CHAPTER 5 - Aron in America and the Sisters at Home
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| Aron in America, 1909 |
In 1909, when Aron went away to America for the first time, it was at the invitation of the US Department of Agriculture, no less. All this is due to his fabled discovery of that wild wheat. His fame achieves both a position at the agency and a fee of three hundred dollars a year. As we have heard, his trip is successful - he addresses a Dry-Farming Congress in Canada, studies the flora of Northern California, lectures at Berkeley and in Chicago. He also goes further afield and in 1912, Aron visits Kew Gardens in London where he marvels at the wonderful diversity of the plants there and comments wryly on the horse riders in Hyde Park: ‘maybe they know all about etiquette, but they don’t know how to ride a horse.’
He visits Henrietta Szold, secretary of the Station back home and their strong friendship becomes even stronger and he even meets with presidential candidate Roosevelt to discuss his vision for the colony. The lecture lasted an hour and forty-five minutes and Aron wrote of that occasion: ‘I shall henceforth be known as the man who succeeded in shutting the presidential hopeful’s mouth for a hundred minutes.’
The family miss him terribly but Aron is conquering the world and will return a changed man. On his trip he is, as we have heard, able to secure financial backing for the research station at Atlit and on his return, he builds up a large collection of geological and botanical samples and establishes an extensive library of all the many subjects he is passionate about.
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| Malka, Rifka, Efraim, Sara & Alexander in Zikhron |
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| The Family in the Courtyard |
They are all waiting for the return of that prodigal son.
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| Aron on his Return |
‘We should picture ourselves on Aron’s return from one or other of his trips, in his study. The table is covered with plants, sketches, reference books and specimens of every sort. A veritable Cabinet of Curiosities. Aron and Sara work side by side in familiar silence. From another room, we hear Rifka practising her violin, the kitten at her side. She falters, then starts up again.
All this is observed without the benefit of words. Just the sound of a fiddle over - Rifka’s violin - which brings to mind, the sound of grass growing, or water being threaded and plaited by the wind, like a girl’s remembered hair by the river bank.
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| Rifka Labelling Plants |
Yes, I remember the kitten quite clearly. It was Rebekka’s kitten - Rifka - as we knew her. A sweet grey kitten with the softest fur and big winsome green eyes - a little like Rifka herself. Fragile yet with the sharpest little kittenish claws imaginable. A picnic is opened, bread and cheese spread on a red and white cloth by Ahmed, I think that was what his name was or was it Farrid? Abu Farrid.
The maid servant, yes, Ayla, I remember her well - pretty, dark, heart-shaped face with two distinctive tattoos on her cheekbones - prepares the coffee. There are, of course, no pictures of her, so an equivalence must be sought. Idealised, perhaps, generic. The truth is, we did not see her. She was invisible as air or water.
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| Ayla Invisible |
The young people tuck in with alacrity and the hunger that comes from rising at dawn without breakfast, is quickly satiated. Ayla pours the coffee from a brass finjan into tiny glasses. The stream of black liquid catches the light. The coffee is stirred with copious spoons of sugar. The sun rises higher in the sky colouring the scene with gold.
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| Sara with Olive Branch |
Sara’s face lifted to the sun, glows golden as she drinks the scalding sweet liquid.
Yes I must agree. Coffee is what one misses most from one’s former life. Coffee. And of course, love...
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| Pigeon with Note |
A pair of hands, a woman’s hands grasp the fluttering pigeon in a tight embrace. And undoes a tiny rolled up note from the bird’s collar.
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Of the wind there is more - much more to say. It was the wind, that monstrous Hamsin, that brought us together in the first place. The birds came later. This particular one, the unwitting betrayer right at the end. The wind is actually a character in this play; the pigeon too, a very important, if not vital protagonist in the story that follows. Of the small settlement - this is where our lives unfolded and it will reveal itself to you in all its simple glories and manifold flaws. Pictures too, if she has her way...
