When it became apparent we were never going to be transferred from the fourth-floor walk-up annex room, we changed hotels and went to the opposite side of town, to a much larger, newer hotel with an elevator.
Money from my grandparents was being wired to Mom’s Israeli bank from the U.S. Each afternoon we walked great distances to the bank to see if the money had arrived. But every day, when we arrived at two, at three, at four—the bank was closed.
In the new hotel we befriended an English family. There was a girl a year or two older than me and another who was sixteen, and then the eldest, who was there with her fiancé, and the parents, from Golders Green. Golders Green, England! Never had a name sounded more exotic to me. They had English accents. The oldest was maybe twenty-three; the middle one, Hilary, was incredibly beautiful and sophisticated; the youngest, Linda, was everything I was not: glamorous, with breasts and hips. Had traveled, knew about men, etc.
My brother had been a picky eater but now suddenly could devour anything; he particularly loved tinned herrings in tomato sauce. I could not eat. The Israeli breakfasts were curious: a buffet of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and farmer cheese, bread and boiled eggs, and dead cats.
There were millions of cats in Netanya, not like American cats. These were long legged, with long faces, strange and Egyptian looking, and the hotel put out plates of sardines swimming in blue poison and the cats ate the sardines and died behind the breakfast table.
I remember a drunk man on the street had a boxer bitch with eight puppies he was trying to sell, and how I begged and begged for one of these. I whined. I cajoled. I pleaded.
My mother spent all her time crying. She had never been out of the United States before, Israel was a rough and young country, nobody spoke English, and here she was with two kids in a strange land where foreigners kept asking to fock.
Now I was crying all the time, too. She got the English newspaper and saw an ad for miniature poodles. We went by bus to Tel Aviv and to the advertiser’s apartment, where we bought a poodle from the woman—the gimpy, catatonic runt of the litter, six or eight weeks old. “At least he seems quiet,” my mother sighed. “But remember, dogs are not allowed in the hotel! We have to smuggle him in and keep him hidden!”
Then I had a puppy, but all he did was sleep. What was the point? I might as well have gotten a stuffed animal. I missed my dog from home. I still cried.
One night, Linda, the English girl around my age, and her sister Hilary were going to a club. “Would you like to join us, Tama?” asked Hilary. She was the most perfect and tiny creature on the planet.
“You are inviting her to come with us to the club?” said Linda indignantly. “She doesn’t know how to dance.”
“Yes I do,” I said.
“Do you know how to slow-dance?”
“Of course!” I figured it was the same as any kind of dancing, only more slowly.
At the club a soldier asked me to dance. He clutched me very close and tight. I stepped on his feet. I did not know how to slow-dance and I did not like being pulled so tightly to the soldier and it was scary. I was still only twelve.
After that event, I never have been able to slow-dance. That’s really why I got an F in my college ballroom dancing class.
mom’s arrest
Israel was only twenty years old at that time. My mom took us to public events where I got to meet people like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan (who was quite sexy with that eye patch). But I didn’t know who either of them was. I didn’t even know what being a Jew was, really.
I knew I had Orthodox grandparents on my mother’s side, but still, what did that mean? My parents did not keep kosher and I did not understand, because it hadn’t been explained to me, that you could not have milk if you had just had meat, unless it was breakfast, when you should never ask for bacon or sausage. Asking for bacon or sausage made Grandpa and Grandma hurt and upset. I always felt awful, but there was no way to know what I would say next to absolutely destroy them. No one ever said what their problem was!
On my dad’s side were a bunch of Polish peasants who came over to work in the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey, around 1904. This side was not like my mom’s side. This side denied being Jewish as much as they could, which I guess would work until there were pogroms or someone trying to drag them off to concentration camps.
Swearing in Yiddish that you were an atheist wouldn’t have saved my great-great-great-great-grandmother, who must have gotten raped by one of the invading Huns, which is the only reason I can think of for my slightly Asiatic eyes.
