What to Do About the Solomons

by Bethany Ball

  Chapter 15

  Yakov in Youth

  When Yakov Solomon was born there was barely enough food for everyone to eat. His birth was not celebrated. His mother was already frail and nervous. Her milk did not come and Yakov the infant cried incessantly. She died soon after his birth. His older brothers, Ron Solomon especially, hoped Yakov would die. He was such a puny, pitiful thing and all the energy he had went into wailing. Only his father Shimon seemed to love him. He would dance around with Yakov in his arms and sing Hasidic songs to him, changing the words to Hebrew. This was the new land and Yiddish was forbidden. It was a relic of the Europe they left behind.

  Later, Yakov’s older brothers told him how their father cried at night for his dead wife.

  The kibbutz was a raw factory of human survival. The men and women had come to Palestine after the pogrom at the turn of the last century with their communist ideas and little else. They were the new Jews. All money, resources, and food were pooled. No one had any more or less than anyone else. Everyone was ready to work. Marriage was an outdated concept in which the kibbutzim were uninterested. It was another custom left over from the old world. A relic. A superstition.

  Yakov’s parents had come from Bulgaria. Heavily influenced by Russian Jews, they brought their worn books of Trotsky. Religion was their history. On Yom Kippur, they ate sausage made from the wild boar that they hunted. They farmed the terrible land and worked hard. They pumped water out of the marshlands, which eradicated the mosquitoes and therefore malaria. Babies were born, got sick, and died. Sometimes women went crazy and sometimes the men. When life got too difficult for a few—due to drought, bad crops, fights with Arab neighbors—they left for the cities or went back to Europe. Some made their way to America.

  They held their own civil and criminal courts, officiated by Yakov’s father, Shimon Solomon, the most educated man in the region. He could read and write and speak classical Arabic. He could communicate with the local population. At times, the Bedouin in the region came to the elder Solomon to have their disputes mediated.

  Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Shimon Solomon was a largish man with broad shoulders. His nose was sharp and frequently peeled from the sun. He loved the Palestinian sun. It was different than in Europe—brighter and whiter. Not filtered through misery, upheaval, old hatreds.

  The men of the kibbutz made a kind of peace with the Arabs. Before Yakov was born, Shimon Solomon was an officer in the Ottoman Army during the First World War. Shimon liked the Turks because there was always lamb shawarma. The Turks always had food. And the Turks liked him because he could read and write and knew the local population. He was captured by the British Indian Army after the Battle of Sharon and held prisoner for one year in Haifa. After the Turks were defeated, he was released. The British forced the kibbutzniks to get passports. They forced the unmarried couples to marry.

  Yakov attended his uncle’s wedding in Haifa with his ­cousins. The wedding was officiated by a red-faced British official. They’d traveled by bus to Haifa. The official spoke no Hebrew. The kibbutzniks spoke no English. Shimon was their translator. The Englishman wore very short pants. His legs were covered in insect bites. The Englishman scratched them constantly until they bled into his crisp white socks.

  Around the time of the weddings in Haifa, Yakov, who was then eight years old, noticed a new woman hanging around the grounds. She was pretty and young. When the woman came around, Shimon would bloom. This new woman was from Berlin and she could read. She spoke other languages too, not just German and Hebrew. She spoke English with the British officials and translated their documents into Hebrew. Her skin was almost white, not brown and worn like the other women’s. Her hair was blond, and hung loosely around her shoulders.

  Yakov hated the new woman.

  Please don’t bring another woman to the house, Yakov told his father. I can do all the cleaning and cooking. Don’t worry, Papa.

  The woman’s name was Gitel and she moved in the day she and Shimon were married. The elders said, What mazel. What luck! A mother, finally, for those five children.

  Soon after, the beit yeladim was built, the children’s house, and the younger Solomon boys were deposited there. Yakov and his closest brother, Ron, shared a cot. He was nine years old and Ron was fourteen.

  After the class bar mitzvah, Yakov was chosen to go to the Balfour School in Jerusalem. It was a prestigious boarding school and an honor for Yakov. At the Balfour School, there was one building for Arabs and one for Jews. The Jews came from the wealthy families of Israel and some from Europe. These boys from the cities were studious and serious. Their hands were soft and their shoes were made from fine leather. Their socks were also very white and they never wore sandals, even in the hottest months.

