Art of a Jewish Woman (4 page)

Protectively or flirtatiously, the men would say, “Mademoiselle, you should have a husband; it is better, safer.”

Coquettishly, Felice replied, “I am waiting for the right man,” wincing at the thought that she had once had the right man, blotting out that she was still legally married.

Beyond the terrace railings she could see church spires and the domes of mosques. At regular hours from the minarets the muezzin half-chanted, half-sang Koranic verses to call the faithful to prayer. It seemed as if the skinny towers were singing to each other and the sky was singing too. To this the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, on the Hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified, added the tinkling of its metal bells when it tolled its services.

It was so easy to be mesmerized by Jerusalem’s Old City, to be lulled by its mystery and beauty, the silence of the stones, the murmur of the faithful, the buzz of the buyers and sellers, to get lost and then find herself again. It was especially easy to feel safe because she was ignorant of the killings that had taken place there in 1929. They had been sparked by religious rivalry and mistrust between Muslims gathering to celebrate their faith at the Dome of the Rock Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jews coming together to pray and blow the ram’s horn at the Western Wall. The Dome of the Rock was where Mohammed had his vision of God and the Western Wall is a remnant of the Jews’ Biblical temple—it is also part of the base of the mosque. On the fateful day, Jewish worshipers had erected a wooden and leaf screen in front of the wall to celebrate the Sukkoth holiday without communicating to the Muslim community that it was temporary. The Muslims feared it was the first step in abrogating part of their holy site. The British administration was completely unprepared to police the tensions. Violence spread throughout Palestine, and hundreds died.

Felice could never let herself get too lost because she had been given fixed hours to be out and fixed times when she had to get back to her patron’s mansion and office. Some days she walked up the main street of Jerusalem outside the old walls where dusty little streets veered right and left. Open-air fruit, vegetable, and butcher stalls—kosher and halal—crowded the margins of the streets and sidewalks where they existed. Donkey carts, a few motor cars, and British jeep patrols competed for space on the street. Laundry hung from the iron balconies. Every once in a while Muslim women briefly unshuttered their marabitas to look at the street and be seen. Orthodox Jewish women making their shopping rounds hid themselves in long, plain dresses and shawls, their heads shaved and covered with wigs.

Why was false hair permitted and real hair taboo? Felice knew it had something to do with men’s need to control women and their bodies, like her father’s not wanting her to be a doctor looking at men’s bodies or an actress showing her own. She didn’t think of it too much because she was fascinated with the shouts in all the different languages on the street—Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German.

The latter three she spoke and understood well; the others still meant little to her. The aroma of pita bread ovens and trays of baklava competed for Felice’s attention with the lettering on signs and shops. She was busy with her Hebrew and Arabic dictionaries, looking up words as she walked, practicing their pronunciations, building a vocabulary.

In the midst of it all, she recognized the rear end, the walk and ears of a girl she knew. She knew who that feminine wiggle belonged to. It wasn’t possible. But it was possible, because it was the swinging backside of Fania, with whom she had finished high school in Wilno. They were classmates at the Etta Djemkovsky school. She was from Grajewo, not far from Sczuczyn. Felice ran to catch up with her and yelled, “It is Fania!” It was she, and Felice felt like everything in her life was an adventure, not a lark anymore, but filled with surprises and new experiences.

She shouted, “Felushka, my love, what are you doing here?”

They fell into each others arms. “You can’t believe where I am living and what I am doing.”

“You must tell me, now, on the spot.”

“I am living with an Arab family. I am a dentist but they won’t let me work and I can only go out to walk at certain hours. I have to get out. I am suffocating.”

“Are you crazy, living with an Arab family?”

“Is it really like
that
here in Palestine? Jews cannot live in an Arab family?”

“You will have no luck. You will be in a harem. A Jewish whore. The Jews will excommunicate you.”

“Fania, is this you talking like this? This is my Fania who told me about having an affair with the headmaster our last year in Wilno?”

“Things are different here. It is a different time. We are older now. We must be more serious.”

“But this is where I live. This is where I have a position, and until I have something else, I have to stay. Where else will I stay without money?”

Fania said, “I will lend you enough to get a room.”

Everybody was lending her money, and she was trying to keep the sums in her head so she could pay them back. Felice changed the subject, “Tell me your news.”

“I am very fortunate. I am the head nurse at a hospital, and I’m living with the most wonderful, elegant boyfriend. You have to meet him.”

Fania pointed to a room-for-rent sign on the street, and Felice accepted her entreaties. Her friend paid for a week. The new room was bare. The only furniture was a narrow bed like a cot. The mattress was a bag with straw in it. There wasn’t even a writing table for her to use.

She went back to the Arab doctor and told him, “Please believe me, doctor, I am very grateful for your hospitality, but I must move.”

“What do you mean, where will you go? I cannot allow you to leave. How will you eat? Here you have everything, and you have Mustapha to care for the room and water and everything. You have your seat at the table with us, my family likes you, why do you want to move?”

“You have done everything for me. You are a great gentleman, but I need to move.” She didn’t tell him she needed to move because he wouldn’t let her work at her profession. It wouldn’t change his mind; he didn’t understand. She couldn’t tell him that Fania and her friends said that a Jew could not live with Arabs. She wanted to marry and have children, and Fania made her fearful with her words about excommunication. It was a week and a month since she had arrived, but she was beginning to know in her heart that she would rebel against this narrow mindedness.

