by Batya Gur
Now, waiting here for Zahara, Hagar’s sarcastic comments rang in his ears. She swore she would never forgive herself that, at the time, she had agreed that he go study history, and Russian history at that, instead of trying all kinds of successful possibilities that had been open to him then, when the two of them had got out of the army. “It’s all because you’re so busy being not-the-son-of-Yemenites. Otherwise, why would you choose to specialize in Russian history?” And right away she had voiced her old complaint about his “fateful decision” not to study economics. “You could have had a high position by now at the Bank of Israel or at least a high-tech company, and all our problems would have been solved.” She had repeated this complaint in the midst of their quarrel this morning, which began with the question of whose turn it was to do the shopping for the holiday.
It was Hagar who had encouraged Zahara to insist on her plans and stood by her in their latest argument. She hadn’t hesitated to stir up the members of the congregation against him, and had even enlisted the women from “The Committee for the Other” to urge him to allow her to sing traditional Yemenite songs on the eve of the holiday. He was more and more annoyed by Zahara’s Yemenite vision, which was so contrary to the openness for which he was active, so that the synagogue would be a kind of neighborhood melting pot that blurred the barriers between the ethnic groups. It was very strange, really strange—he looked at his watch again, and at the nearly empty street—that a young girl, especially one as talented and beautiful as Zahara, would be so deeply involved for the last few years in researching her family’s past. And with that voice of hers, instead of agreeing to the offers of impresarios and musicians who heard her and had already talked about a solo appearance or a compact disc, she insisted on singing songs from Yemen, where she had never been, all of which she had learned from her grandmother, who used to sing them on holidays and at family celebrations. It was hard not to see this as criticism of—and even profound revolt against—his way of life, and in fact against him personally.
It was from Hagar that Zahara had learned to keep pressing on his weak point, criticizing him in words she had learned from Hagar for all his efforts to become like an Ashkenazi. Zahara of all people, whom in fact he had raised. He had read to her when she was a child and had spent hours talking with her about serious things in order to get her off the intended track that was taken for granted by their parents—a woman’s only purpose, they thought, was marriage and children. She of all people had taken to rummaging around in the old family stories he wanted to ward off and bury. When he tried to say that “ethnic identity has no meaning nowadays,” Zahara responded angrily and argued that the entire course of his life and his status demonstrated exactly the opposite; yes, because look at the price that had been demanded of him to “climb up the rungs of Israeli society”—the submissive eradication of his roots.
“Nowadays there isn’t discrimination on an ethnic basis,” Netanel told her. “What was true of our parents is now a total anachronism. What good does all this rummaging do, all this messing around with ancient tragedies?” he asked her when they met a week ago, after she told him that he amused her (“What irony,” she had said with a toss of her head). She taunted him that as a historian he should really be interested in solving mysteries from the past. “That is, if you love history,” she challenged him, “because maybe twentieth-century Russian history isn’t exactly history, and maybe what’s important to you is something else entirely . . .”
“What? What else?” he asked her, and she cocked her head and said, “Forget it, never mind,” and no matter how he begged her she wouldn’t say.
In recent months, their meetings had always ended sourly, after she insisted upon what she called her way and crassly commented to him about “the way you’re becoming an Ashkenazi, which in the end is going to cost you dearly.” She would regard him with a skeptical expression, and sometimes the skepticism was replaced with scorn which sharpened into anger when she asked him about “Big Zahara,” as if he knew more about her than she did. At their last meeting, last Thursday, she had lectured him about the importance of the “miniconcert”—that was how she defined her evening of song—that would take place at the synagogue on the eve of the holiday, and lectured him on her theory about the gradual introduction of Yemenite culture “in an experiential-emotional way, yes, in a way that will awaken excitement and pluck at the heartstrings and make everyone curious about this cultural world, which has been lost almost entirely.” Zahara hadn’t explained why it was important to revive that world and especially for the Ashkenazis from western Europe who had taken over this neighborhood she had never left. And Netanel, who valued family ties and really didn’t want to muddy these meetings with arguments, stopped insisting that she explain.
Again he looked at his watch and at the bend in Naftali Street, and again he looked over at the brown gate across the way—the silver Rover was still parked there—and decided to get his sister together with Benvenisti, whom he saw as the spiritual guide who had shaped his way in life. On the Eve of Rosh Hashanah, when he came to give holiday greetings to Benvenisti as he did every year, he noticed the tremor in the professor’s hands. Even though he was not yet seventy, it looked as though old age was already upon him. And then he was assailed by a gnawing worry: What if he had to resign from the directorship of the Institute, or if heaven forbid something happened to him, and then immediately the flock of young heirs would swoop down, most of whom spoke Russian as their mother tongue. It was Benvenisti who had brought Netanel close to Russian when he was a BA student, and had influenced him to concentrate on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian history, and had appointed Netanel as his teaching assistant in his third year and had seduced him—yes, seduced him, with compliments and flattery and promises of the glorious career that awaited him in a field that was just emerging, and from this seduction Benvenisti had also benefited considerably—to follow in Benvenisti’s footsteps and help him establish the Russian Studies Institute he was slated to head. Now, if God forbid something should happen to Benvenisti, Netanel, his veteran deputy, would have to struggle for his place without any support.
