Perhaps this is my answer. Or at least another part to it, an extension to that metaphorical home where love resides. Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.
UNRAVEL THE TANGLE
A FEW WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, I snuck out during my mother’s afternoon nap and walked to his law office in downtown Petah Tikva.
My father’s office was on the ground floor of an aging two-story building, at the end of a cobblestoned trail, with his name still engraved on the metal sign outside. Inside, the room smelled faintly of smoke, and the dry, dusty midday heat pushed through the closed plastic shutters. Sitting in my father’s worn swiveling chair, I ran my finger along his wooden desk, used the rubber stamp to imprint the words Haim Tsabari, Advocate on the skin of my hand, doodled on scrap papers with his pen. Then I began opening drawers, not sure what I was looking for.
In the bottom drawer, tucked between legal files, I found an old notebook filled with verse. I flipped through it. The poems were heavily punctuated, the Hebrew letters bejeweled with dots and lines, tears of ink. I took the notebook home and read through it, trying to decipher the archaic language as if it were a key to his identity. When I formed the words, whispering them into my pillow, they sounded mysterious, romantic, a secret language.
I kept the notebook under my mattress for days before handing it over to my mother. She passed it on to my father’s friends, who decided to publish it in a book with Afikim, a small Yemeni-founded publishing house that had once printed a poem of my father’s in their journal—his only prior publication. One of my father’s friends asked if they could include some of my poems in the foreword. During the shiva I had walked in on him standing over my desk and reading through my poetry, his face the face of an adult who had been caught red-handed by a child. I had snatched my notebook from his hands and shut the door. I did not bring it up this time. I said yes.
This was not the way I had envisioned getting published. That promise my father had made me on his sickbed, just a few months before he died, ached like a burn wound that wouldn’t heal over. He was going to publish my writing in a book. It was supposed to be his present for my tenth birthday.
My father’s poetry book came out the following year: a slender paperback with a simple black cover, my father’s name written on it in white. It had a smiling picture of him on the first page, looking square-shouldered and robust, followed by my two poems. It was the first time I’d seen my name in print: my poems, beside his, in the same book.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
MY FATHER WAS the second of eight children, born in Mahane Yehuda in 1939 and raised in Sha’ariya, a neighborhood founded by Yemeni immigrants in the 1930s and tacked to the edge of our city like an afterthought. To the east, a narrow highway lined by cypress trees—a row of sharpened pencils—led to Ben Gurion Airport and all the places he couldn’t yet go.
For the first nine years of his life, the country was still under British Mandate. At night, they would wake up to loud knocks and hide under their beds as the British soldiers came barging in, searching for concealed weapons. Other times, they would be startled by the sounds of inexplicable explosions. On warm days, the neighborhood kids, my mother among them, picked daffodils in the swamp across the Number 40 highway, and then stood on the shoulder, bare feet caked with black mud, and waved to the few British cars that passed by, selling the flowers to those who stopped.
My father’s childhood home was small, with low ceilings and caramel walls seeped with the faint aroma of Yemeni soup. My grandmother, Savta Sarah, a petite, dark-skinned woman always in a headscarf and a shapeless dress that revealed her skinny ankles, would grab my hand and sneak a candy into it, folding my fingers over it and smiling as if we shared a secret. My grandfather regarded me with a vague nod, his head buried in holy books. I used to stare at his curly beard, stained yellow by turmeric, and the ringlets that coiled on the sides of his face.
My father was one of a few Yemeni students at Netsach Boys’ School in downtown Petah Tikva, an area of town inhabited by European immigrants. It was there that he met Aaron Mahdoon, who lived a couple of blocks away in Sha’ariya. On the thirty-minute walk from school, they bonded over their love of soccer.
Aaron’s family had emigrated from northern Yemen, while my father’s parents came from the southern city of Taiz, home to the great seventeenth-century Jewish poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi. Both families were poor but my father’s family was worse off. Their house had no electricity, so my father studied for his exams under the streetlamp, sitting on the curb with his textbooks in the orange ring of light.
As his friendship with Aaron grew, my father became a frequent guest at the Mahdoons’: a vivacious, friendly bunch blessed with sharp tongues and a flair for melodrama. The siblings laughed and gossiped, argued and teased each other. They huddled around the radio, a rare commodity in Sha’ariya (television, which was seen as a corrupting force, would not reach Israel until a decade later). My father stole glances at Aaron’s younger sister, Yona, taken by her smile and fair skin, charmed by her witty retorts and fiery temper—a contrast to his dark complexion and wiry frame, his shy, gentle manners.
My mother can’t remember when their friendship turned into romance. The local theater on Sha’ariya’s main street showed three movies a week and my parents watched them all—Egyptian melodramas, Hollywood westerns, Indian movies starring Raj Kapoor. After the movies, they walked the streets and talked, the nights sweet with guava and citrus, the silence punctuated by the rhythmic chirping of crickets. In the distance, cars whispered from the highway.
* * *
—
IN 1959, MY father started writing poetry.