Although, knowing my grandmother on my dad’s side, my ancestor probably wasn’t raped. She probably lured one of the Mongolian horde into her shtetl while Tevye was out fiddling someone on a roof. “Oh, Genghis! Genghis! You look like you’re good at fixing things. My husband, forget about it—he’s useless. Would you mind taking a look at the hole in here? And I want you to try my gefilte fish.”
My mom’s parents did come over that year to visit us in Israel, though neither my dad nor anybody from his side did. My grandparents came to visit the following spring, after the small cement-block cottage we were living in by then, on the deserted beachfront of Herzliya Pituach, got flooded out and we moved to a cheap hotel.
But the summer of 1968 was supposed to be sort of an adjustment/vacation time before the fall, when we would move to an ulpan, a center for new immigrants to learn Hebrew and the hora.
The hora! Oh, the hora!
Money still had not arrived in the bank there—due to the fact that, day after day, the bank was always closed. We continued to walk over every day in the heat, only to find the bank closed and a sign in Hebrew, so forget it.
The hotel said they had waited long enough for Mom to pay the bill. My mom told the owners, “Look, I’m sorry we can’t pay the bill, but the money was supposed to be wired over to the bank, and the bank is never open! I’m not going anywhere, and if you want you can hang on to my passport and checkbook.”
That’s pretty much all she had to offer. See, back then, there were no credit cards.
She tried to explain that eventually the bank would have to open and her money would clear. But it was no use. The owners of the hotel said we had to pay up or leave.
We packed everything and went out the front entrance. Even though we hadn’t been there long, we had a whole lot of stuff. You couldn’t buy much in Israel in those days; my grandparents had told us to bring sheets, towels, cooking utensils—you are New Settlers! Then there was the dog, and the dog needed bowls and other items. And then there were other items my brother and I had deemed necessary to obtain: big heavy clay Arab drums with skin tops that only cost fifty cents; inexpensive goatskin or sheepskin coats that smelled very bad; rocks and ancient artifacts like chunks of Roman glass and clay handles from original Turkish coffee cups, all collected on the beach; small carved wooden sheep made of olive wood, and so on.
The English tourist family we had befriended gathered around us and our twelve trunks. The hotel owners came out, looking ominous. The sleeping poodle (who had been hidden in a bag, since dogs were not allowed in the hotel) jumped out and came to life. He had been in a catatonic stupor. Now he urinated over everything and began running in circles, barking, leaping, and biting. A crowd stopped to watch.
I didn’t know why the hotel owners were waiting, grinning eagerly, until the police arrived. It was a trap. They had thrown us out and called the cops. Some were in a car and others were in a Black Maria, or whatever you call a police van in Hebrew. The owners of the hotel began pointing at Mom and shouting at the police. Then a whole lot of hotel guests came out to witness as well. Mom was crying and trying to explain the money was supposed to be in the bank and that she would pay, only the bank was always closed.
In the broiling summer heat of the Mediterranean sun, I, the poodle puppy, and my cute little brother (the same person who would, some fifty years later, work to organize my arrest!) sat on the trunks, surrounded by suitcases
and bags, as the police swarmed around.
The police huddled to discuss the situation. Then one officer came forward and took my mother by the arm. She was led to the police wagon and they opened the back and led Mom in. She was wearing the pink-and-yellow sundress and the pink straw sun hat, the matching pink plastic handbag, and strappy multicolored platform sandals. The paddy wagon doors closed behind her and they drove away. My brother and I sat on the steps with all that stuff.
“They’re taking her to jail. She skipped out on the bill,” said Mrs. Grynaple in a harsh, gleeful voice. “That’s the last you will see of her.”
psychic studies
My mother was arrested and eventually (okay, later that day) released from prison after the police took her to the bank when it was finally open and discovered the money had in fact been wired into her account.
