Newcomers in an Ancient Land

by Paula Wagner

Beyond the secular kibbutzim, marriage was even more complicated in Israeli society at large, where the Orthodox rabbis decreed that only if the mothers of both partners were Jewish, could they be legally married. Without the option of a civil union, people like me were barred from officially marrying. Despite the consternation of the Orthodox Rabbinate, the secular kibbutz movement took pride in conducting their own ceremonies, effectively circumventing the law. Even if kibbutz weddings like Naomi and Gidon’s weren’t officially legal, they were socially recognized as equally binding.

  At the dining hall, a band struck up with the feverish tunes of Klezmer, the traditional folk music of Eastern Europe, on a clarinet and fiddles as the sound system screeched to life. Children raced among servers and guests with abandon. In the chaos, I hugged Naomi and Gidon and wished them the customary mazel tov. Naomi smiled, her mask of composure intact.

  “Ochel, ochel,” chanted the crowd, “bring on the food.” Bottles of Maccabee beer and fruit juice popped, husks of sunflower seeds and pits of black and green olives began piling into pyramids. The chamutzim (pickled vegetables) were long gone by the time the main fare arrived: bowls of steaming chicken soup and matzo balls, fish, chicken, beef, roast potatoes, cabbage, and gravy washed down with tomato-cucumber-chopped-parsley salad.

  Suddenly I missed my mother intensely. If only she could be here! I could just imagine her taking in the scene with wry humor: devouring everything like locusts... with the appetite of Falstaff, in an incongruous mix of Shakespeare and Jewish tradition.

  Golden sheet cakes inscribed with good wishes in lemon and blue frosting were cut into squares and served with strawberries and whipped cream, along with trays of baklava, blintzes, and cinnamon twists. There was no shortage of food—God forbid! If the ceremony had been unconventional, the wedding feast rolled out in full Jewish traditional. While Jews might “argue the hind legs off a donkey”—another of Mom’s favorite English sayings—they could almost always agree on food!

  As the dishes were being cleared away, René stepped outside to smoke a Gauloise. He urged Gidon to join him.

  “C’mon, man. Time to celebrate with a real cigarette.” He took a deep drag and exhaled, swirling the fumes into the cool evening air.

  He’d bought a pack of Gauloises especially for the occasion. Even if they were considerably more expensive, French cigarettes were far better than the sawdust-tasting kibbutz brands. I didn’t smoke because of my allergies, but in those days almost everyone did, so I didn’t think to protest.

  When all the tables and chairs had been pushed to the walls, the Klezmer band coaxed the crowd onto the floor. Grinning proudly, Gidon strode to the center, linked arms with the dancers of his kibbutz troupe, and launched the rikudei am— folk dances—into motion. The audience roared as he twisted his athletic body like a pretzel, whirled in circles, squatted at the knees, and kicked out his legs like a Russian Cossack.

  Guests and families widened the circle until the entire hall became a spinning mass of humanity. I tried not to step on any toes, but compared with René and Gidon, I felt clumsy. The melee continued until little by little the group thinned, leaving only the hardiest still upright. But there was no slow dancing. Like suits and ties, social dancing in pairs was seen as anticollective and bourgeois.

  By midnight the festivities began to wind down. With their promises sealed and celebrated, the lives of the new couples would merge like rivers. My feelings for Naomi ricocheted from glad to sad to happy to worried. In Israel, we had taken our first steps toward autonomy. Now, in a few short weeks, I’d be far away in France, making an even greater leap into the uncharted territory of independence. Without phones, much less social media, to bridge the continents, cultures, and languages between us, we would be forced to follow our separate paths to an unknown future.

  Gidon wanted a few last dances with his group, but Naomi was exhausted, so I accompanied her back to their room. Unzipping her dress, she peeled the pearly bodice over her breasts and let out her tummy. Then she bent to loosen the straps of her white sandals. Her usually slim figure filled out the contours of the dress a tad tighter than when she had tried it on in England.

  “You looked lovely, Nento!” I said, suppressing my lingering envy of her dress. “How do you feel now?”

