The Yellow Agricultural Gate

The sun just set. It is Thursday. I am sitting in one of the most enchanting places I have been to, at Rotman’s veranda restaurant in the village of Lotem in lower Galilee.  When my husband and I arrived in the village on Wednesday, we were waiting for its electric yellow gate to open, as we did today.  On both days we drove in easily; no one was at the gate to ask us questions. This was entirely different from what we saw a few days earlier at the agricultural yellow gates of two adjacent West Bank villages that could be any of several under Israeli control. There, residents waited for the Israeli military to open the gates, so they could pass with their goods through the Israeli check point and security separation barrier system. Sometimes they wait for hours for the gates to open and then they wait some more to pass through the gates if they are allowed.

The securty barrier system, made up of a separation wall and roads fenced on both sides with wires, was built by Israel to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating the country. There is disagreement whether it is the separation system that sharply reduced the number of suicide attacks, or whether it was the realization by the Palestinians that such attacks were counterproductive.  Most likely it’s both.

Fortunately for innocent Palestinians who must pass through Israeli checkpoints – even within the West Bank -  there is Machsomwatch, with whom we visited parts of the West Bank to witness what occurs in some of the checkpoints.  Admired by segments of the Israeli society and scorned by others, the organization describes itself as a movement of Israeli peace activists, women mostly, who oppose the Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinians' rights to move freely in their land. Through its activities it hopes to bring to an end the Israeli occupation, which causes damage to the Israeli and Palestinian societies alike. The organization also hosts Palestinian families for a beach day in Israel; many of the visitors see a sea for the first time.

The reasons for the reduced number of suicide attacks in Israeli notwithstanding, the atmosphere Wednesday night on the veranda restaurant in Lotem was entirely different from the mood we saw in the West Bank, where Arabs and Israelis live a separate lives. At Rotman’s, Israeli Arabs and Jews were dining side by side, in what seemed to be a harmonious environment. There were no radical Jewish settlers tormenting Arab villagers, young boys were not sought by the military and residents were not woken up at two in the morning, their home searched and ransacked. Here, Arab villagers and their Jewish neighbors could not be nicer to each other.

On the personal level, on Thursday, when we lunched in the Arab village of Pekiin, Nadia, the Muslim restaurant owner, told me her innermost personal problem thinking I was an Israeli living in Israel, not in New York. It is not necessary to retell her story.

“I swear to you, I never told this to anyone. I don’t know why I told you all of this,” she apologized tearfully. We hugged as friends do when I left .

The friendliness I witnessed may not symbolize Arab-Jewish relations in all of Israel, particularly not in the northern Galilee. Additionally, this apparent harmony may not last. It is certainly possible that relations between the two communities would explode one day. But for now it seems as if common interest and mutual respect take precedent over an ethnic divide.
 
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On this Mother's Day

Though the commercialization of Mother’s Day may overshadow the true meaning of the day – paying tribute to mothers or other motherly figures in our lives - I loved the gifts I both gave and received today, the most cherished is the blessing of being a mother to my daughter Odellia, who was a true miracle baby, and a grandmother to Gabriella and Jacob, eight and five.

            We started the day, together with my son-in-law Richard and my husband Stephen, watching Gabriella in a play, moving along to a lovely lunch, after which Odellia, Jacob and I spent the afternoon buying seasonal planting flowers, which I potted for my daughter with the help of my grandchildren. Throughout this lovely day I kept thinking about the chipped cream porcelain woven basket, adorned with two roses on each side, that is in my possession, a Mother’s Day gift I had bought my mother with my savings when I was fourteen, in Israel.  But it was really my mother who I was thinking about. 

            When I was growing up my beautiful mother Khaya suffered from severe recurring depressions. Perhaps she should have been hospitalized at that time rather than being treated by her own doctors, primarily with electroshock and heavy medication for which my father paid huge sums. He refused to have her institutionalized and separated from my sister and me, since she only suffered from her “nerve disease” in winter time, recovering mentally and often thriving in summer, becoming a mother who cared for her daughters, and being always over-protective of me, the fragile looking child I was. 

