by Sonia Taitz
Always Ready
I AM IN LOVE WITH ISRAEL and the idea of the Jewish hero (and heroine). Through word of mouth, my parents hear about a summer camp that follows the spirit of early Zionism. In that time, over a century ago, Israel had been a dream, and an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl, was mocked for saying, “If you want it, it is no legend.” It turned out that Herzl, who became the father of Zionism, was right. This camp, Betar, is dedicated to the spirit of its first pioneers, who wanted nothing more than a homeland of their own. The summer after our trip to Israel, my parents send me there for eight weeks.
I am eleven years old, and have never been away from my parents, but yeshiva has drilled the soul of the biblical prophets into mine. I know that my father is a hero in a broken world. The chants and songs of this intense place rouse and mesmerize me. Like a drumbeat, they stir my impressionable blood with thoughts of ultimate redemption.
“Do you want to go to Israel? Do you want to go on Aliyah, to rise up and be free in your own land?” we are asked, but only rhetorically.
“Yes! I’ve been there!” I pipe up. “I wanna go back!”
Most of the knock-kneed girls around me, kicking up dirt on the weedy grounds, could not care less about Jewish history or Israel. Tough girls from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Long Island, they “make out” and “get felt up” by boys in the bushes; they pierce each other’s ears with sewing needles. I wonder if everyone has been sent to this camp by accident—ads in the papers were ubiquitous, and the fees, I later learn, ridiculously low. Here’s why: there are no normal camp activities. There is a small, scummy lake whose entry-level mud sucks like quicksand, horrible barrack-like bunks, and, for sports, tetherball and potato-sack races. For me, however, this place is no accident, but a perceived form of destiny. For those who are interested in more than simple summer fun, the camp provides a special path.
I soon decide that I want to be a Betari, an elite group within Camp Betar that adheres to a radical form of Jewish nationalism. To become part of this club, you have to learn Jewish military history and vow to “fight for freedom”—even to the point of death.
I want to be a Betari
I want to set my country free!
We stand together in the “uniform” of white shirt, navy shorts, and neckerchief. My hair, finally longer, is up in a high, tight ponytail; many of the older girls have long, thick braids that seem to mean serious business. My sneakers happen to be weird: my mother, who shops for me at her beloved John’s Bargain Store, where most shoes are sold from a large table, has found the world’s first pair of pointy sneakers. These points have never been in style, and perhaps will never be. But in this group, no one notices or cares.
We sing together, and when we say “my country” we mean Israel. Yes, it is technically “free”—between horrors for the moment—but we are obsessed by its history of fragility. This continuous looking-backward to the point of greatest trauma is familiar to me. Most of the other Betaris—like elite Scout members—are older than I am. Some have patrolled in neighborhoods where Jews are teased or ambushed. But I have been in military training of sorts for a long time myself.
We stand on the grass in front of our bunks and shout: Tel Chai! The hill lives! The hill is a hill in Judea that was conquered almost 1,000 years ago. This yeshiva girl, whose soul was swept up in millennial sources from birth, is having a heyday. Betar lives in the past. Even though the strongholds of Yodephet, Masada, and Betar have long fallen to ancient Rome (itself long gone), we swear that they will never, ever, be conquered again.
In order to assure this, we are given old .22 caliber rifles for target shooting, and are taught the rudiments of judo. Throwing a group leader across my hip, I imagine throwing “the enemy” as he jumps me. Thump! On the mat you go, and stay there! We hear of saboteurs who crawled through the nettles to kill settlers in the first Israeli kibbutzim. Enemies in the night, throat-cutters. What kind of people would kill Holocaust survivors?
There is a song we sing on Passover:
Ela shebechol dor vador
Omdim aleinu lechalotaynu.
In every generation, they stand up and try to finish us.
But, the song continues:
Vehakodosh Baruch Hu
Matzilaynu miyadam
And the Holy Blessed God saves us from their hands.
After the Holocaust, we had begun to question God’s timing. Okay, he “saved” us, you could say, but it was certainly a case of too little, too late. So maybe it would be a good thing if, for once, we could save ourselves. As the rabbis teach: “If someone comes to kill you, get up earlier and kill him.” At Camp Betar, the primary Jewish ethos is survival. And it rests more in revivalist Zionism, in sheer practicality, in defending a land and freedom no one may take away from you, than in religion.