Call me a purist - but I have always been of the opinion that a great story stands alone and needs no illustration. But Sara was different. She loved to mark everything, as if to keep alive the passage of time with lines of pencil or ink. The moment preserved in all its truth - before the lies began. My Uber Author might agree with this sentiment. She too likes illustrations - though naturally, always based on historical 'truth'.
Alex, of course, the commensurate, charismatic charlatan would disagree. The bigger picture, that lover of Hollywood movies would say, always needs clarification. People are idiots, Absa. They need guidance! A not altogether wise choice of words but then Alex was nothing if not convinced of his own moral highground. A manipulator of opinion, a teller of tall tales, a lover of young girls. Always a hidden agenda. A handsome pervert, some would say. But more of that later. Of Aron, there is also much to say. Born in the Old Country, in 1876, he came out with his parents as I have said, at the impressionable age of six along with his four-year-old brother Zvi.
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| Aron, a Serious Child & a Serious Young Man |
Aron is a serious child and a serious, young man, a born leader - I think he was indeed born that way - preternaturally wise and yes - perhaps a little arrogant - the arrogance that comes with great intelligence - genius even. Which does not mean he was an easy person. In fact quite the opposite. He was an impossible man! Stubborn, irascible, always convinced of his righteousness. Never married. No one was good enough. The Mother despaired. Certainly, there was always the Bedouin girl. I have forgotten her name. Those twin tattoos. One looking this way, the other, that way. Maidservant, silent companion, never bed-mate.
Aron was, if all things are considered, not a lover of women - or men for that matter. Certainly he worshipped his mother and sisters. Was polite and charming to the town’s ladies, a good conversationalist, a neat and careful dresser and a good dancer. A lover of beautiful things. There were many of the ladies of the town who would have paid a king’s ransom to be in his bed. None were selected. Aron had more important things on his mind. The rumours were that he remained celibate until his death in that cold, grey Northern sea. Unless you count Sonya, of course. So, to continue...
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| Ayla in the Long Grass |
A shadow falls across the grass.
Sara with a box of watercolour paints a branch of delicate yellow sweet bay, in her sketchbook with deft, careful brush strokes. Almost hidden by the long grass the young girl watches, being careful to keep always out of sight. She ducks behind a bush.
Sara looks up puzzled sensing the movement: “Ayla?!”, she says.
But the long grass is empty. Ayla has gone.
Sara’s blue-grey eyes look quizzical. This story is her point of view. But Ayla too has her point of view.
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Sara’s point of view? Or the imagined version of her story - but I should not complain. Everything is only a version of what really happened. Everyone had their own story, their own subjective verité. Some to save their own skins, others out of pure stubbornness or spite. The truth, is known only to God. And possibly to story tellers! Ha! I hear you ask. This is a biographical tale, ‘based on’ the history of the Nili spies, which we all know, some of us by personal experience. What more can we offer to the story? What gives you your glorious degree of invention? I am here then to temper any unnecessary flights of fancy on your part. This is a story that must be told, warts and all, in the truest way possible!
We humans have only partial memory, vague and inaccurate recollection. We cannot be held accountable for our lapses, for our failed rememberings, only for our actions, in the light of these failures. Unaccountably too, Sara’s hair has gone from light to dark-coloured. I remember it as something in between - variable as the sea, mercurial - a little like Madame Bovary’s eyes. Emma - was she brown-eyed or blue or even deep-black? No one seems certain. Least of all her author.
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| Sara and Modern Day Zikhron |
And her eyes - Sara’s, not Mme. Bovary - obviously they were neither blue nor brown! But a curious shade of turquoise-green like the sea, a shade which could darken with mood or weather. Like our own Mare Mediterranean - the sea that was the centre of our world. That great glittering oval that linked Tyre and Sidon with Egypt, with Tripoli and Alexandria, with Jaffa and Damascus. The centre of all ancient civilisations, the meeting point of east and west, the undulating, constantly shifting, dividing line between Asia and Europe, between Islam and Christendom - with our tribe stuck uneasily between these warring polarities, united in nothing except their hatred of the Other and their utter contempt for us. Between barbarian and civilised souls, between ignorance and culture, we were determined to remain Jews and to forge our own path in our ancient land which was rather inconveniently, inhabited by some of those, whom we considered to be, uncivilised souls. Not popular philosophy in your day, I know - but that is how we saw it - and we knew nothing of what you and your friends call - ‘political correctness’ - merely the needs of our day to day struggles, in this strange, foreign land where every glance was either hostile or servile. We had not learned the need to apologise and we never would.
