shabbat that thrilled me so much as its power to sustain a weekly cycle from ancient to modern times. Gathering a few things into a knapsack, I hurried to the bus stop where a few of the ulpanistim from my class were waiting to go to a party on another local kibbutz.

  “I hope they have beer,” laughed Lena, a gorgeous girl from Peru.

  “They bloody well better,” snapped a pimply English kid.

  “Sorry, I don’t drink,” winked a guy from Iran with a dark stubble that made him look older than the others. “But I might have a little hashish I can share.”

  The girls giggled and rolled their eyes, but I stood apart, not knowing them well enough to party with them yet. I didn’t begrudge them their fun, but they didn’t seem to share my zeal for kibbutz life.

  When the bus arrived, I dug out exact change, took a seat, and soon pulled the stop cord for the sign for Hazorea with all the newfound confidence of surviving an initiation. The two weeks since I’d last seen Naomi felt like eons. Disembarking, I passed through the arch of feathery pines that had swallowed her up at the entrance to her new world, and followed a path much like the ones on my own kibbutz. This time I asked for directions to the ulpan. From there I figured it would be easy enough to find someone who looked just like me. Indeed, the man I stopped gave me a quizzical look, and I realized he’d mistaken me for Naomi.