Newcomers in an Ancient Land

by Paula Wagner

  In the distance I could make out a few other workers converging across the lawn, the men in baggy blue overalls, the women in beige work shirts and shapeless pants. A groggy young soldier crossed my path on his way home from guard duty. Although both men and women served in the army, only men pulled night duty. Watching my fellow workers, I couldn’t help noticing how traditionally jobs were divided by gender— men in the fields; women in the kitchen, laundry, and children’s houses. Most teachers and nurses were female, while men held the leadership roles. I was beginning to see the gap in collective ideology between the real and the ideal. So much for a truly egalitarian society, I mused.

  When I’d first arrived on Dan, I’d been assigned to work in the machbessa (laundry). But after several weeks of hanging out loads of sopping sheets in the hot and windy concrete courtyard, I’d gathered the courage to ask the sadran avoda for a transfer to the vineyards. At first the work scheduler had let out a loud guffaw that shook the large belly hanging over his belt.

  “Are you sure you want to work in the kerem with Rivka, that crazy old woman?”

  Rivka was one of the few if not the only woman to work outdoors.

  As a founding kibbutz member, she was a legend but also something of a laughingstock. As a young woman in the early 1940s, she had planted the vineyards almost singlehandedly. Over twenty years later, she still tended them with fierce dedication, although their perishable fruit and short season were less profitable than the apple orchards. But as a childless wife in a society that prized motherhood, her eccentric passion aroused more jokes than pity. Despite the gossip about how hard she was to work with, I wanted to work outdoors so badly that I decided to take my chances. Working with Rivka was still more appealing than repeating the same robotic tasks with the two dour women in the laundry. So I had persisted until the work scheduler finally relented. Rivka too was skeptical at first, but once she decided to take me on, she seemed glad to teach me the tasks. For Rivka, the vineyard was a labor of love. At other times, however, she could be cranky and bitter. As her story slowly unfolded, I came to understand why. According to Rivka, the male/female roles on the kibbutz hadn’t always been so traditional.

  “When we founded the kibbutz in 1939, the women worked right alongside the men, digging ditches, sleeping in musty tents, building the first shelters, trying our best to prove we could work just as hard as them. Of course, we also did all the cooking and laundry too, so in reality we worked twice as hard. But once the babies started coming, ah . . . that was the end of our so-called equality. The men didn’t want to lower themselves to doing ‘women’s’ work—changing dirty nappies and rocking screaming babies in the middle of the night—so they pushed us back into our traditional roles. As for me, I was only allowed to continue working in the kerem because I didn’t have children. Whether that was a privilege or a punishment, I never knew.”

  Struggling to comprehend her Polish-accented Hebrew, I absorbed Rivka’s tale in silence. Having been denied children herself, she had lavished her maternal longings on the vineyard. Yet a deep disappointment seemed to pervade even this accomplishment. The dual pain of infertility and inequality seemed entwined around Rivka’s heart as tightly as the vines.

  Still mulling over her story, I swung the beam of my flashlight into the shadowy eucalyptus and bushy oleanders that lined both sides of the dirt road, hoping the crunch of my work boots would ward off any snakes. Though not yet dawn, the sky was turning a shade of gray, and a few doves were already cooing hypnotically. The pungent odor of manure from a nearby lul (chicken coop) and refet pricked my nose. Suddenly the cock-adoodle doo of a rooster pierced the predawn peace. Worry knifed through me. What if an infiltrator lurked in the shadows? (We did not yet call them terrorists.) Shivering, I quickened my pace. It was still a kilometer to the kerem situated within a stone’s throw of the Syrian border.

  A few signs in faded Hebrew, English, and Arabic lettering —DANGER, EXPLOSIVES, KEEP OUT—haphazardly posted on rusty rolls of barbed wire and broken blocks of concrete were the only visible indicators of the still-active state of war between Israel and Syria. On the other side of the barbed wire, I could hear the faint braying of donkeys and glimpse their masters as they plowed their fields. In this bucolic atmosphere, the possibility of war seemed unreal, much less the idea that Israel might one day capture and annex the Golan Heights.