It is at this point, we must ask ourselves, what is it about the girl? Is Ayla - yes I have remembered her name - on the same side as the children? What is it about her that makes us ask this question? Is there perhaps something a little ambivalent about her tentative presence. The shadow that falls across their path prefiguring all kinds of conflicts and resonating to a long ago mysterious past when her ancestors were thrown into the desert - cast out with NO water!!
Is she, this silent child - I hesitate to ask - but feel I must point it out - the mute stranger in our midst, the barbarian at the gate? Our buried conscience, sign of the disaster to come...? But on with the story of our little town built with the blood, sweat and tears of those first pioneers - and the blood, sweat and tears of those we cast aside, like Ishmael and Hagar in the desert, abandoned to their fate fate..’
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| The Pink-Shuttered Bungalow with Red-Tiled Roof |
A pink-shuttered bungalow with red-tiled roof, surrounded by palm and olive trees. We hear the sound of Smetana’s ‘Má Vlast’ - ‘My Fatherland’. A hot wind blows the palm trees. Through the window we see Rifka playing her violin. Delilah the cat, watches her as it toys with a dismembered mouse. Rifka shrieks as she sees the mouse and the violin music stops with a jarring shudder.
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‘Well there you are. I could have sworn she played the piano not the violin! Then again, perhaps she played both. It was a long time ago. An eternity. And that half remembered melody, Smetana’s ‘Má Vlast’, the sound of the Old Country, a European river, neat villages, scenes of various, vicious pogroms, a bustling town with its antisemitic populace. Marching bands, the drum beats of Cossacks, rollicking inns filled with drunken peasants, green fields, dark forests and always that rippling, green river that brought death in its wake. The land we exchanged for our own barren Promised Land. A tune to be borrowed a thousand times and reinterpreted as our own national song.
She was musical little Rebekka/Rifka, a beautiful, highly strung girl! Capable of great artistry and equally capable of inflicting great damage too. On herself, or others. Like the cat whose name I think was Delilah. Or was it Rahab? who always had one or other curious paw bandaged or salved from its latest sally into the bushes after shrews and field mice and the occasional snake? Yes, memory is a funny thing - some images are sharp as new pins, searing in their intensity, stinging like the disinfectant we used to wash childhood cuts and scrapes, others have the shape and sound of old cotton balls, shapeless clothing, discarded things, a pile of clothes on a tiled bathroom floor, like a coat that once fitted but now belongs to a stranger.
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| The Aronson House from the Nili Museum |
But the house that pink-shuttered ‘bungalow’ of blessed memory - it is engraved in steel on my retina. A single-story, Middle Eastern, colonial house in simple local style - one room leading to the next, a long dark passage - like Dante’s wood - so that you had to go through all the bedrooms to get to the bathroom. The bathroom, with its green tiles and enamel claw-footed bath - like a sarcophagus, imported from Paris or some other place - the hot and cold running water, the polished brass taps - of which Aron was so damned proud! For this was Sara’s home, scene of many of her living accomplishments - she painted like an angel, baked bread lighter than a cloud, sewed all her own clothes - and Rifka’s - cooked, collated, curated, dreamed - and because of those dreams - place of her death too..’
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Light enters through swathes of mosquito netting at the windows. Twin beds, a dresser with jug and bowl and dressing table with family photos, ivory hair brushes, mirror and Sara’s inlaid mother-of-pearl box, a gift from her brother Aron on her eighteenth birthday. Rifka sitting on her bed holds a little nail scissors in her right hand. Slowly she inscribes a shallow cut on her left wrist. The blood is bright red. We stay on the image for longer than is strictly comfortable.