           When she was in good health I felt secured with her, and even loved, for she was the mother who wished she were sick rather than me when I was ill. She was the mother who took me to my favorite restaurant - a rare outing when I was a child - watching me eat the food I liked, ordering nothing for herself. She fought to place me in a better grammar school and went to school to defend me when necessary. She made for me the most beautiful Purim costumes, for most of which I won first prizes in school (Purim is a Jewish holiday that commemorates the rescue of the Jewish people in ancient Persia). She was the mother who took me for my first bra even though, at fourteen, I did not yet need one, but she said that she wanted me to have pretty breasts when I grew up to be a woman. She was the mother who took me to the dermatologist to prevent acne and to the gynecologist when my menstruation was unsteady. She was the mother who made sure that my sister and I wore the finest clothes and that we ate the best food. 

            Though as a child, my mother regularly called me offensive names, unsuitable not only for a child’s ears, I loved her still. Did I think it was my fault that my mother suddenly turned into an unrecognizable woman when she suffered from her uncontrollable behavior when she was ill? Did I feel helpless because there was nothing I could do to help her? The answers to these questions I do not have. What I am certain of is the enormous compassion and love I felt for her in sickness and in health. 

When I was thirty-four she asked me if she was a good mother to me. I told her that she was, doing the best she could. If she asked me the same question today, I would tell her it was a wonder how she managed at all. 

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On this Holocaust Memorial Day

On this Holocaust Memorial Day I want to pay tribute to members of my family who perished in the Holocaust and to those who survived it. 

In 2008, with seven of my maternal cousins I visited Plunge, our mothers’ hometown. With no Jews left in twon after WWII, Jewish life there all but died. Walking there I could not help but think about how all those picturesque houses I saw – among them my mother’s house that was made into a women’s clothing store in 2005 - had once belonged to Jews who, during the Nazi years, were forced out of their homes into ghettos, then murdered.   

We visited the areas that used to be the Telz and Shavli ghettos, to where our family was taken. We visited, too, the nearby forest of Koshan, where my grandmother, aunts, uncle, my unborn cousin, and other relatives are buried in mass graves, together with eighteen-hundred other Jews from their town. By those graves we solemnly recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead. 

We walked by the paths on which my aunts Sorke and Eerle walked daily - four miles each way from the ghetto to the German aircraft factory, where they were forced laborers, and back to the ghetto. Young and good looking they survived the 1941 Koshan massacre, witnessing the murder of their mother and sisters alongside the hundreds of others from their home town. Their brother Itzik was murdered in Telz, probably in the Rainiai forest, in the outskirts of town.

Having immigrated to Palestine in 1933, eight years before the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, my mother (and two of her siblings) did not experience the fear and horror of the World War II years that her family did. But she might have never forgiven herself for escaping that terror.

We also visited with Jacob Bunka, eighty-two at the time, who has been for years the only remaining Jew in Plunge. He lived with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment, which he had turned into an archive, documenting and memorializing the life of Jewish Plunge that ended with the Nazi slaughter. A known carver, he had also erected numerous towering totem-like sculptures made of tree trunks, commemorating the Nazi victims of the killing fields at Koshan and other forests. 

In the summer of 2010 I traveled through Poland with my paternal cousin Anat, to trace our family’s history. My father and her mother, their parents and siblings, escapes the Holocaust: In 1926, after witnessing and stopping an anti-Semitic incident, my grandmother Brucha Bakman decided in no uncertain terms that her family will immigrate to Palestine.

We traveled through the horrors of Birkenau and Auschwitz. Nothing that I haves studied, read, or seen in films, documentaries or photos; none of the interview I had watched and the Holocaust museums I had visited, including Yad Vashem; not even my previous visit to the Terezienstadt concentration camp near Prague, had prepared me for those death camps. What socked me most was the efficiency with which the Nazis ran their oiled death machine and industry. They left nothing, not even the minutest detail to chance: they carefully calculated where the trains carrying their Jewish human transport would first stop, where their victims would initially be selected for immediate death or for forced labor, often by young SS soldiers; where their victims first undressed, where they were first disinfected and shaved, their hair used by the Nazis to manufacture fabric, and where they were disinfected for the second time if they had not been immediately selected for the gas chambers; where their clothing was first fumigated, where their clothing was fumigated for the second time; where their clothing and other belongings were collected, sorted and stored; where they would die by the Zyclon B poisoning gas, and where and how their corpses would be burned. It took merely twenty-five minutes from the time the human cargo arrived to the camps selected to die and turned into ash. 