Israel was just recovering from years of austerity, the rationing of staple foods finally abolished. The Hollywood movie Exodus, starring Paul Newman, was being filmed in Israel, bringing international attention to the little country, no more than a dot on the world’s map. In Haifa, the violent Wadi Salib riots erupted, their resonance reverberating throughout the nation. Israel was a young country, with two wars behind it already and a population that was growing rapidly, far surpassing its resources. The mass immigration of the fifties changed the ethnic ratio within Israel’s Jewish population, which until then was predominantly Ashkenazi. The riots in Wadi Salib were the first civil protest against the mistreatment of Mizrahi in Israel. They were started by Moroccan immigrants who were housed in the formerly Arab neighborhood in slum-like conditions, while Polish immigrants who came at the same time were granted comfortable homes.
My father was twenty years old and fresh off his army service in the signal corps. During the day, he worked in menial jobs, and in the evenings took the bus to Tel Aviv, where he studied to be a lawyer. At night, he read books and wrote poetry. For my father, reading for pleasure was revolutionary: he wasn’t raised to love books, wasn’t recommended favorites by older siblings. His father read only religious texts and his mother was illiterate; like most Jewish Yemeni women of that generation, she communicated her joys and sorrows through oral storytelling and song.
My father wrote for an entire year, winter and summer. Whenever he saw my mother, who, despite her eighth-grade education, was a devoted bookworm and library dweller herself, he slipped handwritten notes into her palm. Then he mustered his courage and handed the poems to his literature teacher from high school. The teacher critiqued them mercilessly, littering the notebook with red ink. Crestfallen, my father concentrated on his studies and abandoned his literary aspirations.
∙ ∙ ∙
Come to me
whole,
Come to me
unveiled,
Come to me
revealed…
…Come
and we s
hall go
—HAIM TSABARI, “Come to Me,” 1959
* * *
—
ON THE FIRST day of 1961, my parents sat on an exposed water pipe near the local synagogue and made New Year’s resolutions to an audience of stars. The night fell over the city, a silk handkerchief moist with perfume. My mother doesn’t remember who said it first, just that right there and then, they decided to get married. They could live with her parents for a while before finding their own place, where my mother would hang curtains and my father would put up shelves for books. They set a date—a month away.
On their wedding day, my father wore a secondhand suit he’d bought at the flea market in Jaffa. My mother had received some money from her parents for a simple white dress. Her sisters had coiled her hair in rollers so it cascaded down her shoulders in loose ringlets. Family and friends were invited to an event hall in the city: long tables covered in maroon cloths and swan-shaped napkins tucked in wineglasses like a troupe of ballerinas. The guests dipped pita in hummus, nibbled on olives and pickles. Chicken legs in orange zest were served as a main course, and nondairy cakes were offered for dessert alongside muddy coffee spiced with cardamom. My parents did the twist, slow danced to Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never,” their foreheads gleaming, cigarette smoke floating above their heads like halos.
* * *
—
IN 1962 MY oldest brother was born. My father continued working during the day and studying in the evening. He no longer wrote poetry, just letters to Aaron, who was sailing to Greece and Turkey with the navy. The letters detailed soccer matches my father had watched, relayed neighborhood gossip, expressed his awe as he watched my brother’s first steps, heard his first words.
Over the next decade, my parents had three more children and moved four times, until they bought the apartment I was born in: a three-bedroom on the fifth floor of a six-story building overlooking the cluttered downtown, with a yellowish patch of lawn in the front. My father opened his own practice in a small office by the vegetable market, above a European deli. A few years later, he moved to a larger office with his brother in a more central location downtown.
My youngest brother was born in 1980. Soon after that, my parents started building our new home in Mahane Yehuda. Israel had just signed a peace agreement with Egypt, the first to be signed with an Arab country. A new decade loomed: people talked of the beginning of an era, of visiting the pyramids and drinking coffee in Cairo.
My father came home for lunch and siesta every day, before heading back to work. In those days, the city was shut down between two and four, when the sidewalks scorched your feet and the shadows folded into the houses. When we heard his key in the door, we sprinted from our rooms and jumped on him. He stood at the entrance with his briefcase at his feet, laughing. My mother waited her turn, smiling and wiping her hands on a kitchen towel.
I pause from writing, fingers hover over the keys.
I call my brother in Montreal. “Is this real? Were we really that happy?”
“I think we were,” he says.
∙ ∙ ∙
When I descend into oblivion
do not pull me back,
When I fall into the nether world
do not draw me out,
When I reach my grave
do not mourn me.
And on the day of my remembrance
do not visit me,
Remember me while I’m still on earth
—HAIM TSABARI, “Remember Me While I’m Still on Earth,” 1967
* * *
—
THE DAY HE died, I dug out my sister’s makeup from my closet, promising God that I wouldn’t steal anymore. I called my best friend, Nurit. “My father is dead,” I said, crying so hard that she couldn’t make out my words. I remembered how he sang to me, “When you cry, you’re not beautiful. Don’t cry, little girl, don’t cry.”