The door opens and Sara enters. With a sharp intake of breath she registers the scene.
Rifka quickly hides her wrist in the bed clothes.
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| Rifka in Sunhat |
‘That pale face with the guarded, faintly hooded eyelids and the deep shadows beneath those sorrowful eyes which gave her the appearance of a long suffering, recovering invalid, the slightly snub nose - unusual in Jewish families and possibly inherited from a long ago rape or pogrom in the long ago country of our parents’ genesis. The pretty pout and soft hair overwhelmed by an enormous, oval straw hat, the vast brim of which shades her egg-shell-pink face, although the light piercing the fine straw illuminates the sprinkling of red-gold freckles on her cheeks. These she hates with a passion and powders fastidiously every morning with an art-nouveau compact from Paris - such little treats can be found at the town’s apothecary - the downy cheeks she scrubs every evening with lemon juice from the twisted citrus tree in the courtyard I know as well as the back of my hand - and a pumice stone imported from the island of Sicily. The famous Lipari pumice stone, so light it floats on water, every cultured woman’s beauty aide, utilised for skin care and scraping excess callouses off feet too long encased in tight, buttoned boots on stony paths and from skipping too earnestly across wild, Middle Eastern hilltops after her brother’s latest passion. Botany, geology and lastly spying. That Aeolian stone ever so slightly pitted and abrasive, created by the last fierce, volcanic eruptions of that island, whose Jews were expelled so long ago by one Duke from Naples or another. That light-as-air conglomerate, always reminding me of Rifka’s fine, powdery complexion.
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| The Sisters in their Childhood Bedroom |
Yes, the sisters’ bedroom - a child’s room in many ways - now inhabited by the two girls in the bloom of their youth. Two rag dolls still rest on the younger sister’s bed. A candle in a blue enamel holder on the dressing table. They had grown from children to womanhood in this plain room. Simple, sparse, like our lives were then. A plain oval mirror, like our Mare Mediterranean - I can see in my posthumous mind's eye the green glass reflection of the girl I thought I loved, and the image of another woman looking over her shoulder with a look I had not yet learned to interpret. Jug and bowl, faded enamel with blue roses - an impossibility, you know - blue roses - brought along on that famous ship and the uncomfortable dirty train from Romania and on the bumpy wagon chased by little boys - scruffy little urchins, beggars, would-be-porters, sellers of sesame 'beigele', from that smelly, dilapidated, crowded port of Jaffa. The time-honoured ewer and jug - for that was how we washed ourselves - top and tail - before that famous bathroom. Jug filled by that hewer of wood and drawer of water whose face we did not see - fires lit to warm that water - mirror shone to the dull, silver alchemy of poisonous mercury by much careful rubbing of a soft dish cloth, eyes averted for fear of the one that might look back. 'Ayin ha'ra'. The Evil Eye. Framed photographs of the ancestors cleaned with a sponge dipped in vinegar and salt, brass taps polished with a mixture of carbolic and sand - by the young dark-skinned girl, Alya, basin emptied by the same, sheets - delicately embroidered with a thin thread of red - washed and laundered, ironed with that heavy, seething contraption that lived and breathed on the fiery furnace of the corner stove - also imported from Romania or was it Bruxelles? The Kingdom of Belgium of that sadistic Leopold who single handedly plundered and murdered with no qualms, in darkest Africa. Did we do the same, in the name of a Land for the Jews? If we are guilty of such heinous sins, one must remember, in our defence, that that was the ethos of the time. Empire and colonisation. ‘Bringing civilisation’ to those we conquered and making them serve us for the honour.
The freshly-laundered, mosquito netting, at that window - white as a wedding veil, white as a winding sheet, taken down and laundered once a season. The white shroud that would wrap my loved one’s body in that final act of respect and love.
