by Avraham Burg
It’s very hard, in hindsight, to distinguish between the official, mythic memories that were immortalized in the pre-State annals, and my mother’s own personal memories. Even so, one of her recollections always struck me as her own authentic memory, and not as something she was told. “My brother lived at the entrance to the city,” she told me hundreds of times, “and we lived at the top of the hill, separated by an empty field. From the window of our house we could see the steps to my brother’s house. On the ground floor of his building was the school where I studied. On that terrible day, I looked out and saw feathers fluttering over the stairs of his house. I thought it was snow. That it was as beautiful as snow.” Alas, my sad mother, alas, little Rivka’leh. You were only a bit older than my grandchildren are today. And I so much want to reach out and hug you again. Just one more time. A big, loving, protective hug. Because on that day, on that terrible day, they didn’t take mercy on anything, not even on duvets. They slashed them with fierce fury as if they were human throats. Mom, now I understand. Only you could see the feathers that flew out of the slaughtered blankets and mistake them for snow. Only thus did you manage to transform that moment of utmost human degradation into the beginning of our lives. They murdered, massacred, and raped almost everything in sight—but they did not manage to annihilate your optimism. That perspective, the perspective of a good girl who believes each morning anew that her life is pure snow, opened you up to possibility. To be larger than life. It is the optimism that kept you sane and balanced, joyous and so maternal.
AT THE END OF THE SHIVA FOR DAD, MOM AND I SAT IN her small kitchen. “Write, Avraham, write,” she told me. “Write Dad’s life story. You’re the only one of us who can.”
“But everyone knows everything about him, he’s a public figure,” I said, trying to understand.
“That was not what I meant,” she explained in her stilted Hebrew. “Write about his world that is no more. Who he really was. The good man I loved,” she said, her voice choking up. “Write about Velvey, you understand.”
I think she wanted me to communicate to the future generations of our family the sources of our optimism and joie de vivre, which came not only from her, but also from him. Because on Dad’s side as well there was someone that was always happy, and never surrendered to depression: Onkel Velvey. Zeev in Hebrew, “Zef” in German Jewish pronunciation, was Dad’s cousin. He was part of a tight circle of cousins that grew up together in Dresden, Germany. Velvey was one of the youngest, and Dad the oldest, something like a firstborn son. On November 8, 1938, Dad was in Berlin, and very active in saving Jews from the clutches of the Gestapo. Young Velvey, just fourteen, studied at a yeshiva in Frankfurt. Today, when I think about him, my heart goes out to him, this little boy. A very lonely boy. His mother died of the same cancer that has devoured so many women in our family. His oldest brother had fled already to Palestine, and his father and younger brother had been expelled just a few months earlier to Poland. At noon Velvey left the yeshiva to go somewhere, and when he returned it was all in flames. He called Dad in Berlin from a pay phone.
“Yossel,” the fourteen-year-old asked the twenty-nine-year-old. “What should I do?”
“Where are you?” Dad asked.
“On the street.”
“Walk down the street. There’s a Jewish orphanage there. By the time you get there, I will have spoken with the director, and he’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry.”
That was the start of a long journey that ended with the rescue of another Jewish boy, who became an Israeli. Dad loved Velvey very much, like a brother, more than other surviving members of his family. Velvey was the happiest man of my childhood. Always smiling, always full of vitality. Totally different than Mom’s melancholy sisters from Hebron. A man with good hands, whom nothing could stop.
I remember the triumphant smile on Dad’s face when he told me once about the exploits of “our Velvey.” He traveled to New York and got stuck in a traffic jam in one of the city streets. All the drivers beeped and got upset, except Velvey, who had seen more upsetting things in his life. He got out of his cab, which was driven by the restless Uncle Fischel, a Holocaust survivor and a lovable bundle of nerves ever since, and went to the front of the jam. A huge garbage truck had broken down and was blocking traffic. My uncle climbed up on the truck, opened the hood, and with a few coins from his pocket and some wire he found by the side of the road got the engine running again. This handiness and initiative, the ability to never lose hope, complemented Dad’s inherent optimism. And when they saw one another they knew better than anyone else what was left buried there, under the ruins of their beloved Dresden. They knew what was etched forever deep in their hearts, and knew how to support one another like restrained German Jews—wordlessly.
Velvey and Mom were the two pillars that supported many of the structures of Dad’s life. Through the tears that accompanied the writing of these pages, I couldn’t escape a thought that troubled me. It will never be possible to know what really, deeply changed in their characters because of those traumas of childhood and youth. What orphanhood, bereavement, fears, and sadness did to their young souls, still being formed. Still, could it be that these two, Mom and Uncle Velvey, were good, happy, optimistic people despite it all, because in the one and only defining moment not all was bad? Because they had something or someone good to rely on? Mom had Abu Shaker and Velvey had Dad. Mom has a memory of pure snow out the window, and a humane orphanage was there for Velvey at the end of the street. I’m not an expert on traumas and post-traumatic stress disorder, but they have been around me most of my life, and I have seen that there is a slim but significant difference between those who have managed to latch on to something good in the worst moment of all, and those whom good had evaded, and since then they have no rest or happiness.