  Yakov didn’t like to sit still. He preferred to work with his hands. He was penalized for going barefoot in the courtyard, for dirty shoes, for not showering, for not knowing the prayers for bread, the blessings for Shabbat. Yakov left the school at sixteen. He went off to the army but was discharged early for flat feet and bad vision. He was not unhappy. The army suited him as much as the boarding school. He preferred the land. He returned to the kibbutz and went to work in the brick factory. The Second World War came to pass, filtered through the tinny voices of the kibbutz-shared radio.

  Yakov Solomon was now eighteen. It was 1947 and no one knew which way Israel would go. Like a boat righting itself, the country swayed to the Soviet side and then back to America. Yakov Solomon was enamored with America. He was a humanist. He was not a Jew. He was a man. He hitchhiked with his cousin Eli Solomon to Haifa where he meant to board a ship that would ultimately set sail for America. He loved America because he had decided that he was no longer a communist or even a socialist. He was a capitalist. He said to Eli, as they wandered through the near-demolished streets of Haifa: If everyone woke up each morning saying, how much work can I get done today, socialism works. But if they wake up, as they do in the kibbutz, and say, how little can I get away with, the whole thing fails. Eli Solomon nodded but Yakov could tell he didn’t know what Yakov was talking about. Eli was interested in adventure, not ideas.

  They wandered the seaports for three days searching for a ship they could find passage on. They were not the only ones. Many wanted to leave Israel now that it was no longer under British protection. No one knew, after all, if the country would be Jewish, Arab, or Christian. Soviet or American. Refugees wanted to go home, or to America where they had family.

  Finally, their passage was procured. A crude oil ship left from Haifa. It would eventually take port in Liverpool, and from there on to America, or stay. They were to leave in six hours’ time. They spent those hours drinking arak with young Arabs on the beach. Soon it was time to go. They got up to leave, to go back to their small hostel where they picked up their bags.

  Later in his life, Yakov Solomon would wonder how his father and uncle found them. How astonishing that they appeared at their lodging and dragged them back to the kibbutz. Was Eli Solomon too afraid to go? Had he sent word about their whereabouts? Or was it Yakov himself, sending signals from some secret part of his soul, knowing he could never leave haaretz?

  After the war, a new wave of immigrants brought fresh energy to the kibbutzim. Some of them were full of enthusiasm. They were true Zionists. They were willing to work hard.

  But they were not as hardy as the first wave, the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians. These Arab Jews got sick more often. Everyone knew the Sephardim were not as hardy as the Ashkenazim. Worse, the women were literate and more beautiful than the kibbutz women. These Sephardim cooked spicy foods with spices they brought over in glass jars sealed with wax.

  The Sephardic food, all the men agree, was much better than the Ashkenazi food. The Sephardic women were the most beautiful.

  The women in Yakov’s kibbutz were mostly Polish. They hated the Sephardic women. To humiliate them they deloused them with ho
ses and forced them to cut their thick black hair. They gave them new names and forbade them to speak French and Arabic.

  On a terrible hot day in August, Yakov saw a woman, near the chicken houses, fighting with the kibbutz women. She cursed them in French under her breath. The Algerian woman would not let the kibbutzniks cut her hair. To the women of the kibbutz, she was an Arab. She said to them, in English, and then in French, I am more clean than you! Look at you filthy women. Look at your dirty fingernails!

  Phoot! Phoot! the Polish women said. They said this as though she were some kind of dybbuk, a demon, which in their eyes, she was. It was as though she had come to disturb the peace, this woman, this aravi. It came down to this: She refused. She said it again and again. Je refuse! Je refuse! And then in English: I refuse! The woman would not allow the delousing, the haircut, or the Hebrewized name. The other Algerian and Moroccan women stepped away from her. They wanted to fit into their new home. They wanted to keep the peace. This one had always been difficult, always seemed as though she looked down on them.