We will help out, we Betaris, named for a hill that, like the more famous Masada, fell to the Romans after a prolonged resistance, in the first century. The warriors of Masada choose to commit suicide rather than surrender, and we would eagerly do the same. Our camp is dedicated to the memory and philosophy of the early Zionist Josef Trumpel-dor, who fought against British occupation. Plays are not put on about the Queen Esther who seduced a powerful king, but about brave Hannah Senesh, a young partisan girl who parachuted back into Europe in the middle of World War II and was executed. We all want to be like Hannah Senesh, who had immigrated to Israel to work the land, returning to Hungary only to help her people during the Nazi era. We all want to strap on a parachute and be let out in the right place, or the wrong place that needs to be set right. We can’t wait.
We have learned that our enemies respect only one thing—strength. So I stand straight and tall as a leader in khaki uniform, kerchief at his neck, shouts:
BETARIM, HIPAKED!
(MEMBERS OF BETAR, ATTENTION!)
Then,
HEYEH MUCHAN!
(BE READY!!)
To which we reply:
TAMID MUCHAN!!
(ALWAYS READY!!)
Is this the moment I have been waiting for? The one in which I get to DO SOMETHING to save my family, my people, my poor, persecuted fellow Jews? I am thrilled by the .22 caliber rifle, thrilled to be talking in Hebrew about “destiny,” even though all I do is shoot blindly at bull’s-eyes on old burlap. This is no normal Jewish camp, where you play badminton outside and jacks inside the bunk. This is a post-Holocaust camp, and it fits into my brain like a bracing antidote to sorrow.
We learn that anti-Semitism comes in many forms, and that it never goes away. That it is a devious and permanent sickness, born of envy and ignorance. Yes, the post-Holocaust world sent it underground, but it pops up again and again. This time, we will be ready. I, Sonia Taitz, with legs like spaghetti al dente, will be ready.
My mother is, of course, sane and skeptical.
“Yeah, yeah, you will be some great help. Meanwhile, you should learn first to make a good borscht.” She wasn’t being sarcastic in this instance. She really did, still, want me to learn to make a good borscht. Or anything remotely edible.
Redemption Song
THE SCHOOL I attend after the old yeshiva is a more modern Jewish preparatory academy on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan. Its mission is to prepare Jewish children not only to follow the traditions, but also to get into Yale and Harvard. The change of schools, vast in measures of prestige, is my father’s idea. It is also another giant step away from Washington Heights and my mother.
It is amazing that one long bus ride, on the #4, takes me from my parents’ humble home, and then—as though breaking through storm clouds into the sun—to Fifth Avenue and the Museum Mile. Embassies, limestone mansions, millionaires.
As always, I am something of an outsider, a Jew among Jews. If, in Washington Heights, the elites were German Jews, here, on the Upper East Side, my classmates have apartments near Gracie Mansion with Japanese futons and Chinese triptychs, mothers who are slim and tall and wear elegant chignons, fathers who are lawyer
s and play golf. They have maids who live in “maids’ rooms” in vast, high-ceilinged apartments, where the carpets are not wall-to-wall but Persian, afloat on a sea of polished parquet. These people are even more elegant than my parents’ Riverdale crowd, who still have unsheddable accents along with their aspirations (they call their cars “Kedilecks”).
I am most comfortable with short little Sarah, a scholarship girl, who always wears purple, whose hair is like Brillo, whose father is a diamond-cutter, who lives in the Bronx. Her parents speak Yiddish with a Polish accent, and her Bubbe lives downstairs. Whenever we are on the phone (most every night), I can hear a subway train pass by, which she tells me rattles her floor. I love Sarah. She is my only friend in the school with immigrant parents who worry and sigh. Even though the school shows horrible films each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, bringing us all into an air-conditioned social hall to view Jewish bodies shoveled up by bulldozers and hauled into pits, and even though many of the girls’ faces seem wet when the lights go up, Sarah really knows how to suffer, right now, here in America. When I talk about my pointy sneakers from John’s Bargain Store, or a mother who never stops talking about her dead father and brothers, Sarah knows exactly what I mean. She shops at Loehmann’s when she is lucky. All the other girls in this new school shop at Saks and at Bloomingdale’s. They whip out credit cards with authority.
