1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Here’s another pearl of memory. Was my father really there? Does this story say anything? Is it even important? I’ve written it fifty times since I was a deckhand aboard the Pan York in 1949, when we brought refugees from Europe, when we searched for them in all kinds of holes in Italy and Yugoslavia, and when they came begging us to let them board and there was no more room and they shinnied up the hawsers to board the sardine can that was the Pan York.

  One morning I was working on deck scraping off rust and the sea was rough. I saw a group of immigrants coming up from the depths of the ship’s underworld to eat and wait in line for the toilet. They stood in line for hours, and the ship was lurching, and I saw a woman who took out a little toy mirror, which she’d evidently bought from a haberdasher in the ship’s belly because they bought and sold even when they were packed in like sardines, and she tilted her head back, shook out her hair, and curled it with one finger and smiled at herself in the tiny mirror and looked happy.

  In Tel Aviv, at night, I lay helpless. I had this talent of thinking about something until I actually entered it. I didn’t really know what I was forbidden to know. I imagined that my father had fallen off a roof, and I felt the break and the pain and I felt death. It was hard for me and I thought that the Jews, well, it was impossible that they shouldn’t have a home. The interim year had been 1945, the connecting year, the middle year between the destruction and what seemed then to be our great strike in the battles against Jewish destiny. Two years had passed since the war in Europe ended and hopes were high. I didn’t really know what the hopes aspired to, but we felt it was good that they were there.

  Four

  At Hanukkah in 1946, the last one before the war broke out, the winter was harsh. Hail in abundance, strong winds, snow piled up in Jerusalem and Hebron, and we climbed Masada*, where Jewish rebels had taken their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman Empire, to touch the Holocaust that had become real for us. In the past, during the Jews’ harsh years, we’d known a little about it, but we were mainly preoccupied with the struggle between the left-wing Achdut Ha’avodah and Mapai political parties, and didn’t understand what we read in the papers.

  We climbed the winding, potholed path to Masada, but we couldn’t see a thing because darkness was upon the face of God’s deep, and we reached the summit. The mountain was terrifying, broken, forsaken, orphaned, and wounded, and on top it was flat and barren. A black sky lay on top of us with its multitude of stars. We shivered with cold and excitedly stood to attention. The Dead Sea shone in a pure light that did not come from the sun because it had not yet risen. We placed a stone on which we scratched “If I Forget Thee, O Diaspora” and said something about how the Germans had exterminated the Jews. We hadn’t heard any details, I was to meet my father’s cousin only later, and we knew very little about the concentration and death camps. A guy from the Palmach who accompanied us pulled out his pistol and fired one shot into the air, and it sliced into the silence, and it was moving to see a Jewish pistol round fired at the enemies of Israel.

  I left my friends, who lay down deadbeat and fell asleep in the middle of the biting cold of the desert, and walked away slowly. The blackout enforced in the country throughout the war had now been lifted, and intoxicated I looked at the beautiful lights flickering from afar: Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Jallah especially, but Jerusalem too. That colorful scene in the middle of the night moved me; one of my friends, I don’t remember who, came looking for me, and found me—a schmuck standing on the cliff edge. I pointed at the lights and told him that it looked like the Christmas I’d seen at the Migdalor Cinema in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, with James Stewart, who out of the goodness of his heart sacrificed himself for his family, and he was in despair, grieving for his lost and wasted life and he came to a bridge over a frozen river to leap to his death. At that moment appears Clarence, a chubby angel sent to help him and who’s working on earning his wings and has to do a good deed to win them. Clarence jumps into the river and shouts for help, and Stewart, who hears him, jumps into the freezing water and rescues him, and the angel screens a flashback of Stewart’s life, and Stewart sees how he changed the lives of so many people and how much goodness he showered on them and how selfless he was, and he takes back what he’d said, that it would have been better if he hadn’t been born, and he comes back to reality, and all the people he helped in his life come to his house with presents, and all this happens on Christmas Eve, with the tree, the lights shining from it, the tiny fairy lights on its branches, and a great light shines as the bell on the Christmas tree tinkles, and Stewart’s daughter says that when the ringing is heard, it means that an angel has earned his wings.