Days and years have gone by, and Shlomo, Velvey’s son, is one of the closest and dearest people to me. “That’s my cousin,” I say about him. He is wise and generous, successful and cautious. And when I left political life for my other life, he spread his wings over me and became my guardian angel. Shlomo never judges me. He’s just there with me and for me, like Dad and Velvey were there for each other. Always.
The optimism emerging from the destruction continues to shape our lives. We’ve seen wars and experienced the loss of friends, we’ve gone through the tragedies and comedies of our generation. Both of us will never let the anger at the missed opportunities stop us from trying to fix things. There’s always some wire with which we can restart the truck of life. Both of us and our families love life and are optimistic and trusting. We know deep in our hearts that our parents needed their entire lives to overcome those distant traumas, and that it will likely take much more time for the local collectives to overcome the various painful memories that plague them. And us? Our job is to try very hard to provide that good moment for someone else in bad times. Humanity’s love of life will do the rest.
HEBRON CONTINUED TO EXERT ITS HOLD ON OUR FAMILY. I can still remember my first visit there immediately after the Six-Day War. We all drove there—Dad, Mom, my sisters, Aunt Malka, and my little brother—to meet with the family who had saved us. To see the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to search for the place where the house stood until it was destroyed. For us, the stories about Hebron were always in the air. The steadfastness, the firmness, the connection to the place, our patriotism, as well as the sayings and melodies that came from there. Hebron was a sort of status symbol—anyone who came from there was part of the local aristocracy, one of those who was here before everyone else, the Mayflower of the nascent State of Israel.
My mother generously shared with us her memories of the Hebron of her childhood, but she knew to draw a clear line between her Hebron and the fanatical Hebron of today’s settlers. The massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein in 1994 horrified and shook her to the core. Goldstein (born 1956) was an American Israeli physician, religious extremist, and a cold-blooded mass murderer who perpetrated the To
mb of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounding another 125. He was beaten to death by survivors of the massacre. It subverted the foundations of my mother’s existence, not just because it was such an inhumane act, a crime against innocents. “Now, because of him, the massacre in Hebron no longer belongs to us,” she said. That criminal Goldstein profaned the murder of those she loved, reduced the Jewish massacre in Hebron to a quid pro quo.
A few years before her death, my mother was interviewed on one of the TV channels that caters to religious viewers. She spoke of her childhood in Jerusalem. “But Mrs. Burg,” said the young interviewer, a right-wing religious woman, “why don’t you return to live in Hebron?” Mom cut her off before she veered into forbidden territory. “Hebron is trauma. My childhood began in Jerusalem.” And I understood then how she felt all those years. Hebron was trauma, and Dad and we were a new beginning.
After many years, in the late sixties, Umm Shaker came to our home. She was already very old. Aunt Malka found her in Hebron, and Dad pulled strings in order to arrange everything. It was a day I’ll never forget. There in our living room sat the woman I had heard so much about. That Turkish woman, who had sent her husband to the frontier of humanity, where he was wounded by the rioters’ knives but refused to relent. The woman who had saved my mother, and the woman to whom I owed my life. What a woman. It’s no wonder that she was the only person in the world that Mom allowed to sit cross-legged and to rest her bare feet, just like that, on the great living room couch. Because what was forbidden to little Israeli boys was just fine for the old Turkish woman from Hebron. When she sat with her legs crossed in our German Israeli living room, it was a natural conjoining of East and West. In some sense that old woman from Hebron was like my mother’s second mother. Her first mother gave birth to her and died, leaving no memory of her. But her second mother, who saved her life, was in our very home. Dad met her. I saw her, and Mom suspended all the rules for her. Yes, for a moment I had a Palestinian grandmother. Many of my peers, Israelis of various backgrounds and ethnicities, true German Jews and many others too, never had a grandmother like that, not even for a moment.
CHAPTER TEN
THE NEW MEANING OF HEBRON
UMM SHAKER DIED A LONG TIME AGO, MOM ISN’T HERE anymore, and the memories are becoming more distant. Other traumas are plaguing the country instead. And I, the first generation after Mom’s snow, trying to be the last generation of feathers from the slaughter, wanted to return one more time to Hebron. To feel what I would feel.
My first meaningful visit to Hebron was during my military service, a few years after the Six-Day War. I was a young paratroop officer and I was stationed there with my comrades in order to keep the peace. The Six-Day War had liberated our ancestral lands and led to the occupation of Palestinian land. We came to the city after police duty in Nablus and Ramallah.
“We’ve transferred you to Hebron, the most difficult city in the West Bank, because of your reputation. Bringing red berets into Hebron is a message, since the days of the British mandate,” we were told in a briefing. Our good reputation also included our capacity for evil. We manned checkpoints and forced work-weary drivers to unload giant trucks loaded with crates of merchandise, ostensibly to make sure that explosives and other weapons weren’t hidden there, but in practice to prove to them and us who was boss, and who wielded power and authority. Such unloading took hours, and meanwhile all city traffic was stopped. What a perfect mess. We zealously chased after rioters. We made our presence known and intimidated frightened residents in the cities where we were posted. This was the good reputation we brought to Hebron.