  One by one, the stars winked out, and a faint glow silhouetted the hills against the sky’s dark dome. I knew that those hills harbored bunkers, and in those bunkers, Syrian soldiers cradled Russian-made Kalashnikovs that might well be trained on me. But the beauty of the dawn gathering over the hills eclipsed all human conflict. Part of me realized how easily the soldiers could have picked me off, but another part of me imagined they might fancy the odd sight of a young gingit girl in shorts, work boots, and a red bandana as a distraction from the tedium of war.

  Light was gathering at top speed now, rimming the hills with opalescent clouds of apricot, lavender, and magenta, until finally, the sun shot over the horizon like a cannonball in a blaze of gold. There was nothing gradual or subtle about sunrise in this part of the world! The intense contrast between darkness and light made me want to cheer the new day and grieve the loss of night all at once. Despite my exhaustion at the end of each shift, I couldn’t wait to creep along the dirt road to the kerem the following morning, where the sunrise promised a newborn day.

  The Golan Heights later Annexed from Syria

  Excellent view of Upper Galilee from bunker used to shell Israeli farmers in the 1960’s

  Chapter 23

  THE KEREM

  Temporarily blinded by the sunrise, I barely noticed the crew of other young workers gathering behind me at the gates of the kerem.

  “Boker tov,” they murmured shyly. Good morning.

  “Boker or,” I replied. “Morning light.” I loved the way the Hebrew language could transform a simple greeting into a poetic call and response.

  Although most of the crew were teenagers like me, our worlds were far apart. Most were from poor families whose parents had emigrated from Morocco in the early fifties. To save them from potential urban ills, the government had sent them to the kibbutz for a summer of fresh air and immersion in the socialist ethic of hard work.

  Shifting from one foot to another, they awaited their work orders from Rivka. Their skeptical expressions puzzled me. Why didn’t they share my Zionist zeal for the virtues of kibbutz life? Over the time we worked together, I would slowly grasp that where I sought adventure, they sensed exploitation. Where I sought acceptance, they felt like second-class citizens in their own land—poor Sephardic relatives of their better-educated Ashkenazi brethren, who dominated Israeli culture and politics in that era. What those Moroccan kids thought of my frizzy red hair and freckles, much less my eagerness to volunteer for hard labor under a blazing sun, I couldn’t guess. Although Esther, the mentor who had inspired me to go to Israel, was far more educated than they obviously were, I was reminded of the discrimination she had described.

  Since my Hebrew was still fledgling and their English wasn’t much better, we communicated mostly in grunts and shy smiles as we laid out stacks of boxes at the end of each row of vines. Next we fanned out in pairs, one on each side of a vine, to snip the red and green grapes that hung in huge hands called eshkolim, taking care to lay them gently in the boxes for fear of bruising. When the boxes were full, we stacked them six high like leaning Towers of Pisa at the end of each row for other workers to lift onto a tractor-drawn flatbed. Teetering along the rows, it took all my strength not to topple over and send my heavy stack of boxes flying.

  I was also on the lookout for chameleons that liked to hide in the vines. But they were so well camouflaged by their golden emerald skins that I could rarely see them before my fingers closed around the rough wrinkles of their soft underbellies. Staring up at me with lidless eyes swiveling in all directions, they fixed me in a prehistoric stare that took me beyond time to a p
lace occupied only by the feel of their baggy bodies, the luscious taste of grapes, and the relentless rays of the sun.

  By eight a.m. that sun was a blazing bonfire, so all picking ceased, lest the grapes spoil in the heat. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I headed for the welcome shade of the open-air packing shed at the edge of the vineyard.

  My belly rumbled. Having washed down only a slice of toast with a cup of tea four hours earlier, by now I was starving. All morning, I had fantasized about cooking a delicious breakfast for the crew in the makeshift outdoor kitchen at one end of the shed. But time was of the essence. As long as I worked like lightning and didn’t delay the final packing tasks, Rivka indulged my culinary efforts. As soon as breakfast was over, the trucks would need to be loaded with grapes destined for local markets. But without refrigeration, they couldn’t go much farther than Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.