  My friend was amazed by the story, which in his view was so alien to the Jewish Masada, the mistaken choice of death, which is innocent of any tree or sound. You’re crazy, Yoram, he yelled. What’s Masada and Jewish heroism got to do with a shitty film at the Migdalor? And I said to him, Perhaps there is a connection but only in my twisted mind. Masada lay deep inside me, troubling me, I was obsessively preoccupied with the glory of death and liberty, and also with the genocide, in that a people like that had punished itself with genocide. My mother had been among the first of this country’s sons and daughters who had climbed Masada, Masada that the Jews hadn’t liked mentioning, for they had idolized Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai who fled and came down from the wall in a coffin, and who made sure it stank of excrement so that the Romans wouldn’t open it, and had asked the Romans to let him build a yeshiva in Yavneh and didn’t say that it was to save Judaism, and the Romans thought he was betraying his brethren. Afterward the great slaughter of the Jews took place, and the mass suicide so loathsome and abhorrent to the Jewish sages, and only the traitorous Flavius Josephus who wrote the history of the Jews perpetuated it.

  But the Jewish-Arab struggle created a need for heroes. The people in Eretz Yisrael espoused the Masada rebels, who preferred death to slavery. Standing on that cliff facing the darkness illumining itself on the desert became a mystical experience for entire generations of Israelis.

  I stood and thought that today’s Hanukkah and the long days had started to come to an end and the world is kindling lights and I heard a rock falling into the chasm and I felt I was falling, but luckily my friend grabbed me and pulled me back, and I said to him that if I’d taken one more small step I’d have become a Roman stone at the foot of the mountain.

  Then I looked again at the beautiful infinite lights of the Arab towns and I said that if you stand on the edge of the abyss, as the songs back then termed our national situation, you’re like the Jews seeing Paradise beyond the end. And then a guy called Nehemiah came running and called us to help his Palmachnik friend who had been wounded by a stray bullet fired from the pistol hidden in his pants pocket because he fancied a girl he shouldn’t have. And one of the youth leaders ran ten kilometers to Kibbutz Beit Ha’arava to bring a dressing, and we sat there pressing on the shot guy’s arm so he wouldn’t lose any more blood, and only some five hours later the youth leader and a medic got back to us. We went down to the Dead Sea and saw a platoon of British soldiers there, it wasn’t easy getting down, we walked south beyond the spit and reached the Jordanian side, and the mountains loomed over us and we swam beneath them, lying on our back with our satchels sprouting from our belly like fat flowers, for we couldn’t sink but were burned by the salt water. Above us the mountains of Moab were spread proudly, and jagged projections of dark rock in the darkness of the hill, and there was a bat, and an eagle traversed the sky, and we laughed, we couldn’t believe that we really could lie on the water without sinking. A girl swam at my side, I don’t remember who she was, she reached out and touched me, and it was very unusual for a girl to touch you. I looked at the mountains, and light of sunrise began to emerge from behind them, and the desert shadowed it all into a bed of beauty, which for some reason seemed to me to be sad and perhaps even superfluous here, in the light moving over this darkness, and I held her hand in m
ine, I looked at her, she didn’t look at me but I felt the warmth crawling into me and I was hot. You see, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that terrible expression “the edge of the abyss,” coined by the poet Alterman, which if you’re standing on it you can see Paradise but also the opposite.