All these tasks are attended to with a mixture of endless patience and apparent dedication by the silent, servant girl, little Ayla with the twin indigo tattoos. Her implacable face, like a Roman Janus seal, looking now to the left, now to the right as she irons, washes and darns, scrubs dirty sheets in a sudsy, wooden tub and hangs the linen on a make-shift washing line in that brittle, burning sunlight of that long ago colony.
I stood once at that window all night, threw pebbles to wake the girl of my dreams - fell in love, at least twice with both sisters, in different order and sometimes simultaneously. Ha, I hear you say, Rachel and Leah. The reason we lift the wedding veil - so that one might not - God forbid! - end up with the wrong sister. How fickle to love both of them! But you would be wrong. I loved them both in different ways, in my own way.
Rifka first, it must be admitted. She was nineteen years old, very young and virginal and excruciatingly protective of her maidenhood, when I wrote her a poem - not a very good one:
‘No my child, you can’t have my love.
You’re much too small and delicate...
Do you remember how hard you cried
When you said I bit your white neck
And the crimson blood flowed?
This, my dear vexed me, believe me, it did,
Because it was only a kiss, just a kiss!’
Our relationship so full of a teenage girl’s fears and my ardent, sex-starved, youthful endeavours, was doomed to failure.
I wrote, foolishly thinking to turn her hard heartedness into passion: ‘I loved you and begged you abjectly, like a pauper asking for alms, to open a window in your heart’ - though I might have mentioned, it was her sex that I wanted to open like a flower - ‘I went down on my knees, my heart bled until I was exhausted, and in the end I’ve lost and the worm has won...’
I gabled too about my hopes, to have children, make a family. None of this was to be, for Rifka turned me away, and I loved the other sister, for Sara was the true flame that lit my burning heart..’
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It is evening in the family house. A lamp surrounded by a dim cloud of insistent insects, burns on the rickety, wrought-iron table in the centre of a plant-filled courtyard. The cat plays with a ball of wool as Malka, a sheen of sweat on her furrowed brow, knits a long black shawl with total concentration only broken by her knitting needles clacketty-clacking, the incessant whine of mosquitoes and the interrupted sound of Rifka with her violin, her delicate, girlish fingers on the strings, fine, raised, red scars on her wrists. She looks up, swats at a mosquito, misses and sighs in frustration. At the table Sara sits intent on her work. Her face with the serious grey-brown eyes of an intelligent young woman as she paints a pile of seed pods in yellow and green watercolours.
A man appears at the window, one whom you might recognise.
Sara’s expression as she carries on working gives no clue as to what she is thinking.
Rifka’s face lights up. We hear a knock at the door. Malka puts down her knitting and gestures impatiently to Rifka who jumps up and opens the door and the young man enters with a bunch of field flowers - wild snap dragons, blush thistles and common purple convolvulus or Syrian bindweed. The younger sister greets him with evident excitement and buries her blushing face in the bouquet he offers.
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| Rifka in her Twenties |
‘Small curls framing that milk-white face, which could redden at the slightest attention or perceived offence, shell-like ears, a rose-bud mouth, red as blood, eyes like milk, pale and reflective as a mill pond. Mill stone round my neck, I might have said, but I could not see that then. Her wrists, seemingly fragile as almond twigs, as if they could snap quite easily - or snap off one’s head, like that transparent, fragile creature the female, praying mantis. Arms blooming with scarlet buds, like a dystopian version of that first artist, Bezalel’s flowering almond branch. You can see from those scars - livid as tattooed memory that she was volatile, nervous, labile. A perfect candidate for our own Mr. Freud from Vienna, another exile from that cursed Pale. A hysterical - from the word womb - young woman, confusing love and innocent flirtatiousness, a confusion where I admit, I may have been the unwitting culprit. A vestal virgin, fearing sex and terrified of losing her precious, maidenhood, tension always in her tiny hyperbolic pent-up frame and a mind that was capable of great affection and unimaginable sibling jealousy.
Much has been incised from the my poor human memory, cut out like the cancer which would finally devour poor Malka, like the tumorous growth that was the Ottoman presence in our land. A sickness that spread from Constantinople - to the gates of Vienna, from Jerusalem to the borders of Asia. Remember that childish joke of ours? - C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E - how do you spell it? Yes the answer was ‘I.T.’’