  “Okay, I guess.” But the flatness in her voice and the slump of her shoulders told otherwise. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Really nothing. I’ll be okay by tomorrow, I promise.”

  Silence. Then, forcing back tears, Naomi drew in her breath and blurted out what I already suspected. “I might as well tell you. I’m six weeks pregnant.”

  I had squelched my intuition, but now the telltale signs of her body could no longer be denied.

  “I didn’t want to get pregnant! But all the birth control methods I’ve tried have failed. The pill makes me sick, and the damn diaphragm obviously isn’t reliable.”

  In the early sixties, the pill had only recently become available, but the estrogen dosages were so high that many women couldn’t tolerate it. I stood in silence as she spilled out her worries.

  “I can’t have another abortion. Last spring was too horrible.”

  “I know,” I said simply, wincing at the memory of that awful day. Afterward, I had tried to console her, but she had pushed me away in her own attempt to stay strong. Just when I yearned to hold her close, she had held me at bay. My own hurt and confusion had twisted into a tangle of resentment and sorrow. The pattern had dogged us since childhood. Now I agonized for Naomi but stood back, afraid my comfort might deflate the day’s joy beyond repair. But the illusion of a happily-ever-after wedding had tumbled to the floor with her dress.

  Abortion was a gray area—neither strictly legal nor illegal—in Israel at the time but left to personal discretion (or indiscretion) of each woman. But with birth control still spotty, unplanned pregnancies were hard to prevent. Still, I wondered how I had managed to avoid getting pregnant when my twin sister had been betrayed by her fertility. But at twenty-nine, I imagined Gidon was eager to start a family, especially as the sole surviving male member of his family. Besides his mother, he had virtually no other relatives. The Holocaust had claimed them all. Without children, his name would die out. I had heard him joke darkly that having children would be his revenge on Hitler.

  Hugging Naomi good night, I made my way back to the small guest room provided by the kibbutz. René was fast asleep, to judge by his snoring. Rocking gently on the porch swing outside the bedroom, I let my thoughts wander under the waning moon. Naomi’s revelation had left a bittersweet residue on the events of the day, entangling my heart with joy and regret like the vines in the kerem. I hoped the fruit of Naomi and Gidon’s union would be as sweet as the grapes I had harvested on Kibbutz Dan once the bitterness had passed.

  Chapter 33

  RENÉ S COUSINS

  Before leaving for France, René wanted to introduce me and also say his goodbyes to some of his many cousins who also lived in Israel. Having grown up together in a large extended clan in postwar Lyon, they had formed strong bonds. After hearing some of their childhood stories, I was eager to meet them.

  Five of the cousins were sisters whose father had been deported during WWII. When he failed to return after the war, their mother (René’s father’s sister) was left to raise them alone. Although no one knew for sure what had happened to him, they had pieced together a sad but likely scenario from the vague reports of other survivors. Apparently, when the Russian and American troops had converged on his camp at liberation, he had sided with the Russians. But their frigid march to the east had cost him his life. In a supreme irony, he had died, not because he was a Jew, but for his stalwart Socialist views.

  Left to rely on her wits, René’s aunt had become the matriarch of Lyon’s fruit and vegetable marché. Rising at four a.m., she bargained for the best prices in the hurly-burly man’s world of the wholesale market, long before setting up her st
all within the neighborhood market with the help of her five daughters each morning. Despite the grueling work, the marché had been their salvation. Not only had it put food on the table, but it had kept a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs. But the struggle to survive had left little time for the cousins’ education and limited opportunities for their future in France.

  Seeking a better life, the five sisters had emigrated to Israel as part of Ha’Shomer Ha’Tzair, the Socialist Jewish youth movement that would have warmed their father’s heart. Impressed by their experience, René had been inspired to follow. Now, having finished their compulsory military service, they were eager to launch their lives as full-fledged Israelis.

  We had already visited Esther, the eldest of the five sister/ cousins, and her husband, who had established themselves on Kibbutz Bar’am, which was not far from Kibbutz Dan and less than a quarter of a mile from the Lebanese border. If my memories of Esther are minimal, my impressions of her kibbutz remain vivid: Bar’am had been established in 1949 on the site of an ancient Jewish village, where over the centuries, a predominantly Maronite Christian village called K’far Bir’Im had grown up. To deter the frequent cross-border incursions at the time, the Israeli government had destroyed the village and expelled its inhabitants. As we surveyed the ruins, I couldn’t help imagining its former inhabitants living in refugee camps just over the nearby border.