“There’s no such song,” I protested, sniffling. “You’re making it up!”
“I promise, it’s a real song,” he said, his hand to his heart. But he was laughing, and I didn’t believe him.
* * *
—
HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE congregated outside our house on the day of his funeral, filled our home during the shiva, eager to tell us of the favors my father had done for them, the services he hadn’t charged them for, the court fees he had paid on their behalf.
Hiding at the top of the stairs, a month shy of ten, I watched the men swaying back and forth in prayer, the living room rising and falling like waves at sea. I listened to the grown-ups talk about my father and it was like they were talking about somebody else. They said he was nearly deaf in one ear. I used to get frustrated with him for not answering when I called. They also said he was blind in one eye, the result of children’s play that had gone terribly wrong; someone had thrown a sharp object that struck him in the eye. His mother, distrustful of Western medicine, hadn’t taken him to a hospital until it was too late. That’s why he’d always worn dark-tinted glasses. I reexamined my memories of him in the light of this new information, as if I were rereading a mystery book knowing all the clues. For days I walked around with a hand covering my eye, startled by the loss of depth and perspective.
My tenth birthday was a month after his death. Instead of a book of my writing, I got three Barbies from three different relatives, all desperately trying to cheer me up. My favorite was the black one. She had curly hair and brown skin, closer in shade to mine. She’d also lost her father. Together we hid in my father’s closet, sitting between his hanging suits, hollow ghost dads that swayed and rubbed against my face, vaguely smelling of his cologne.
* * *
—
FOR THE NEXT few years, stories about my father’s generosity and kindness followed us everywhere. Plumbers, electricians, and mechanics pushed my mother’s hand away when she tried to pay. Packages arrived at our door, baskets full of chocolates and snacks. Being my father’s daughter became a safety net, the inheritance he’d left behind. Taxi drivers did a double take as they dropped me off at home. “You’re his daughter?” The big-muscled hot dog vendor outside my high school welled up in tears, and agreed to start a tab for me, a perk reserved for very few students, of which I took full advantage.
Years after his death, during my mandatory service in the IDF, I met an old Yemeni janitor, a civilian working for the army. We chatted. “I know only one man in Petah Tikva,” he said. “Haim Tsabari, the lawyer.”
I stared at him. “That’s my father.”
The man put his hand to his heart, his face crumpling. He used to work as a janitor at the courthouse in Tel Aviv. My father was the only lawyer who spoke to him, let alone befriended him. He would find the janitor in the hallways and ask him to take a break. The two of them would sit in the cafeteria and chat over coffee and a cigarette.
* * *
—
AFTER A FEW years the city decided to name the lane by our house after my father. A plaque was made, set into a rock; men in suits shook our hands, smiled at cameras. A photographer from the local paper snapped pictures of our family posing by the sign. My father became a public figure, a street name, a picture in history books.
As years passed his legend grew and my memories faded. I could no longer picture the way he walked, recall the sound of his voice. His facial expressions. His smell. I envied other people’s stories, coveted them, and then I began borrowing them, secondhand stories I recited to others. My own memories seemed small, insignificant, often patched together from snapshots: my father and me in his Ford Cortina, driving on the beach highway to Haifa; the two of us sitting on a wooden bench outside a corner store, sipping Sprite from green glass bottles on a hot summer day.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
ON THE PHONE from Israel, my mother answers my question
s about my father until her voice starts to give. I write everything she tells me, collecting details the way I would for a fictional character. How did he drink his coffee? Did he really put salt on oranges? I see them walking the streets of Sha’ariya, my father in his black-rimmed glasses, my mother in her knee-length skirt and seamed stockings.
“Everybody loved him,” she says. “He was the good one.”
“What do you mean?”
“When people first met us, they thought, What a great guy. But his wife, she’s such a snob.”
“Why?”
“You know me, I don’t always want to say hello to everybody. I have my own business to take care of. Your father—he had patience. He talked to everyone.”
I realize that she has also lived in the shadow of his memory.
* * *
—
MY FATHER TOOK me to the beach in Tel Aviv once. He let me use his back as a float, my hands wrapped tightly around his neck and our feet kicking in unison. We swam far, past the wave breakers, to where the city buildings were as small as Lego. In the deep water, his eyeglasses slipped off. He watched them disappear into the murky green but couldn’t dive for them with me holding on to his back.
My mother was furious when we got home late. “I was worried sick!” she yelled. “You drove back without your glasses?” From my hiding spot behind the couch, I watched my father work his charm. He spoke gently to her, stroked her hair, kissed her face. The wrinkle wedged in her forehead melted away and her lips formed a reluctant smile.
Sometimes, my father sang to my mother, “Yoanti, tamati, nishmati,” which would make us giggle and her blush. He’d grab her hands, taking her away from the vegetables she was chopping or the soup she was stirring, and turn her around to face him, forcing her to join him in a dance. Her name, Yona, means “dove” in Hebrew and so this became their song. “My dove, my pure, my soul. My rose without thorns. You’re mine and I’m yours.”
The Art of Leaving Page 25