  Since the vineyard was too far from the main dining room to go back for breakfast, a tractor delivered the meal makings in crates and coolers. First I filled two gigantic dented kettles with water—one for Turkish coffee, the other for English tea—lit the blackened propane stove, and set them to boil. Next, I set out three types of plain unsweetened yogurt—thin, medium, and thick—alongside cracked olives, pickled fish, and piles of pita bread. Chopping furiously, I concocted a salad of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, and bell peppers. Last, I whipped three-dozen eggs in a chipped earthenware bowl and poured the foamy mass into three large skillets, thrilling to the hiss and sizzle of liquid adhering to the hot iron edges as I swirled them into omelets. Time permitting, I sautéed onions and mushrooms and added them too.

  But no matter how quickly I worked, it was never fast enough for Rivka.

  “Ya’Allah!” she fussed, using the Arabic phrase for “Get going, by God!” But her Polish accent only made the crew snicker. With their Moroccan roots, many of them spoke Arabic, though they would have been loath to admit it lest they be seen as “Arab-lovers.” Meanwhile, several of them toasted bread over the old stove, sending up black plumes of smoke from the open flame.

  “Watch out, you’re burning it!” screeched Rivka. More laughter. But as soon as the feast was ready, they bellied up to the packing tables to devour it.

  A lined and weather-beaten woman, Rivka looked ancient in my young eyes, though she was probably in her late fifties. When she wasn’t tending the vineyards, she was defending them at Saturday night kibbutz meetings whenever a motion was made to replace them with more lucrative crops such as apples. Then she would bellow at the top of her lungs, “Over my dead body you’ll tear up those vines!” Other times she’d threaten suicide or storm out of the meeting in tears, anything to save her beloved kerem. The men called her hysterical and the women rolled their eyes, but Rivka always prevailed in the end. I held my peace as she fussed over breakfast. Deep down I admired her. What she lacked in looks, she made up for in determination.

  After breakfast, we finished the final packing tasks: wrapping the boxed grapes in tissue paper and loading them onto the trucks; stacking a fresh supply of empty boxes for the next day; sweeping up the shed; gathering up our tools; and finally heaving our bodies, dog-tired and dusty, onto the flatbed for the bumpy ride back to the kibbutz, dangling our legs over the sides like limp rubber hoses.

  Each day after work I met René for lunch in hadar ha’ochel, along with all the other kibbutz workers, chatting and jostling over plates of boiled chicken, steamed vegetables, braised eggplant, rice, and potatoes, washed down with freshpressed apple juice from the kibbutz orchards. Famished as we were, the simple fare tasted delicious. In the European tradition, lunch was a full dinner, while supper was a lighter meal. I was grateful for whatever was on the menu as long as I didn’t have to cook it in the steamy kitchen. Bone-weary, I could barely drag myself back to our room for a shower and siesta, the sacred afternoon break between two and four.

  The whining overhead fan did little to dissipate the oppressive heat as it competed with René’s snores. In fitful dreams, I journeyed back to the kerem where chameleons locked me in their unflinching gaze as if daring me to unravel the convoluted history of this land, but its paradoxes eluded me at every turn. Borders, bunkers, barbed wire, conquerors, castles, kibbutzim, and a liquid light all vied for a place in my dreamscape. Just when it was time to get up for afternoon tea, I desperately wanted to sleep until the next morning.

  PART III

  ENGLAND—SUMMER 1964

  Chapter 24

  A DETOUR TO ENGLAND

  While Naomi and I were in Israel, our parents and younger siblings spent the academic year of 1963–64 in London where Dad was on sabbatical from his job in California. He cherished the chance to compose music instead of teaching it, while Mom was delighted to be near her family in England again. Jonathan, our thirteen-year-old brother, attended the International American School, and our little sister Laura started kindergarten there. The plan was for us all to reunite in California by September of 1964.