Strange how I still recall our silly jokes, rather than the tragedy that was to come. And stranger still how the mighty Empire of the Turks, that capacious, grand Ottoman sofa embroidered in thread of gold and saffron and scarlet flowers, the patriotic Turkish tulip of crimson hue, that covered thousands of miles and lasted four hundred years, has been reduced to a mere shabby, faded footstool!
In this case, a velvet ottoman, the colour of ox-blood or red agate, the colour of that ‘wine-dark sea’ of our friend Homer the Greek. A prophetic footstool, I suppose you might call it.
And now, from first person to third - as I hand the narrative to its owners. A shifting story like the always drifting sands of our desert country which will flow from one story teller to another, from one perspective to another..’
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| Malka & Efraim at the Shabbat Table |
A dark red velvet ottoman on which Rifka’s cat, sleeps. A small hot room with heavy, dark furniture, a long, narrow, upright sofa and heavy, maroon velvet curtains keep out the oriental light. Crenellated stands for what-nots and ‘tzatskes’, doilies, dollies, dozens of potted plants add to the feeling of claustrophobia. The walls are painted from floor to ceiling in red. Everything adds to the stifling heat. A narrow dresser filled with middle-European gold and white china, oil lamps etc. Two ornate candlesticks hold candles already lit on the sideboard. Avshalom’s flowers in a vase in the middle of the damask covered table are already dropping their pretty petals.
The father, Efraim/Fischel puts down his prayer book. The family is at the Sabbath dinner table: Sara and Malka and two of the brothers, dark haired, shirt-sleeved Zvi with his wife Sarah Hinda and two young children, and debonair, leonine Alex, complete with twirled, pomaded moustache. The heat is oppressive and an irritated Malka wipes her brow with a beautifully ironed, damask napkin. An extra place laid, stands empty. Everyone, it appears, is waiting. Alex taps his silverware impatiently. Zvi checks his fob watch. The incessant ticking of a Bavarian cuckoo clock from the Old Country with its hint of Alpine mountains, is the only sound. Efraim and Malka exchange a look. The young servant girl, Ayla, enters from the kitchen with a tureen of purple beet soup just as Rifka bursts in the porch door.
“Aron is on his way home. He’ll be here tomorrow!” she cries.
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‘I suppose that my Beloved Number Two would have been hurrying back - late again - on her bicycle - the sisters each had one, men’s bikes, but serviceable, of French origin - one of the Baron’s placatory contributions for the multiple hardships suffered by the settlers who struggled on his behalf to create the ‘moshava’ as it was called, the small settlement on that hill of blessed memory. Rifka riding furiously with her satchel and violin on the bouncing back of that gifted bike - with the news burning in her ears, so full of the importance of the event, that when she bursts in, she doesn’t notice the servant girl with her pot of borscht - almost knocking Ayla over and the pot of soup goes flying over the cream patterned Damascus cloth in a spreading purple rash that results in a number of almost, but not quite, holy inspired curses from Malka.