In Krakow, from where we left for the camps, a Jewish festival was taking place. When we returned there from our emotional trip the town was festive with live Hasidic music and dancing. I needed to be among the celebrators. Anat, who was shocked at my ability to do so immediately after the horror we just saw, could not. But for me, standing in the center of Krakow, where the Jewish Ghetto once was, surrounded by hundreds of joyous Jews and non-Jews alike, celebrating Jewish life, was the very answer to the place from where we had just return. To me, it epitomized Jewish continuity in Eastern Europe in spite of Hitler. Nothing would have angered him more, I thought tearfully, than seeing the great granddaughter of Samuel Bakman, who died of starvation in the Radom Ghetto, and the great grandniece of his sisters Khaya, who was murdered in Auschwitz, taking part with so many other descendants of his victims, in the revival of Jewish culture in Poland. 

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On This Passover Eve

When, this past Monday, on Passover eve, I began to write a new post, I meant to devote it to President Obama’s pro-Zionist speech in Jerusalem (March 21) and to the meaning of Zionism, and relate it to Passover, the Jewish holiday of freedom. But the smell of burning onions emanating from my kitchen drew me from my study back to my kitchen, as I prepared for our family Seder. I was foolish to presume that I could host a Seder in the evening and devote time to write a post. I haven't written for a month, I thought, it can wait another day or two, or….

The act of turning over the frying onions in a large cast iron skillet and their smell took me back to another place and another time, and to the two women who most influenced my life, each a Zionist in her own way.
Where I went back to was the terrace in my family's ground floor apartment in Tel Aviv. The time was sixty-two years ago, on Passover eve. The women were my paternal grandmother Bracha and my mother Khaya. They were cooking for all thirty or forty of us – my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins, who would gather in my grandparents’ home for the festive Seder.
They were frying onions and gossiping at the same time. So that I wouldn’t hear the gossip, they sent me to the terrace – to no avail - to watch over the cooling onions.

My grandmother, an ardent Orthodox Jew, and a true feminist decades before the term reached the Orthodox community, literally forced my grandfather to agree to emigrate from Poland to Palestine.
The immediate cause of my family’s emigration was an anti-Semitic incident my grandmother witnessed while traveling on a train during one of her business trips. She was sitting in a car full of passengers, some of whom were Orthodox Jews. When one of the Christian passengers, accompanied by a few of his brute friends, pushed off a Jewish passenger’s hat and laughingly took out a folding knife from his pocket and moved to cut off the young man’s beard, my grandmother grabbed his arm and commanded him to stop.

When she arrived home she waited to talk to her husband without their children present. Only then she proceeded to tell him about the train incident. “We are going to Palestine,” she told her husband in no uncertain terms at the end of her story. With those five words she saved her family from the madness that would erupt in Europe with the rise of Hitler less than a decade later. In February 1926, on board the ship Dacha, my teenage father and his family arrived in the northern port city of Haifa where they first settled.

When my mother was sixteen or seventeen, she belonged to the Revisionist Zionist movement Beitar (founded in 1927 in Latvia). By the time she had graduated from Plunge’s Hebrew Gymnasium (high school), she was fully committed to the Zionist movement, planning to immigrate to Palestine, to take part in the rebuilding of a free, democratic Jewish state there.

In 1932, when she was eighteen, my mother left home for the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda, or Memel. There she joined the HeHalutz (The Pioneer) movement, training to become a pioneer in Palestine. It was during that year of training while working on a farm in Memel, that she experienced the strongest expression of anti-Semitism she had personally endured. Working much faster than the non-Jewish farmers - picking strawberries as I recall from her stories - they threatened to kill her if she did not slow down. Perhaps it was her beauty as well as her efficiency that irritated them.

In 1933, my mother left Lithuania for Palestine aboard the ship “Martha Washington,” with other HeHalutz members. Her family members who stayed behind were not as lucky as my father’s family.
Together with Blumma, a woman she had met on the boat and with whom she became life-long friends, my mother arrived at a settlement in northern Palestine, where she became a legendary cook, preparing meals for her fellow pioneers. Blumma, a heavyset cheerful woman of whom I have fond memories, lost her laughter after one, and then another of her sons fell in Israel’s wars. But my mother lost her own laughter much earlier.

When she left her family behind in Lithuania at the age of eighteen, she followed a legacy of courage, determination and perseverance, and a commitment to a cause. But her bravery, as well as her sense of purpose and resolve, gave way to seasonal depression and despair that began when she was in her early thirties, shattering not only her own life, but the lives of those who lived closest to her - my father, my sister, and me. We loved her nonetheless.