  We went back to Tel Aviv and went home and my mother cried because she’d heard that I’d almost fallen off Masada. I was a bit in love with the girl who gave me her hand but by the time I realized I loved her, she’d fallen in love with somebody else. In Tel Aviv we’d swim in the sea, practice unarmed combat by the Yarkon River, hit one another in Hadassah Garden, and swim in the round pool, and we’d dance the hora and the krakowiak and talk about free immigration and the struggle against the British and agricultural training and self-realization, and we had heart-to-heart talks about Jewish destiny that we were supposed to resist and rebel against, as our poor teacher Gedalyahu Ben-Horin told us, who wanted to rebel against Perfidious Albion himself. We wanted to rebel without really understanding what exactly we were rebelling against. We read Plekhanov’s On the Role of the Individual in History. We argued about whether history creates leaders or vice versa. We read Turgenev’s Rudin and held a big trial in which I defended nihilism as opposed to the liberal dreams and trends of Turgenev’s time. Perhaps I won although I think I was actually soundly defeated, for who wanted a nihilistic revolution back then instead of a secular Hebrew kingdom, or more precisely, a socialist-Zionist revolution.

  We sang “Katz’s Dad / Katz’s Mom / Yama yama shorba” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” Everybody loved coming to my house and standing on our balcony and watching Miss Gross shaving on the adjacent balcony and peering over the sea through her binoculars to see Berlin. She’d smile and say, It’s all right for you, you’re sabras, and we told her that we haven’t got prickles, and she’d laugh and say, But I have, and we could see them growing on her cheeks. And we read Panfilov’s Men over and over, which became our Bible, and Memories of the House of David, about the travails of exile and the wonders of the Jews in Spain, and I recited Ibn Ezra, which made girls like me: “I am a prisoner and with me is a man / He will not break away, he will not depart / Without a sword, he is the death of me / Without plague, he will cause my death / What am I to do? A Sisera has come / But there is no Jael of the House of Heber / Hurry and come to my defense / As did Abraham to Shemever.”

  Five

  One fine day in October 1947 the sea was as smooth as silk and a few of us went to the American Bar in Herbert Samuel Square to have a special sundae. Suddenly we were fired on from the Hassan Bek Mosque in Jaffa. The people in the American Bar seemed scared and wanted to see where the shots were coming from, and my friends apparently took off and I remained standing by what is today the Opera building, and shots were heard again and I saw a window shatter and at the same time saw a man running from the direction of the Manshiye neighborhood. A Jewish policeman who saw the frightened man yelled, That’s the Araboosh who fired. Then he ran to take cover in the doorway of my uncle Henio’s photography shop, who for twenty years had been photographing idiots who wanted to look handsome against a backdrop of paper jungles he’d hang behind them, but who for his soul had for twenty years photographed the sunsets on the same beach and at the same hour and not one of those photographs was preserved.

  The Arab stood nailed to the spot and was caught by a huge, wild-haired woman who threw away an almost full ice-cream cone so she’d be able to move freely and she spat at him and yelled in Romanian that he’d never again shoot from Hassan Bek. She repeated her shouts in German so he’d understand her better. He pleaded and cried and said in Hebrew that it wasn’t him who’d fired and he was there by mistake, and I believed him, he looked wretched, confused, and miserable, but they didn’t want to believe him. They had a real enemy in their hands. Other people came too, they threw their ice creams onto the sidewalk and began hitting the Arab and stomping on him. He was wailing and they were hitting him for everything he’d done to them in the Diaspora, and I tried to lie on top of him to shield him and I felt how he was trembling and quivering and blood was oozing from his nose and I was hit and cursed, by the Jewish policeman too, who had emerged from his hiding place and come over. He shoved me and yelled at me to leave the fucking Arab alone because he’d come to kill me and they’d been born to kill us, and I told him that I hadn’t seen that he was coming to kill me, and the policeman slapped me and yelled, What, didn’t you see the people who fell dead here? What kind of a schmuck are you? They went on hitting him and laughed at me for kissing the Araboosh’s ass but I didn’t give up. The Arab’s breathing rasped and for the first time in my life I saw how somebody died. I saw how the Arab’s life came out of his mouth and from his eyes that were opaque, eyes that no longer saw a thing and protruded, and how he finished wheezing and died.