For Ayla, as I said, was invisible to most of us. Just the kitchen girl. Nobody gave any time to her thoughts or actions. Except Sara. For Sara had time for everybody. But the Mother, was always impatient. Dear irascible Malka, stony as those hills of blessed memory - and although she never liked me, I had a soft spot for her. She was after all, despite her bourgeois pretensions, the mother of both the girls I loved. As well as the mother of the four sons Aron, Alex, Shmuel and Zvi; as unlike as if they came from different corners of the world. Malka pined for Europe - despite the fact that it had rejected her and her people on an epic scale and with a venomous contempt for twelve or more centuries. She surrounded herself with memories of old Romania. Photogravures of the Old Country, of forgotten generations of monochrome grandparents and lost lakes, of sepia trips to the mountains and the Black Sea, ornate candlesticks, the silver worn thin by generations of female polishing and definitely a whole library of worn prayerbooks from the shtetl world they had abandoned. I wonder, would you have noticed the incongruity of this too, too solid Mittel Europeanness, the ornate ‘Victoriana’ or ‘Kaiseriana’ as we should call it, of Bacau and Vienna? From a time before the sinuous lightness, the serpentine ribbons and undulating scribbles of Art Nouveau and those Secessionists of Le Style Viennoise. The incongruity of a lumpen, carved, Bavarian cuckoo clock, complete with grotesque little figures running in and out of a Hansel and Gretel cottage - crowned by Baba Yaga, wicked witch and spring-headed cuckoo - on the hour, every hour - until that fateful hour when all clocks stopped and the cuckoo flew no more. The fondness our poor people had for the icons, symbolic of their own destruction, past and future! The incongruity of all of this, in this rough, raw, empty, treeless landscape, this steamy mosquito-infested swamp still to be drained, bandit-ridden, corrupt, a backwards place, this land without any trees - the Turks had hacked away at them for building the railways that stitched together their rotting Empire, a place, held together with rusting, antiquated chains and fraying rope, unravelling as we speak.
The Ottoman Empire was dying, the locals had carelessly burned, or cooked their rancid sheep’s meat and meagre chick-peas on fires stoked with our trees, removed every piece of usable timber in the entire country to that crumbling capital, they called Istanbul which the Yishuv knew by the age old name Constantinople.
NO TREES! Do you understand what that means?
Do you understand why we had to do what we did? Growing trees was only the beginning!
Jews had been deprived from owning land in the Old Country. They had been small tradesmen and money lenders, being forbidden most other occupation. Now, in what is known as the Second Aliyah, their most fervent aim in their new life was the ownership of land and the working of it. And this they set out to do with tenacious will and purpose that was almost religious in its obligation and execution. Fields were cleared of stones and weeds, planted and tended with seedlings, nurtured as if they were beloved children and at the end of the season reaped by Jewish farmers, both men and women. To continue with the work was Aron's most fervent dream.
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| Farmer with Horse and Plough |
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| Woman Farmer Working with the Men |
Wheat, and then orchards were the first thing those old pioneers planted. They got off the ship and literally changed from shtetl dwellers to farmers, from men of prayer, to men of action, getting their hands dirty in the holy mud of the Holy Land.
Pioneers, a pejorative term according to those opposed to our settlement, and the opposing narrative, the ‘chalutzim’ - fighting against all odds, brave, intrepid, hardy, they battled malaria and hostility, drained swamps, built stockades and settlements, planted farms and fields. Just like the cowboys who went west and took over the land - those pioneers of Palestine, it cannot be denied, took over the land of others. A search for a homeland or the theft of the same, from those who already lived there and had for a thousand or more years?
Two nations, one land. Ignoring the claims of the ‘original’ inhabitants, their language, culture, mythology and aspirations - for a language, culture, mythology and aspirations of our own. We who had been excluded and ostracised, expelled and eliminated, could not help excluding and eliminating the tribe of Ishmael, in the name of his half brother Isaac.
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| Arab Man Ploughing |
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| Bedouin Encampment |
We did so in the fervent belief that our Return had been promised us for the many millenniums of our dispersal and suffering. Islam and Judaism’s claim to the Land each contested by the other. Arab nationalism and Jewish nationalism arose simultaneously and immediately collided in head on impact. The shrapnel from that slow-burning conflagration still destroying the Land of Israel and its twin and shadow, still to be born, which our enemies will call ‘The State of Palestine’.
We say that Mohammed never got to Jerusalem and that the Jews never left. That the Land promised by God has always been ours. They, that in a dream, mounted on the heavenly steed Buraq, the visionary Prophet travelled from Mecca to the ‘Farthest Mosque’ - Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. For the followers of that proclaimer of the will of God, the land has always been theirs. Every vanished Arab village, every destroyed olive grove and stolen spring, is theirs by right and heritage. Every lost home, remembered by a set of keys and many generations of tears. That old, much misused phrase used by the early Zionists: 'A Land without a people for a people without a Land' would bring nothing but trouble and disaster.