  But the year had flown by, and when Naomi and I announced we weren’t coming home, the shock waves rolled all the way from Israel to England! Aerogrammes flew back and forth, but when nothing could dissuade us, Dad insisted that we come to England for a face-to-face family meeting. We had little choice but to agree, and besides . . . it would be another adventure.

  Sometime in July, less than a year since our first trip across the Mediterranean, Naomi and I boarded a ferry in Haifa, this time bound for Brindisi on the Adriatic coast of Italy, on the first leg of our journey to London. From there we planned to take a train through Europe, cross the English Channel on another ferry, and catch yet another train to London before hopping on the London Tube to the neighborhood of Hampstead Heath, where our parents had rented a house. Having learned the English Underground system during our year of boarding school in London five years before, that part at least would be familiar.

  Gripping the ferry’s rusty railing, we waved goodbye to Gidon and René until their smiles disappeared in the distance, along with the ancient ramparts and minarets of the old port of Akko. The trip took on a sense of déjà vu as a light breeze replaced the port’s stale ferry fumes, gulls cawed overhead, and the ship’s wake foamed in the sparkling azure of the Mediterranean. Covering 2,500 miles by land and sea, we arrived in London in one week.

  On the ferry we soon met several other young people— mostly European, Australian, and South African students on a gap year—enjoying the rite of passage between high school or university before the responsibilities of adulthood set in—but no other Americans like us. But in the summer of 1964, the hordes of hippies seeking a haven from the Viet Nam War draft or simply hoping to tune in and drop out had yet to appear. Naomi and I were ahead of the curve in that respect.

  Flying was still relatively expensive, so ferries and trains, popularized by travel guides like Europe on Five Dollars a Day, were ideal for covering long distances on short budgets. With stops in Haifa, Istanbul, Piraeus (Athens), Gibraltar, and Italian ports, ferries offered frequent service throughout the Mediterranean. Some hardy passengers even slept on the deck, despite getting soaked by sudden squalls. But Naomi and I booked a third-class cabin near the familiar roar of the engines. The horrifying peril faced by modern-day refugees fleeing political turmoil had yet to become a regular feature of Mediterranean crossings.

  Although I worried about my parents’ reaction to our marriage plans, I saw the trip as a detour rather than a deterrent to my grand vision of the future. I didn’t relish a confrontation with Dad, but I steeled myself against his objections. Having rationalized my own doubts by now, I was plowing full steam ahead. I wasn’t about to let Dad derail a vision that went beyond Israel, to include living in France for a few years, as René wanted to do, before returning to Israel to attend the Hebrew University.

  Although I could already hear Dad saying I was going off half-cocked—one of his favorite expressions—I felt I had a solid plan. I was good at making plans. Plans balanced th
e excitement of adventure with my need for security; plans kept my fears in check as I ventured into the unknown. Plans also reassured my parents that I was living up to their expectations as the responsible daughter.

  My mother’s opposition didn’t give me as much cause for concern as Dad’s. After all, she too had left her home and family in her early twenties to follow Dad to a new country. I hoped she’d understand I was simply following in her footsteps with a slight geographic variation on her model. Maybe she could convince Dad, seeing as how he’d enticed her to America, just as René was drawing me into a life in Israel and France. This was the grand logic I laid out for myself, so I tamped down the nagging turmoil in my mind and heart.

  From Naomi’s brooding silence, I sensed that she too had her doubts, yet neither of us dared to air them, as if to talk them over might make their shadows real. Instead, we busied ourselves with the practicalities of travel—schedules, foreign currency, luggage, and as always, fending off the advances of a few feisty sailors.

  Like light passing through a veil, Naomi and I could often convey our thoughts through the slightest glance or gesture without a word. Depending on the moment or the mood, we either danced around our differences or fought them to a draw. Like a finely tuned pendulum, our energies could gyrate wildly, but eventually we’d gravitate toward mutual accommodation. Still, we couldn’t be sure of each other’s thoughts and feelings without sharing them. So I was left to wonder if Naomi’s internal monologues about Gidon resembled mine about René. Was she as eager to take the plunge into marriage, or did she feel forced to walk the plank?