  She was Vivienne Sarfati. She was beautiful and worldly. Later, they would say she looked just like Anouk Aimée, the actress. Vivienne had come to Palestine from Paris, where she was enrolled in the Sorbonne. She’d come to Paris via Algiers, where she’d lived with her father and mother and four sisters. She picked more apples than most of the men and cursed heroically in Arabic and French, and now Hebrew. She tied her shirt up under her bust and exposed a smooth, taut belly. She cut her pants into shorts. Her rear was heart-shaped. Her face was a perfect oval.

  No, she didn’t love him. No, she didn’t want Yakov. She loved another boy. A boy from Algiers who had promised to follow her to Palestine, although, it was said, he was not even Jewish. Yakov paid Efraim Grenkel in the mail house to intercept the letters, but they were in French. Everyone watched Vivienne Sarfati stand outside the mail house with a letter to mail in her hand, wearing her brightest shade of French lipstick. She kissed the envelope. It was quite a show.

  In the end, the boy from Algiers never came, not that Yakov was aware of anyway. Or perhaps he came and was turned away. If Vivienne was heartbroken, she did not show it.

  During Sukkot, Yakov stole Vivienne away to the fields and tried to seduce her. I will never love you, Yakov Solomon! You are an arrogant, uneducated man, Vivienne told him.

  Had there ever been a stronger intoxicant?

  Vivienne’s parents arrived a year after her and then, one by one, her sisters followed. Her sisters married quickly. They were all pretty women, the Sarfati clan, but Vivienne was the real beauty. She was going to Jerusalem to study business. Every day she left on the bus for class.

  Yakov steered the kibbutz into the cement business. Soon after, with kibbutz funds, he bought construction equipment. Large cranes and cement mixers. They dwarfed the cowsheds and chicken houses. Cows and chickens, Yakov scoffed. What are we? A shtetl?

  Yakov’s older brother Ron was not happy with his younger brother’s success in the kibbutz. Ron had never been happy. Worse, he’d fallen in love with Vivienne Sarfati too. He’d been seen mooning around the bus stop waiting for the evening bus from Jerusalem.

  Yakov Solomon backed off. As the youngest Solomon, he was not meant to take on the leadership he had. He could not have the girl. Yet, there was something about the way Vivienne looked at him. Like she knew him. Even if he could not get the girl, he liked to be known.

  And there were other women in the kibbutz, after all. This new generation was younger and smarter. They were better educated and more attractive too. Anyway, it was better not to mess with the Sephardim. They could crush the most fragile part of a man with their bare hands and never look back. They were not even Jewish, not really, but aravim, Arabic. If Ron ever got his hands on her, she’d ruin him.

  Managing the kibbutz was not easy. Every day there were more headaches. Solving one headache brought ten more. The fish stank from the head, the old saying went. Any problems in the kibbutz were Yakov’s problem, as he was now the head of the kibbutz.

  The men came to Yakov to tell him about Shlomo Golani. Shlomo Golani had been stealing cows from the cowshed and slaughtering them. Men found a pile of bones smoldering out in the Valley. Shlomo took the meat for himself and his family. What are we going to do about Shlomo Golani?

  What are you going to do about Shlomo Golani? Yakov’s brother Ron asked him.

  Yakov Solomon had been invited to the house of the sheikh in the nearby village of Saphsaphas. The village bloomed with red and white bougainvillea. The streets were swept. The elegant mud buildings squatted low. Everything was the same light brown color, everything but the flowers and bushes and the sky. A tiny child in a white smock squatted beside the door of the sheikh’s house. She chattered happily to herself and to Yakov. Yakov pulled a tiny golden chick from his pocket and handed it to the child.

  Yakov told the sheikh about this story of Shlomo Golani and the sheikh listened. He laughed out loud at the story of Golani, slaughtering cows behind his apartment in the middle of the night and taking the meat for himself.

  Even his name, the sheikh said, is funny.

  Yes, Yakov said. But what should I do?

  But of course let him do what he is doing! Let him slaughter cows! The sheikh rose to his feet. Let him slaughter cows! If he does not slaughter cows he will slaughter people!

  Months later, the sheikh came to the kibbutz office. He was stern and solemn. The sheikh had brought all his male relatives. His brother was angry and would not meet Yakov’s eyes. They crowded the small office. Kibbutzniks milled anxiously in the yard out front. Yakov poured a glass of arak but the sheikh refused it. The brother also refused it. The brother asked Yakov, Haven’t you people got enough of our land? The sheikh hushed him.