  I went home. I was drenched with the blood of the first dead man I’d seen, a poor Arab, wretched but also valiant. I later killed quite a few Arabs and saw blood in war, but he was the first dead man and he was killed for nothing. They probably thought they’d smitten Amalek. You could have filled the Sea of Galilee with that Arab’s blood. I went home hurt. My mother, Sarah, took care of me and consoled me, and my father, Moshe, said, It’s savage here, that’s how it is in Palestine. I went out onto the balcony. A ship moved slowly toward Tel Aviv Port. From the area below wafted the smell of a bonfire. The image of my father’s cousin mingled with the dead Arab and pain welled inside me, and more than pain, sorrow. I became fertile soil for the preaching of Aviva from my class, who influenced me to leave the Hamachanot Ha’olim* youth movement and join Hashomer Hatzair* because of the idea of a binational state it espoused and to prevent what I’d told her about the dead Arab.

  One time on our way home from Tichon Hadash, which was on Hayarkon Street, we met a friend who liked Aviva and tried to gain her affections through me. He was a tall boy called Nahum. There was something deep-rooted about him that I never possessed, something connected with the soil, he wasn’t arrogant and didn’t shout and didn’t make political statements and hated sentimentality, but while we were all in high school he worked in the port to support his family.

  One day he asked me to go the port. Everything was locked. Barbed wire. Lights off in daytime. British soldiers on guard. Machine guns aimed in every direction. He got a pass for me and I was meticulously checked by a short, stocky British policeman and with Nahum I boarded one of the tugs that brought the barges laden with cargo and passengers from the ships to the jetty and back. It was the first time in my life I’d traveled abroad. There was a foreign smell. We climbed the gangway to the deck of a cargo ship. There was an unfamiliar atmosphere there. Smells I didn’t understand. People were wearing strange hats and moved back and forth, some looked dark and wore heavy coats. There was a mist and the sounds of foreign languages were heard. A youngish man, perhaps French, offered me a packet of Craven A and in a fraction of a second lit the cigarette I’d taken with one hand, and put the long match between his lips to extinguish it. He smiled and said in English, which I barely spoke, It’s good for you, that’s what he said. I stood there; perhaps for the first time in my life I was feeling a sense of freedom. The sea was there but it was a different sea. Infinite on its three sides, and on the fourth side my home, shrouded in mist and invisible. It was a whole sea, with no borders, without distance, without deck chairs, without beach paddles, without popsicles, without lifeguards’ surfboards, and without soda pop. I smelled it. I knew the smell from our balcony but from this sea came a kind of fragrance of power, of anything goes. Afterward I told my father, I was in your abroad, and he laughed but beyond the laugh he understood me and said, It’s terrible that they won’t allow Jews to come, but it will be all right. It was strange to hear from someone that it will be all right and from my father, Moshe, yet. Up to that moment my whole life had moved between it will be bad a
nd it will get worse.

  On the deck among the sailors and the stevedores I yearned for some distant place where it would be good and in which I’d never been. I remembered how, in 1938, in third grade, we’d written letters to Germany: “Dear Jewish child, Yoram Kaniuk is writing to you from the Ledugma School in Tel Aviv. Flee quickly and come to Eretz Yisrael, because if you do not, you will surely die.” I didn’t write just “you will die” but “you will surely die,” so that the German child would know the difference between “you will die” and “you will surely die.” All the letters were collected in mailbags and sent to Germany and Austria. We’d stand in the new Tel Aviv Port in the midst of the gnats, the flies, with the stevedores from Saloniki cursing and shouting, and the pallid German and Austrian immigrants, to whose children we’d perhaps written that they would surely die if they didn’t come, timidly descended the gangway from the ship to the barges, carefully because the barges rose and fell. Thus they reached the jetty, men mummified in suits, women with fox furs around their neck, and frightened by the burning sun, and I also saw skiing equipment. They perspired on the boats, and we in short pants and white shirts, stood and sang “The ships sail to distant shores / A thousand hands unload and build / We conquer the wave and shore / We are building a port,” and then we’d recite “Hoo hee, what do I see? / A ship with a funnel come from the sea / Where have you come from, my fair ship and what have you brought? / I’ve come from afar / Where Jews wait to sail / With staff and satchel to Eretz Yisrael!”