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Syria

Though I intended to write sooner, it has been three weeks since I posted a new piece on my blog. I meant to write a post about Syria. But I procrastinated. Besides, those who know the book business tell me that I should write only about my memoir No Laughter in Winter, if I want to have it published.

As it happens Syria is closely intertwined with my past in a very real way. If you read my recent post about my family trip to the Golan Heights, or other posts I have written, you know that a Syrian missile killed my husband forty-five years ago. It was a tragedy that shaped my life; it is what much of my memoir is about. 

For the past two years, another generation of Syrian soldiers is killing not their Israeli neighbors (though they probably would if they could), but their own people. By UN estimates there are 70,000 dead Syrians, and according to the organization Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), among the slaughtered there are over 3,700 children and 2,150 women. These figures do not include the wounded and the tortured. Among the latter there are hundreds of children too. Additionally, there are about 670,000 refugees and 2.5 million estimated internally displaced Syrians.

Syrian soldiers have had the reputation of being particularly cruel to their enemies. I can never forget the shocking photos published internationally by various news organizations after the October 1973 war, showing the disfigured bodies of Israeli soldiers who had been captured by the Syrian army, their mutilated penises stuck in their mouths.  Once, those defaced soldiers were beautiful, healthy men, like my husband had been before he was burnt beyond recognition. Decades later the Syrian army, now fighting to save its patron, is just as cruel. 

“They are your enemy and mine,” an acquaintance said to me recently during my visit to Israel. “Why should we care about those Syrian civilians?” This, I should add, is not a widespread response among ordinary Israelis to the Syrian civil war.

“Because they are human beings,” I replied. “Old and young; mothers and fathers, and children who are jailed, tortured and killed.” War. Civil, or international. It forever changes the lives of those who are affected.

True, like everyone else, Israelis in particular, I worry about Syria’s future: what type of government will be established there when Assad is defeated and the rebels take over? Most alarmingly, in whose hands will the country’s huge chemical arsenal will fall? Will Hezbollah and Hammas, or other terrorist groups in our globalized world get hold of it, ? And what relationship will a new Syrian government have with Iran? These are frightening questions.

But the women  - wherever they are and whatever nationality they hold – those who like me in the past, see their unrecognizable husbands;  those who see their children, brothers and sisters, those who hear their last breaths, are my sisters in grief, past or present.  

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In The Military

On Thursday, the Pentagon lifted its 1994 ban on women in combat. Presumably, the model the U.S. has studied for integrating women into combat is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which enjoys the reputation of exhibiting more gender equality than any army in the world, even though Israeli women rarely fight wars. And though Israeli woman serve as fighter pilots, infantry officers, naval captains and Humvee drivers, only 3 percent serve in combat roles. 

The Pentagon news and the Israeli example brought me back to my own military service in Israel five decades ago. 

In my yet unpublished memoir I recognize one of the happiest days of my life to be the day I left my military base for the last time. After a two-year mandatory service, checkered with numerous infractions and courts martial, I was honorably discharged from the army. I remember the great sense of liberation I felt as I walked for the last time from the barrack that was mine toward my base’s checkpoint. As I was leaving my base behind, I walked slowly and deliberately, taking great pleasure in each stride, for each step I took on the base’s main road on my way out brought me closer to freedom, my invisible shackles melting into thin air. 

I was wasted in the army, not because it did not recognize my talents. The issue was less about me than it was about the status of women of my time in the military, and about the exercise of authority, a game one had to understand and know how to play not only to succeed in the military, but to endure it.

I fit in, socially. But little did I know that it would be in the military where my own heart, that which sought wisdom and meaning and fulfillment, would clash with the structure of authority; clash, but not crash. It took tragedy, only three years after my military service ended, for me deal with power and authority the correct way.  

In spite of its grueling nature, basic training was the only good experience I had in the army. On sandy hills I learned target-shooting with my heavy, Czech-made M-16, that shook my whole body with each shot; to throw hand-grenades; to shoot an Uzi; to crawl with a heavy kit-bag filled with military gear and hide in ditches; to watch for the enemy on my left, the enemy on my right, and camouflage; to build tents, peel potatoes, wash aluminum pots ten times my size, dust my barrack, shine my boots, and press my uniform to perfection. But in the end, basic training did not mean much, since in my time women in the military, officers including, filled administrative positions only, with many lower rank female soldiers wasting their talents, often serving coffee to their male superiors and doing other mundane chores. 