  It is not we who want your land, Yakov said. It is them, and Yakov pointed north, south, east, and west.

  They agreed in their meeting that there would be no fighting between the sheikh’s village and the kibbutz. The Arabs of the village would not bear arms against the kibbutz and the kibbutz would not attack the village. Additionally, the kibbutz gave the sheikh six locally made Sten guns so the Arabs could protect themselves from the Jordanians, in the event they tried to raid Saphsaphas, the place of the willow trees.

  Yakov Solomon explained to the sheikh that there would be gunfire at night. Do not be afraid, Yakov said.

  Yakov told the sheikh to make shelters in the village. Dig in the ground large holes for the women and children, Yakov said. In the event there are bombs.

  This, the sheikh refused to do. Our houses are so beautiful, he said. And they have stood two hundred years or more. Your concrete houses are so ugly. The sheikh spit on the ground. We cannot understand how the Jews live without beauty. The sheikh made a sign with his hands. Allah will protect us, the sheikh said. And He will protect you also.

  The kibbutz prepared for the fight.

  Syrians came from the Golan. Jordanians came from Jerusalem.

  Half the kibbutz men went to Haifa and became soldiers. The rest protected the land. At night the men on watch listened to the jackals howling. There were tracers and flares and fighters overhead.

  During the day, life went on as always. Kibbutzniks tended their gardens and fields and cows. Half of the chickens died from disease. Around them, Arab villages were abandoned.

  During the day, the Arabs from Saphsaphas came to borrow the kibbutz tractor. For this they traded za’atar spices, olive oil, pitot.

  Each night, a young Czech scholar who had studied in Jerusalem snuck off to the sheikh’s village and translated for him the news from the Arab news service. For though the sheikh was a judge in the highest Arab courts, he was not fluent in the literary Arabic of the radio announcers.

  A Transjordan Frontier Force checkpoint had been set up six kilometers down the road from the kibbutz. After the first night of shelling, these
men disappeared. Yakov’s brother Ron took over the checkpoint along with their cousin Eli Solomon and two other men.

  It is at the checkpoint that Ron Solomon was killed. He was shot by Jordanians. Yakov was bereft. Vivienne felt no such sadness over her lost paramour. She thrived. She cut her hair short and gamine, like a movie star. She wore lipstick her mother brought her from Algiers. She came to Yakov wearing her scandalous red lips as he was walking to the building where they made bricks. She watched him clear out the chicken carcasses. She watched him all the time now and finally, she said to him, Now I’m free, Yakov Solomon.

  Yakov Solomon hears the sheikh’s brother had been killed. He’d gone off to fight for the Syrians. There had been an argument between the brothers. The sheikh had commanded him not to fight, but the brother was hotheaded and full of rage at the sabras and went anyway. He was the sheikh’s only brother. The sheikh has only daughters. The sheikh’s family would no longer rule the small village, once the sheikh died. This was a good thing, the villagers said. They’d protested his collaboration with the kibbutzniks and saw him as a traitor.

  Yakov went to him, as his father, Shimon, would have. He brought three freshly killed and plucked hens. Yakov came as a man who has lost his brother, Ron Solomon. His cousin Eli Solomon led a female goat by a rope. They walked through the Jordan Valley fields to the dusty village on the hill. It was untouched by mortar and gunfire. The men took their shoes off at the door.

  The sheikh sat on a low chair. His eyes burned brightly. So brightly it seemed they burned for two men, as though the sheikh had absorbed his own hotheaded brother.

  We have come to pay our respects for your loss. I am so sorry—Yakov Solomon began. He bowed his head and stared at the straw mat beneath his bare feet.

  For a moment the sheikh sat and didn’t speak. The silence stretched. Yakov began to sweat. He was unsure what to do. He had heard about the villagers’ hatred of the kibbutzniks. Yakov grew frightened. The goat was restless and bleated loudly. The sheikh raised his head. He kicked a stool that was beside him across the room into the wall: L’JahHanim! he said. To hell! Don’t talk about it. It’s in the past! L’JahHanim!