  Like Dan, Kibbutz Bar’am grew a variety of crops, including apples, nectarines, plums, and even kiwis, that flourished in the hot, sunny days and cool, breezy nights of the Upper Galilee. And like the Syrian border, the tragic beauty of the Lebanese border both enthralled and disturbed me. Gazing over the expanse of fields and orchards, the border appeared both close and remote. Although my brain recognized the danger, in my heart I felt the pain of a deep unhealed scar, forever separating two peoples from the land they both loved.

  Compared with the open vista and cool breezes of Bar’am, Netanya, a beach town near Tel Aviv, was humid and steamy even in October. When two of Esther’s younger sisters—Rachel and Miriam—met us at the door of the small apartment they shared, I immediately noticed how much their large almond eyes and silver-streaked dark hair resembled René’s traits from the Turkish side of the family. After customary kisses on both cheeks, they welcomed us into their modest living room.

  “Coffee?”

  “Of course!” boomed René. “What’s a family visit without Turkish coffee?”

  Miriam hurried to a small alcove that served as a kitchen while Rachel sat cross-legged on the rug-covered stone floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Miriam move through the coffee-making ritual, step by step: setting a saucepan to boil on a hot plate; grinding the beans by hand and stirring the fine powder into the water along with a few pods of cardamom. As soon as bubbles simmered to the surface, she turned off the gas and covered the pot with a saucer to let the grounds settle. Finally, she poured the dark, thick liquid into four porcelain cups. Clearly Turkish coffee was to René’s family what English tea was to mine.

  Fueled by caffeine, René and his cousins caught up on each other’s news in rapid-fire French, too fast for me to follow. But their English was even more limited, so I spent most of the afternoon nodding oui or non, in polite hopes of being right about 50 percent of the time.

  Finally we switched to Hebrew for the sake of a common language around the supper table—a spread of hard-boiled eggs, hummus, pita, cottage cheese, olives, tomatoes, and cucumbers that I never tired of.

  When night fell, Rachel apologized for their limited sleeping arrangements but quickly offered a solution.

  “If René doesn’t mind a mattress on the floor, Miriam and I are happy to share the double bed with Paula.”

  Seeing my puzzled look, she explained.

  “That’s how we used to sleep as kids in France—three to a bed head-to-toe. Look, we’ll show you,” she added when I still looked baffled.

  Giggling like schoolgirls, Rachel wriggled under the quilt feetfirst, while Miriam dove in headlong, only to pop out like a puppet at the foot of the bed.

  “There’s still plenty of room in the middle for you Paula,” they laughed. “Don’t be shy—we’re family.”

  With no choice but to squeeze into the narrow space like a sausage in a straitjacket, I crawled carefully between the cousins, trying to avoid kicking Rachel’s head or tickling Miriam’s feet. I had never shared a bed before, not even with Naomi. Squished so tightly together, I doubted I’d get much rest that night. But the arrangement wasn’t as weird as I’d feared. Like a new patch on the family quilt—or at least under it—the cousins embraced me. If René’s family was anywhere near as welcoming, I’d feel right at home in Lyon.

  At first light the next morning, I untangled my arms and legs like a warm pretzel and inched out of bed, trying not to disturb Rachel and Miriam in their blissful slumber. I needn’t have worried. They slept as deeply as René. After a simple breakfast of café au lait and a French baguette, we hugged goodbye. Then René and I caught the bus for Jerusalem, where we planned to visit Dafna, another cousin from yet another branch of René’s far-flung family.

  Chapter 34

  EIN KEREM

  Just outside Jerusalem, the bus stopped in the scenic village of Ein Kerem. Like Bar-am, it had been a Christian village before its Palestinian inhabitants had fled (or were driven out) in 1948. Its domed whitewashed homes, picturesque churches, and a massive stone monastery—Notre Dame de Sion—now provided the backdrop for an Israeli artists’ colony in the making. Entranced, I followed René up a steeply winding path.