For the first time I realize that I am a minority in a minority, and that not all Jews are plagued by endless fears and mourning. Not a single one of the kids in my grade has even heard of Camp Betar. When I describe it, they wonder if I am really as “cool” as I pretend to be. (I am far too intense.) They go to “regular” Jewish camps, with tennis lessons, softball diamonds, and Olympic-size pools. Their homes are not little slummy apartments, and I don’t invite them to mine.
Yes, we have moved up in the world—not to that promised house where I would have a dog like Thunder the Alsatian, and still in Washington Heights—but a step up nonetheless. The new apartment is on a street called Overlook Terrace, a name that evokes breezes and luxury, and real terraces, outdoor spaces where we can sit! (We no longer need to put folding chairs out on the street to catch a breeze.) Though our balcony is but a small rectangle hanging off the side of our building’s façade, I feel as though we have a backyard, chaises, and even the possibility of a lawn. I buy some African violets and set them out to breathe the fresh air with me. “Oy, a mechayeh,” as my mother would say, sitting there and taking a glass of cool water. Oh, this makes me live.
She loves the apartment, loves that it is a new construction, with air and light and marble in the lobby. She loves coming home every day, enjoying the cool when it is warm outside, the warm when it is cool outside, loving the kitchen, which is the center of the apartment, and not simply one more room along a narrow, dismal hallway.
The building also has an enormous outdoor pool, making me feel as though I have actually surpassed the suburbs and gone all the way to Beverly Hills. The entire development is new and modern (we are among the first tenants), which to us, at that time, means all things good. My mother is overjoyed that our bathroom is tiled in baby blue, that the entry to our apartment contains a small foyer featuring a closet with doors that slide on rollers, and that the doorbell no longer goes “eeeeeccccchhhhhhhhh” but “ding dong,” like the Avon lady in the TV commercials.
But it’s still not good enough for my new friends.
One problem is that my brother, ever taller and more gangly, no longer has his own room. There are only two bedrooms—one for my parents, and a smaller one for me. Manny sleeps in the living room, on a “love seat” that turns into a bed. He has agreed to this arrangement because of the pool, and the pretty neighborhood, which is set on a hill. We live only a step, now, from the sanctuary of the vast and leafy Fort Tryon Park. From our perspective, it is like a secret forest. Though my parents and I tend to stick to the flower paths and the promenade overlooking the Hudson, parts of the park wind into subtle dead ends; there are granite rocks to climb and dark corners to discover. Manny is often there, exploring fun, teenaged things that my mother only hints about. He has left Yeshiva Soloveitchik, too, and is now enrolled in an elite public high school.
“Don’t look in his pockets!” she warns me.
“What’s in there?”
“Funny balloons!”
She doesn’t say a word to him about the balloons. He is always her favorite and can do no wrong. His frequent prowling outdoors seems to her a healthy sign of manliness. When he returns, smelling of sweet, smoky perfumes and sporting strange marks on his neck, my mother offers him platters of food, ushering him to a chair in the kitchen as though he is a weary prizefighter between rounds.
Gita decorates her new home in glamorous shades of white and gold. The fiberglass curtains are heavy and white, with Greek-key patterns in gold. Gold, indeed, is a motif: Manny’s convertible “love seat” is covered in gold silk, the carpet is thick and gold, and the pride of the room, a huge sofa, is white, with curved wooden arms and thick gold threads woven throughout. My mother loves this piece so much she covers it in customized plastic, complete with zippers. On top of it, she places square gold pillows, each with a button in the middle.
Still, even on Overlook Terrace, with its terraces and pool, even when my own new bedroom is furnished in brand-new white-and-gold French Provincial, even though it is now wallpapered with pink roses like some bedroom in Riverdale or even France, I am ashamed of where I live. Personally, I find it all beautiful and elegant. But my sophisticated new friends would not think so. They would ask, surely, “Where’s your brother’s room?” Each of them has a room of her own (even the maid). No one sleeps in the living room, where you can see them when you open up the front door.
And what am I to say? My hulking, hormonal teenaged brother sleeps on a fold-out bed; you can find it perpendicular to the sofa with the plastic covers on it?