From the hotel, we next moved to a pension outside Netanya. Two young guys from Greece, in their twenties, were also staying there, briefly, and one of them stepped on my puppy while it was running in the yard. This boy—I think his name was Jacques—broke the dog’s leg. I have never been so angry in my life. Believe me, the disdain of a twelve-year-old can be very pure and wholehearted. It was an accident, but in my opinion, no more idiotic creature existed than a seventeen-year-old Greek man tripping over a poodle and breaking its leg.*
At this time my mother subscribed to Fate magazine, and she’d brought the whole collection of back issues with us to Israel. The magazines were full of articles about aliens, UFOs, psychic abilities, how to astral-travel, and stuff like that. She would read aloud articles about peculiar, inexplicable events.
Things happened to people. Someone did a load of laundry and when they opened the dryer, there was part of a Civil War uniform inside. Apparently this dryer was a conduit to another time? This seemed stupid to me.†
The other articles in each month’s Fate were usually about things like a rain of frogs in a small section of the Midwest or a woman who panicked and couldn’t get on an airplane because of a bad dream and that airplane crashed. The Bermuda Triangle was a big topic. That kind of stuff.
I did not like the magazine. It came, I think, once a month, and then my mom made one of us stand against a white wall while the others had to try to see the big aura around that person and figure out what color it was.
There was always that ad on the back that said to contact the Rosicrucians: YOU MAY HAVE LIVED ON EARTH BEFORE.
I never did meet a Rosicrucian. I thought the Rosicrucians were something Catholic, like Jesuits. You could write to them for the free literature, but I don’t know why—I didn’t.
From the pension in Netanya, we moved to the ulpan nearby. My mother was studying Hebrew with the other new immigrants. Then, for reasons I no longer remember, we moved to another ulpan, this one in Beersheba, where there was a camel market in the center of town on Wednesdays. Here the new immigrants got into food fights on a nightly basis, arguing over the limitations of one hard-boiled egg or one baked potato for each of us. Pitchers containing water were tipped over others. Tables were knocked down. It was a dangerous place. So was school, where the new immigrant kids from Morocco would spit and beat you up. The day we had to line up and get smallpox injections—a needle as huge as something you’d stick in an elephant, reheated between kids over a bunsen burner—I ran away before it was my turn. Each child ended up with a permanent protrusion, sticking up like a little finger, at the site where the needle was poked. Shortly thereafter, we made another move, this time to a beach shack on a deserted strip of road in Herzliya Pituach.
When that place blew down in a hurricane—or at least became uninhabitable—we moved into a nearby hotel. But the beach cottage was, while it lasted, a fun place. At night in our two rooms, with only one small reading lamp and a small electric heater to keep out the chill, water pouring through the walls when it rained, we would practice automatic writing, where you gently hold a pen on a piece of paper and hope it channels words, or use a Ouija board.
I had grown up with a psychiatrist father who said that acupuncture worked because it was utilized on poor, illiterate peasants who believed in whatever they were told. And my mom, while we lived in Israel, found in a used bookstore all the books by the Tibetan monk Lobsang Rampa, a guy who ended up in the body of some Englishman after reincarnation and was able to remember and write twelve or fifteen volumes about his past life as a Tibetan monk. At age thirteen, once he was almost fully enlightened, another, more senior monk had opened up his third eye.
Apparently all Tibetan monks got this done: a spike poked into the forehead, where that third eye is located, which enabled him to see auras and engage in astral projection. This interested me because, if it was true, how come people just don’t go to a doctor to get their third eye opened? And how did Lobsang Rampa end up reincarnated in the body of a British person living in the English countryside, able to recollect every detail of growing up in Tibet and breakfasting on tsampas and entering a lamasery at an early age.
That was a strange year of reading, that year in Israel.
We took the bus from the deserted beach, where we lived in a cottage alongside two other mostly empty cottages, in Herzliya Pituach, into Tel Aviv, maybe a half hour away. There was nothing else there, where we lived: just these three run-down cottages and, across the road, the rusted skeleton of a twenty-story hotel that the builder had never finished because he ran out of money. Nearby was an abandoned munitions factory—it had been burned down or blown up. We were warned not to pick up anything metal, which could be an unexploded grenade or shell. If you dug in the sand you would find scorpions—black and deadly yellow. And on the beach, deserted, bags of drowned kittens washed up. I have never been back, but I think today it’s all built up and that little beach cottage, had we had the money to buy it, would be sitting on property worth millions.