I don’t recall a feeling of return to my family roots, any sense of closing the circle in Mom’s city. It was just another mission. It was important for me to be a good commander, an exemplary role model, to follow orders to the best of my ability, and to be an outstanding soldier, in the spirit of the paratroopers. One day at dawn I took my soldiers on patrol in one of the prettiest riverbeds in the Hebron hills. A route through an ancient landscape of biblical farming terraces, grapevines and vineyard paths, farming huts made of stones, and mud channels carrying the water running from small mountain springs. I had planned the route the previous evening on a topographical map. On the map there are no people, no human realities, and no encounters. The map is indifferent; it only documents. The narrow donkey path wound along the edges of the farming terraces, trying to take up as little as possible of the precious land in the rocky Hebron hills. We walked in a row, keeping a distance from one another, wearing rubber-soled paratrooper boots, carrying packs full of gear and ammunition, rifles at the ready with the safety catch on. Sometimes we walked on the path, and sometimes we cut straight across the fields, packing down soil that had been turned over, inadvertently changing the course of water streams, breaking carefully tended vine branches, repeatedly disturbing the romantic calm of that hidden valley.
Suddenly the owner of the field reared into view before me, the commander leading the troops. A short, burly, and strong Hebron farmer, an older man. He had an expression of terrible pain on his face, a look of uncontrollable rage. He charged at me and my men hysterically. We were armed with the best modern weapons, and he wielded a pickaxe. One against many. My men loaded their guns, aimed, and opened their safety catches. I yelled at him in my best occupation Hebrew. He didn’t understand a word and shouted back in his village Arabic, and I understood it all. He couldn’t comprehend why anyone had the right to cut through his fields, destroy his work, and damage his ancient vineyard inherited from his forefathers. I understood his outcry, his pain and anger. He continued yelling and going amok, and we had to pin him down. Ten twenty-year-olds against someone who could have been our father or grandfather.
This was a minor incident that probably none of those involved remember, aside from me. Before and after it there were plenty of other occupation stories that were more terrible, brutal, and shameful. But those particular shouts were directed at me personally, and that is why they still ring deafeningly in my ears, from the inside. It wasn’t a political shouting match, but it was the protest of the biblical Navot, the owner of the vineyard, against the indifferent oppression of the soldiers of Ah’av—us—just trying to carry out a routine order in the best way possible. I could hear a version of the biblical prophet’s condemnation, “Have you conquered and also inherited?” and I was so ashamed. From these very vineyards Abu Shaker returned home and saved Mom and Grandfather and the rest of their household in 1929.
Decades later, I consider my military service in the city as a moment of great personal importance. My internal language changed then for many years to come. The minute I got tough with that Hebron farmer, hardening my heart as an oppressor, my Israeli nationalism jumped to a new level and over time nearly choked any other spirit in me. Something in me died then, and did not come back to life during my years of public service. I didn’t know then that I had become an occupier, I just wanted to secure the route, to make sure all was well. And coincidentally I became something else entirely. In those vineyards, I learned the first lessons of Israeli nationalism.
Today I understand my friends, Israeli Jews, who are so fearful of thoughts that are not nationalistic. Because for them, like it was for me in the vineyards of Hebron in the seventies, it’s all related. We only know one definition of our common fate, of shared nationalism and fraternity—a total, exclusive definition—either nationalist or traitor, without any nuances in between. Religion, language, authority, power, sovereignty, the land, and a new culture were all melted down, and they fused in me—in us—to create something unparalleled in my parents’ generation. If you take out one brick, the whole structure will collapse. It’s hard for us as people of this place, children of modern Jewish nationalism, to imagine Judaism without religion or Hebrew, a community without a state or a state without all the biblical territories, patriotism without Greater Israel, survival and existence without a huge preponde
rance of military might. And in general, few of us are aware of our political history. It is doubtful whether in 10 percent of the thousands of years of Jewish existence we lived in a reality of full sovereignty. All the other Jewish periods were different: a scattered diaspora, communities, autonomy, and more. Every time we tried to get the chariot of sovereignty moving again, self-destructive mechanisms were also triggered, and we were again banished to the diaspora and scattered again, without authority or sovereignty.
Most of our achievements as a people, as a culture, and as individuals are linked to the depths of non-sovereign existence. The era before Zionist nationalism contained many elements that could potentially succeed the current absolute nationalism. Separating the Israeli amalgam into distinct elements—language, culture, religion, heritage, tradition, place, and sovereignty—which don’t necessarily overlap, can provide more channels of identity and identification than the binary option: all or nothing. My Israeli challenge is to do all I can so that the self-destructive mechanism does not go into action again. As opposed to the Israeli in me, the Jew in me must always be prepared for the next state of existence. These two—the Israeli and the Jewish—are constantly moving in me like restless twins in the womb of a suffering pregnant woman, with neither having the upper hand.