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| New Settlement on the Kinneret |
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| Arab Farmers on their Land |
How reconcile such divergent and existential ideologies except by violence?
The slow burning fuse which would ignite the region, a direct response to colonialism - British, French and our own. You may ask, what did colonialism bring except trouble, exploitation, expropriation and othering? But there was also ‘progress’, patriotism and pride in our people’s eternal gratitude for their Return. Those chalutzim reinvented themselves the second they touched the land. It was a holy transformation, forged from the fire of necessity. A palimpsest of processes, one overlying the other, like alchemy transmuting base metal into gold. Imagine this story, likewise, as alchemy. The alchemy that is memory, like the alchemy of film which restores all that is lost to a future audience. Reality emerging from light, shone on a collage of celluloid. This before your latest magic of the ‘digital’ image, the cut and paste of a ‘laptop’. How could we ever have dreamed of such fantastic phantasmagoria?!
The following scenes might indeed, work better as a magical realist montage. Imagine them overlapping in a series of intricate and mysterious dissolves. Fable, fantasy and myth, set against the only too real backdrop of our own poor land. An amalgamation of real and freakish elements - things too strange to believe, with descriptions of the mundane ‘reality’ of our everyday, lived lives. The way memory brings together discordant and often unrelated images to create new undreamt of meaning. Surrealism, I believe is the term you would use? Surreal, yes. Our story has an element of the unreal about it. Bizarre, unexpected conjunctions in the style of Borges or Gogol. Nightmares that continued on awakening. One minute we were ordinary citizens going about our business in a little backwater of the decaying Turkish Empire, the next, we were on a wanted list, hunted, betrayed, sabotaged, murdered even.
At any rate, dead. And can there be anything more surreal than one’s own death?!...’
****
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| The Family Courtyard |
The Aronson house. A paved courtyard shaded by a large lemon tree, twin palm trees, with a bench in the shade, potted plants, stone water tank and a pale-pink dovecot. Sara’s point of view of her eldest brother Aron, tanned, charismatic, robust-looking - his girth has grown as well as his confidence - hugging a laughing Rifka, swinging her small frame round and round in the air, while she shrieks with joy like a happy child.
Abu Farrid and Ayla, lug in a pile of luggage including several heavy crates of books and a number of leather-strapped trunks.
Aron kisses a laughing Sara on each cheek. Malka enters from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Mother and son embrace, Malka dashing tears of joy from her eyes.
“You’ve been gone too long, my son,” she says.
Efraim enters, weary from the field and greets his son with a quiet blessing and a gentle pat on the head.
“God has given you back to us!” he says.
“Only for a while Papa. I have much work to do - ”
But the Mother is already busying herself in the kitchen, bossing the little maid Ayla around in her haste to get food on the table. Eggs, cold beef and a loaf of Sara’s homemade bread.
Malka: “First you must eat something! ”
Aron pats his ample stomach: “I’ve been away long enough to learn to feed myself, Mama dear!”
They all laugh and tuck in heartily along with Aron. Yes, Aron’s tummy was always something of a problem. He enjoyed his food and fought a losing battle with the tape measure...
There were those who said he had the stomach of a camel - and that he could go for days without food and that he would make up for the lack, by eating half a lamb, barbecued on the coals of a remote village, followed by a dozen pita washed down by a bottle of wine.
There were others who remember seeing Aron pick up a cow on his back - an adult bovine, not a calf - and that he could do the same with a sheep.
Aron could indeed eat like a horse when it was possible and decline all nourishment when he was busy, sometimes going for a day at a time with nothing but ‘bots’ - mud coffee - or a swig of water from a flask while on horseback.
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| Aron & Goliath |
It was also rumoured that he slept only for four or five hours a night and that his new bed, carved with a design of wheat on the headboard and at its foot, was as big as a boat - and that his greatest love, other than for his sister Sara, was a dog called Goliath.
And when he did sleep, he snored, of course.
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