I wasn’t going to school, either, so the Lobsang Rampa library provided the oddest education you could hope for. Along the way—later, too, it’s all mixed now—there was Alan Watts, Zen in the Art of Archery, Autobiography of a Yogi, Madame Blavatsky, Ouspensky, Eileen Garrett—who knows?
In Israel we eventually left the cottage on the beach after a bad flood, and my grandparents, my mom’s parents, gave us money so we could get into an inexpensive hotel nearby. There we met another British family, the Sharkeys, who were on holiday—and at the end of the year I told my mother I was going to visit them in England. Somehow my mom came up with the money for my trip. She and my brother took a boat back to the States and I flew to England. Mom took me to the airport but couldn’t go through security. I was carted away. Because we had entered the country on a “family” passport—I had my own passport now—it showed no record that I had ever entered the country. I don’t know when they decided that was okay, but I was taken to the plane. I couldn’t see my mom. A woman came and found me on the plane. “I haf seen your muzzer,” she said. “I haf seen your muzzer and she was crying and crying. I do not think you will ever see your muzzer again.” I was thirteen. (Later, my mom told me she had asked this woman to find me on the plane to tell me she was going to wait outside security and wouldn’t leave until my plane took off—and not to worry. But, that’s not what the woman told me.) We didn’t really know this family particularly well, but Mom wrote to them and they said I was welcome.
I don’t remember being scared and I don’t remember thinking I was only thirteen. Even though it was Swinging London in 1969, the Sharkeys weren’t really part of it. They were just a nice, hip family who lived in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Dave had been the first Jewish boxer in the United Kingdom and was a follower of Gurdjieff. Anne, the mother, took me to Biba to get new clothes. Biba had just opened. I remember being very shocked by the fact that you had to change in a communal dressing room, but my mother had given me a small sum of money to go shopping and I had to try on the clothes. I bought an Empire-waist minidress in a Liberty of London print, another dress with a shirred front and puf
f sleeves, and a few other items, like a hat.
(By the time I got back to school in the U.S. that fall, I had outgrown the items, so I never really got to wear them much. And I did not realize that wearing clothing from Biba was not going to be normal in an Amherst regional junior high school in 1969. On the first day, a tiny man came running up to me and said, “Take off that hat at once!”
I laughed merrily. It was a large-brimmed red velour hat made by Madcaps. “Take off that hat and put it in your locker!” shouted the tiny man.
I thought he was the janitor. Besides, there was no rule against hats.)
In London we lunched at Cranks—the first trendy vegetarian restaurant—and Anne’s friend Barbara was an editor at The Ritz, a kind of English equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Interview, a newsprint underground paper.
It wasn’t until 1976 that I went back for my junior year abroad. I had no money, but because the tuition in London was less than New York, my father paid. By the divorce decree he had to pay; he was supposed to pay for my graduate school, too, but he did not. Because of the cost, I dropped out of the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in playwriting) after a year, and it was years before I could pay back the student loans I had incurred.
Around the time I dropped out of grad school, Dad began billing me for my undergraduate education, sending letters stating what he had given me for food when the dining hall was closed on the weekends (he gave me fifteen bucks a weekend) or my annual budget for clothes ($250 a year).
But I didn’t pay him back.
* Some years went by. I was an undergraduate at Barnard College. I was fixed up on a blind date? Met some guy in the student lounge? Anyway, we went out. He was Greek. We got to talking. I said I had lived in Israel. He said one summer when he was seventeen he had been in Israel. I said, “Some idiot broke my dog’s leg.”
“Umm,” he said.
This poor guy. I still could not forgive him, and cursing, I left.
Scream Page 6