But this wasn’t the issue now; Zahara was. If he introduced her to Benvenisti, maybe she would understand and respect the strange choice he had made when he was younger and would stop accusing him of trying to be Ashkenazi. Furthermore, if the professor listened to her plans to gather testimonies from people who had lived in Israel at the beginning of the Yemenite immigration, maybe she would drop her plan to rummage in the affair of Kinneret, the agricultural settlement that had expelled the Yemenites in the 1930s. And smitten by his personal charms, she might also give up her desire to solve, “once and for all” (as she had declared, with pressed lips that gave her face a fanatical, almost ugly look), the affair of the kidnapped Yemenite children who were given over for adoption at the end of the 1940s.
The conflict between him and Zahara, which had initially looked merely like differences in outlook, was sharply revealed upon his research into the Jews who had come to Palestine from Russia in the Second Immigration. That led him to research into the economic flourishing in the kibbutzim during World War II, and thus he learned about the role that was played by young people from the Yemenite community, about which he told Zahara. She was so excited by this discovery that she urged him to write about it.
No one before him, she argued heatedly, had investigated the role of the Yemenites in the kibbutz economy at a time when more working hands were needed to provide for the needs of the British army. Together, said Zahara, the two of them could gather data for an entire book. “Not some boring academic study,” she said with that burning, fanatical excitement in her eyes that had been worrying him so much recently, “but a real book that will show what happened and how it happened and how they planned everything. It was a real conspiracy.”
And again, as at all the family meals and at all the weekly meetings between the two of them, she reminded him how imp
ortant it was to discover historical documents that would reveal the plan by the country’s founders, Ashkenazim of course, to eradicate all the distinguishing characteristics of the Yemenite Jews and assimilate them and marry them off to the descendants of the eastern European Jews until they became sabras in every respect.
“This book will cause an even bigger stir than the one you wrote about the Russians,” she promised him, and he grimaced dismissively; the very fact of the comparison between that study, which dealt with Stalin and Hitler and had caused a great stir and led to his international reputation, and the affair of the enlistment of a “Yemenite workforce” in the kibbutzim aroused protest in him. Zahara chose to ignore the courageous things he had said in an interview to The Times of London when his book came out: He had spoken there not only about Stalin’s attitude toward Britain, but also about the Jews who had immigrated to Israel recently from Russia and their hatred of their past, and the popular press was furious at his revelations. He also spoke forthrightly about the Russian immigrants’ role in Israeli politics, and explained their leanings to the right and their capitalist views, and how they had distorted and revised the history of the Soviet Union. For months after that interview he was still subjected to terrible attacks in the British press, was shocked by the vilifying letters sent to The Times and also faced explicit threats to his life.
Although he knew very well that the research itself demanded no special courage or intellectual integrity, but only persistence and a lot of time at the archives that had been opened to researchers into Russia, he nevertheless had been praised for his courage by Benvenisti and senior colleagues at the Institute. But this praise, which assuaged Hagar’s complaints for a while, did not help him with Zahara, who challenged him at the table and demanded time and again that he also display his courage with respect to the Yemenite problem. “This concerns you personally,” she argued, but he did not feel that way, and after he did not comply with her wishes she began relating to him with aggressive scorn.
Only an objective individual as intelligent and charming as Benvenisti could get her to loosen up and stop those charges, which were becoming more and more spiteful, as when they met last week and she spoke about “this pathetic attempt”—his attempt—“to be like Hagar and her parents. And soon you’re going to invent a new biography for yourself, as if your parents had also founded some kibbutz. Look at them, at Hagar’s parents whom you admire so much, and see what has become of their lives!” she’d shouted suddenly, pushing the plate of hummus away in disgust. “Look at who you want to be. They founded a kibbutz and now they’re always busy trying to hide the fact that they’re living in poverty, just like beggars. And they never even mention that not a single one of their children has remained in the kibbutz. Never mind in the kibbutz—in the country. Only Hagar has remained in Israel—and her sister Einat? Even after it turned out that her Finnish husband was an alcoholic and beat her, she didn’t come home, and she’s stuck there in Finland. And her elder brother? He’s a little guru in some ashram in India. And Yotam makes a living as a real estate agent in Florida. And Father and Mother—aren’t they obsequious to the Beinisches?” With what spite she spat out the name of the hated neighbors. “They go out into the yard with their Ashkenazi in-laws, as if to show them the garden, but really so that the Beinisches will see them and bust a gut. And how Hagar’s mother says, ‘Show me your row of herbs and medicinal plants,’ and Mother goes and shows her the basil just so she can hear again ‘How beautiful the khadi leaves are,’ just like that, with a kind of accent, like she heard from Mother. And you, it’s all because of you, all because you intentionally married a sabra girl, and one from a kibbutz yet, a blonde with blue eyes. And you went and became a professor of Russian history. Who ever heard of such a thing?”