  “Shalom, shalom!” called a woman with a heavy French accent. Dafna had already spied us from her perch on her vine-covered mirpeset (patio) high above a valley. Looking up, I was greeted by a pair of almond eyes and a round, smiling face, framed by a few stray strands of silver curling from the braided coils of Dafna’s henna-tinted hair. She was perhaps a year older than I and I liked her immediately.

  But at the top of the stone steps, our way was blocked by a gaunt figure in mud-spattered overalls with a cigarette dangling from his lips. Fully absorbed in cranking a portable cement mixer, he barely looked up.

  “Hey, Khanan!” yelled René over the din as the machine roared suddenly to life. Without pausing from his labors, Khanan grunted a belated bonjour. Luckily, René had already warned me that beneath his crusty manner, Khanan had a warm heart. Like René, Khanan had also grown up in the same gritty quartier of Lyon. Street urchins since childhood, they didn’t stand on ceremony.

  “Come in, come in!” bubbled Dafna, kissing us three times on each cheek, her sunshiny welcome dispelling Khanan’s dark mood. They had moved in only recently. Evidence of multiple construction and art projects, piles of books, and tools lay everywhere.

  “Sorry, everything is still so makeshift. We don’t even have a real bathroom or kitchen yet. But as you can see, Khanan’s in full building mode.”

  A tiny kitchen annex and bathroom were still works in progress behind a long enclosed porch. In the large main room, the arches of four walls met in the center of a high domed ceiling like graceful arms in prayer. The faded blue-and-yellow tiles on the floor under my feet felt smooth with age. Paintings, photos, and colorful mobiles—evidence of Khanan’s creativity—cluttered the room. Perching on a narrow window seat in a recess of the thick exterior wall, I peered through two vaulted panes at the panoramic view of vineyards, terraced valleys, and forested hills far below. An agricultural school sat near a crossroads, and a cluster of red-tiled roofs signaled a moshav—a collective village.

  Directing my attention to the left side of the valley, Khanan pointed out the skeleton of a massive modern building under construction, from the looks of its scaffolding and the huge steel girders suspended from swaying orange cranes. In the heat of the day, he was taking a break while the concrete set.

  “That’s Hadassah Hospital going up on that hill over there,” he motioned proudly. “It’s going to be the
biggest, most modern hospital in all of Israel.”

  But cooing sounds diverted my attention to a cradle half-hidden in the chaos of the room.

  Suddenly reminded of Dafna and Khanan’s baby, René boomed, “How’s Gilad?”

  “Doucement,” shushed Dafna. “He’s fine. We’ll take him for a stroll after the sun cools down. Coffee meanwhile?” We sat in a small garden until Dafna fetched eighteen-month-old Gilad, who blinked his large brown eyes in the still strong light. I marveled at the dominance of those eyes in yet another generation as Dafna strapped him onto her back.

  “Let me show you the mayan,” she said, filling me in on the history of the ancient water source in the center of the village. “Ein Kerem means ‘well of the vineyards.’ According to biblical myth, Mary, mother of Jesus, drew water at this very spot on her way to give birth in Bethlehem.”

  Over the millennia, the well had become a sacred site for Christian pilgrimages, eventually giving rise to the village that had existed here before 1948. Now Jewish inhabitants were rolling up their sleeves to rebuild the ruined homes with the help of small grants or low-cost loans from the Israeli government. Like Bar’am, the original Palestinian inhabitants would not be allowed back.

  “You know,” mused Dafna, “when you and Paula come back from France, you could have one of these houses too.”

  Across the valley, my gaze fell on a few forlorn-looking houses with caved-in roofs and broken walls, whose dark doors hung ajar like open mouths, their vacant windows gaping like ghostly eyes. A profound uneasiness came over me. What if the spirits of the previous owners were still lurking in the wreckage of their old homes? Had they fled (as the Israelis claimed) or been driven out (as the Palestinians insisted)? Try as I might, I couldn’t reconcile these two conflicting narratives. I only knew in my bones that I’d never be able to make one of those abandoned homes my own.