On my first night’s watch duty, I was standing alone, guarding an empty spot that had but a small lone bench. The night was pitch black; the air sweet; the silence piercing. All I could see were the shining stars; all I could hear was the faded sound of barking dogs in the distance. Mutely, I was humming familiar songs in my mind so I would stop thinking about how scared I was. Suddenly I heard gun shots from somewhere afar. Fearful, I dropped my gun and ran as fast as I could, an act punishable with a jail term if caught. I do not recall where I ran to. But when all was quiet, I went back to my spot and completed my task. It made little sense to stand there alone, as did most of my military service. 

The Army did not need many of us - females who came out of high school with no skills, but it used us nonetheless, and we did not speak out. I did, in my own insignificant, yet costly way.

To my satisfaction, research and studies about the same issues I confronted appeared decades later with the maturity of the Israeli feminist movement in general and the field of women’s studies in Israeli academia in particular.

Two weeks ago my Israeli great niece Naama successfully graduated her officer's course. I would like to believe that she'll find more meaning in her service than I found in mine. 

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A Family Trip

Last Friday was extraordinary for me and for some members of my extended family.

Forty-five years after my husband Yigal was killed when his armored vehicle was hit by a Syrian shell, twenty-five of my relatives and I went on a trip tracking his battalion’s path on its way to capturing the Golan Heights in a suicidal battle that lasted two days – the last days of the 1967 Six Day War.

We were three generations of cousins, my niece and nephew and their children, and Yigal’s brother and his wife. Some were too young to recall the tense period that led to the war, or know anything about the war or about my past for that matter, though some cousins knew about Yigal from their parents.

We began the trip in the area where Yigal’s brigade gathered before battle. There, sobbing, his brother told us about Yigal’s bravery: Engulfed in flames, he jumped out of his burning armed vehicle, rolled on the ground to extinguish the fire, then, under fierce shelling, running forward he continued to command his unit until he collapsed. Only his belt was left on his body, its metal buckle melted.

He was taken to the hospital suffering burns over ninety-two percent of his body. There, he asked his doctor not to tell me about his injury because I was three months pregnant (I subsequently miscarried).

Earlier, when treated by the field doctors, he asked them not to tell me about his injury so I wouldn’t be disturbed while studying English. I was not. He must have confused his desire to enroll in the Technion (the Israeli equivalent to MIT), to study engineering, with my "English studies."

Our group then drove to Givat Ha’em (Mother’s Hill), from where his battalion began fighting. It was already there that his vehicle was hit. Rusty, it is still standing there as a memorial.

Someone placed the picture Yigal’s brother brought with him safely on the vehicle’s corner. I had planned to tell my family about Yigal and read from my still unpublished memoir a chapter that tells about the war and about Yigal’s death. All wanted me to speak by the vehicle.

There I told them about the tense days preceding the war, when Israel as a nation feared another holocaust because in his speeches President Nasser of Egypt promised to throw all Israelis to the sea. He had already taken aggressive actions that violated the terms under which Israel withdrew from the Sinai Desert a decade earlier.

I told them about our hope that a war would not break out, and about Yigal’s and my goodbyes. I told them about the knock on my door in the darkness of night. I told them about my trip to the hospital, the way I saw him burnt beyond recognition, and about the sound of his last breaths. I told them what his commander wrote about his leadership qualities and his camaraderie and about incidents in our life together that exhibited those characteristics.

I told them about my aunts and uncles – their parents – who, one-by-one filled my apartment upon hearing of Yigal’s death, and about the appearance of his brother there, having been called from the front, and how we silently hugged. Not a dry eye was left in that apartment. I told them that in the corner grocery store, my neighbors were whispering that the silence emanating from our home was worse than a thousand screams.

There was hardly a dry eye left on Mother’s Hill.

We then continued our journey on the path Yigal’s battalion fought until they conquered the Golan Heights, from where the Syrian had constantly shelled Israeli settlements in the valley beneath them.

We ended the trip with a family picnic, on a spot overlooking the now peaceful valley. A family bonded by its closeness and rich history.

My American family – my husband of forty years, my daughter and her family, were not with me on this trip. But that was fine. My past, that which occurred before they entered my life to my delight, belongs to me. The rest belongs with them.

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