What’s more, Manny has turned into a hippie. His hair is thick, long, and wild; under his nose is a trace of a Fu Manchu; and his music is sepulchral and threatening. Unfortunately for me, there is a stereo in the living room, which my parents have bought so they can play songs from the Fiddler on the Roof cast album, or the Reader’s Digest Collection of Opera Greats. But as they are always working, they rarely use the machine, which is housed in an enormous wall unit. Manny uses it.
My brother has awakened to the world of rock and roll. On his return from mystery excursions, he plays groups with odd names like the Troggs, the Fugs, the Animals, and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. Some of the lyrics, blasted into my ears, are disturbing:
Mother?
Yes, son?
I want to—(followed by a cacophonous drum solo suggesting unspeakable plunder)
This modern apartment’s walls are thin, and the Fugs and Troggs invade my French Provincial, flower-papered sanctuary. My bedroom actually has two doors, halving my chances of privacy. Due to the advances of New World modernity, they are hollow, anything but soundproof. One connects me to my big brother’s living room lair, the other to the kitchen, where my mother is likely to be banging pots, or making food my fancy new friends never heard of, like klops.
Despite this predicament, I gear up the nerve and ask one of the sweetest girls in the class to come over on a Sunday. She hesitates, then confides:
“My parents won’t allow me to go to your house. They say it’s in a bad neighborhood.”
A bad neighborhood? 100 Overlook Terrace? Compared to 643 West 172nd Street, it is the Taj Mahal! But I have to acknowledge the fact that, as the years pass, crime is escalating, here as in the rest of the city. In our case, just south of us, and traveling north, is a busy drug trade, headed by new gangs of immigrants from Central America. Just a few blocks away, people have been thrown on the ground and mugged. We hear of shootings on the Channel Five 10 O’clock News. Car alarms blare at night. Sometimes, during our Sabbath strolls to the park, we are assaulted by booming music as convertibles
screech by, triumphantly red with passion and heat.
So I travel to my friend’s houses on East End and York Avenues, to Central Park West and Riverside Drive, and we stroll around the parks, dodging perverts, graffiti sprayers, butt pinchers, and marijuana smokers.
Most Jews, I learn, do not think about disasters every day! Their parents do not worry about saving money on clothes, or have accents that hint of their refugee status. They do not tell their children that the apple peels they don’t eat could have saved lives in concentration camps. My classmates did not learn to shoot rifles at age eleven to save their hypothetical kibbutz from night-pillagers. They do not dream about shouting “tamid muchan!” when the world’s alarm clock starts ringing. And they do not lie half awake every night, knowing that that alarm will soon ring.
Ever adaptable, I begin to relax, and even to luxuriate. Park Avenue is not having any Holocausts. The world, moreover, is loosening up in thrilling ways. Jews are increasingly acceptable, marriageable. The love-goddess, Marilyn, falls for the smart guy, Miller, with the glasses. Bushy-haired, big-nosed Bob Dylan steps onto the scene, and he’s cool! He is followed by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, who with those names and faces win big-screen love and Academy Awards. My friends and I chat about television shows, joking about the Judeo-quotient of favorites like Bonanza and Mission Impossible, Agent Maxwell Smart and his Agent 99, mod Peggy Lipton and Linda McCartney, nee Eastman.
When I turn thirteen, there is no official Bat Mitzvah rite of passage; girls do not “go up to the Torah” in Orthodox circles, however modern or sophisticated. This silencing does not faze me, however. The outside world, to which I become more and more attuned, opens up in generous sync with my own adolescent blossoming. All is changing, we can see, morphing like the liquid in our lava lamps, turning old vendettas into an era of generous freedom. Being a woman, like being a Jew, becomes cool. In hip San Francisco, it’s the Summer of Love; in England a waif called Twiggy evokes the dawn of the ambisexual; and in New York we caper around in miniskirts and hopeful white go-go boots. Half hysterical with excitement, I run to my friends’ houses and dance to the hurdy-gurdy, higgledy-piggledy Beatles of Sgt. Pepper’s. Rock and roll pounds the drumbeat of new and better times. I begin to understand my brother’s newfound joie de vivre.