“What’s happened to you, Zahara?” He was alarmed, and he also noticed a small, light brown mark under her eye, but he did not dare ask about it. “What’s gotten into you? I thought you liked Hagar and—”
“So you were mistaken!” said Zahara. “Or maybe I was mistaken. You can’t trust Ashkenazim,” and he had never heard such bitterness from her before. “Look at her. A few days ago I suddenly saw your wedding picture, the one in the living room on the television. When was the last time you looked at it? Look at Hagar there—a perfect Israeli girl with all those freckles, certain that the world belongs to her, with her long hair and blue eyes. Look, and you’ll see why you really married that woman.”
“What has she done to you?” Netanel himself was astounded by the anger that rose from the depth of his throat. It was one thing to be tired of your wife and to see her weaknesses and faults day after day, and another to hear other people condemn her, especially if the other person was your baby sister.
“She hasn’t done anything to me personally,” Zahara had said to him then, “but as a learned historian, you should know by now that not only personal things count.”
Netanel kept quiet. In truth, he thought that it was only through personal interest that an individual arrived at ideas, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t tell her that it was only through personal injuries and hurts, or because of a specific conjunction of circumstances as in his case, that a person arrived at any theoretical occupation, and even historical research.
“Don’t you see how materialistic she is? And the . . . Have you seen how she shops all the time?” Zahara demanded to know.
“That’s enough, Zahara,” said Netanel.
“It is not enough!” Zahara said, and looked around at the other diners in the small restaurant. “Have you seen the way your house looks? Like a smugglers’ den in Istanbul—Russian and Czech dinner services and samovars from Uzbekistan . . .”
“They were bargains at the neighborhood flea market. New immigrants from Russia were selling them, and it was a good deed to buy them . . . ,” he mumbled uncomfortably.
“Oh? Really?” scoffed Zahara. “And the sets of towels and the linen sheets from the fancy stores at Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv? And the microwave? This is already the third one she’s—”
“What do you care?” said Netanel with irritation, precisely because he also hated those endless purchases and was ashamed of them. “What do you care what Hagar buys?”
“I don’t care. Let’s just say that I don’t care if my big, successful brother is married to a woman who . . . who is the essence of the ugly Israeli. She’s proof that there’s no such thing as ‘Israeli culture.’ How can there possibly be spirituality in the present if you deny the past like that? Look at how you’re living a lie and—”
“Zahara,” interrupted Netanel. “Why are you so hard on us? Hagar is even helping you against me about the museum and all that and—”
“Sure she’s helping me, and do you know why? Because now she wants Mother’s silver objects and her embroideries, that’s why. All that interests her is getting all those things from Mother before . . . while Mother is still alive, so that I won’t get them. So that I’ll be glad if she gives them to her, that’s why.”
“Enough,” Netanel protested, and put his hands over his ears. “I don’t want to hear any more.” And when he saw that Zahara had no intention of stopping, he changed the subject to Sukkot: Not only had he come to terms with the evening of song, but he also spoke about it as if he really wanted it despite the fact that he didn’t even know either the Nashid, with which she intended to open (“If you desire a man chosen for secrets,” she chanted in a low voice. “Do you know this?”) or “Wazil man jaman wamahna”—“O, from the place where thou sittest observe and see / A poor people exiled weak and oppressed”). But he did know “In the Shade of the Sukkah” and “Ya Grada.” His grandmother used to sing them (“She used to sing them to you when you were little. Mother told me”).
“Maybe my parents are right,” he had said to Linda after that meeting. “Maybe we have to find a man for her who will calm her down, with all that hot blood. She should get married and have children and stop driving u
s crazy.”
“How you talk, Netanel,” protested Linda, tapping him on the nose. She explained that what was necessary was to talk to Zahara seriously about the University of Indiana and remind her what a pity it was that all her talent was going to waste.
“‘A pity’ is putting it mildly,” said Netanel musingly. “It’s really criminal, this waste.”
Then Linda concluded that they had to talk to his father, and that if he didn’t agree to pay for Zahara’s studies, they had to take a loan. In the rapid English to which she switched, she said that the problem began with the fact that their parents were not prepared to part from their baby, but it was clear that she could not be allowed to live with them anymore. It’s absolutely clear, she said, because they’re just driving her crazy and recently even she, Linda, who had been closer to Zahara than anybody, could no longer manage to talk to her. It’s as if she’s been haunted by a dybbuk, she went on, if it weren’t for all that nonsense about the Yemenites you might think that Zahara is head over heels in thwarted love or that she has something going with a married man and on second thought, yes, she is beginning to think that that’s really the case, that she has had some disappointment in love and she’s hiding it.
It had, in fact, been thanks to Zahara that the relationship between him and Linda had begun. At the age of thirteen, when Zahara had still been fat and awkward, her hair always a mess and her chin dotted with pimples, she’d baby-sat every morning one summer for Linda’s twins and had fallen in love with them, and had fallen even more deeply in love with their mother. Linda was the first to take her musical talent seriously, and by the middle of the summer she had come to Netanel—”because it’s difficult to talk to your parents,” Linda had said in her accent that rolls ‘R’s—and swore that she would not give up until they sent the girl to a serious teacher, because “talent like that doesn’t grow on trees.”