At first the freedom to wander whenever and wherever she wanted, the sounds of daytime commerce, horses galloping, and people singing and socializing at night were entertaining. But Felice soon tired of it and knew she had to plan her next move.

She took out from her suitcase a postcard she had received shortly before leaving France and reread it. It was from the one other friend she knew she had in Palestine, Rahela Schultke, who had graduated in political science from Nancy two years before Felice. Rahela, who had been like a mother hen to her, telling her to do her laundry, fixing the runs in her stockings, lending her clothes. Rahela’s family was from Suvalki, which is near the Lake District in Poland, not too far north of Szczuczyn and south of Wilno. In the postcard she said that her brother had been right to convince her to come to Palestine because her life felt good, and she was living in Tel Aviv in a neighborhood by the sea. Her brother, she wrote, was tall, blue-eyed, beautiful, and also a very important man. The postcard invited Felice to stay with them if she came to Palestine.

The next day she took a taxi to Tel Aviv. The rattling car descended the canyon and hills where a few sheep nibbled for grass among the rocks. Soon they crossed the small, fertile plain. Then in the distance she saw heat waves shimmering off low-lying buildings. There was nothing really tall, but as she got closer she could see that some were up to four stories, their gray concrete and white plaster walls shining in the noon-day sun—the White City she had heard about, the new city, the City of the Sands, built by Jews. It was just 16 years old. A society of Jewish residents from ancient Jaffa just to the south had purchased the land and driven their stakes into a sand dune in 1909. They wanted to create a Jewish garden suburb on a European model because Jaffa was becoming overcrowded with new arrivals. The next year they named the site Tel Aviv, Spring on a Hill, after the name of an Old Testament site.

The Arab community protested that it was communal land, that the sellers had no right to take money for it, to line their own pockets, but it was an ambivalent protest in 1909 because the European immigrants were bringing new capital and jobs to Palestine, even though most of it stayed within their own community.

Already Tel Aviv was a busy city of almost 60,000 people, larger than Jaffa. The taxi navigated broad avenues with planted center strips, named after heroes of the Zionist homeland movement. Buildings were going up everywhere; laboring men and women standing on wooden scaffolds hauling buckets of cement and local bricks up on pulleys, setting mortar, smoothing the rough surfaces with stucco. Its architectural character was clear. It was modernist European Internationalist style multi-level buildings with broad, flat surfaces with small windows inset into some of the expanses and large plate glass windows forming other walls. There were many blocks of uniform four-story apartment buildings in the Bauhaus style imported from Germany. Bauhaus architecture brought together concrete and glass, gently curved contours, geometric shapes inspired by modern industry, occasional art deco flourishes, small windows to hold out the heat, and balconies everywhere for relaxing in the morning and evening freshness. Today this part of Tel Aviv is a UNESCO world heritage architectural site, but by the mid 1930s in Germany, Bauhaus design ideas were too artistically and intellectually free and innovative for Hitler; the Nazis banned the style.

The taxi arrived at the beach, where people were bathing in the Mediterranean, and drove north a short distance. Then it cut back on a rutted, hard-packed sand street into a new neighborhood of little one-story houses built on the cheap with wood frames covered with plaster. The driver asked Felice for his fare, but she didn’t have it.

“Why did you take a taxi then?” he demanded, his voice rising over his lost day’s work.

“I didn’t know how else to get here,” Felice said. She hadn’t even thought to ask how much the taxi would cost.

“You come here from Europe with your fancy clothes and think the land owes you a living,” the driver screamed at her, balling his hand into a fist.

“You ought to be ashamed, treating a newcomer like this, somebody who has come here to work and live and treat sick people,” she retorted. That took the driver aback. “What is your name? When I have the money, I’ll find you and pay you back.”

He left, and Felice climbed the porch steps and knocked, but there was nobody at home. She put down her little suitcase with her few clothes and her still unused dental instruments and climbed from the porch to a balustrade from which she could reach a window. It was unlocked, and she let herself in. When Rahela returned with her husband and brother at the end of the day, Felice was asleep in a chair. She found the brother, Shuli, smiling at her when she woke. He was indeed very handsome. So began another courtship.

Shuli was a fervent Zionist, and his courtship included an attempt to woo Felice to Zionism. In Shuli’s mind, as in the minds of hundreds of young men from the small towns and cities of Poland, Zionism meant an opportunity to create a society in Palestine where they could be free from prejudice, physically safe, and self-sufficient. He was working to fulfill the dream of countless Jewish youth from Eastern Europe and Russia that had begun in the second half of the 19th century and had gathered force in the lull after the First World War, before the horrors of the Second World War.

In the dream, the Ashkenazi would lead the Diaspora tribes back to their biblical homeland. He educated Felice about the welter of Jewish organizations whose names and divisions and rivalries she struggled to keep straight. There was the Jewish Agency, which was the immigrants’ quasi-governmental administrative organization that the British authorities recognized and worked with. There was the main, European socialist-influenced labor union, the Histadrut, which was stretching out tentacles like an octopus, buying or creating construction companies, rock quarries, cement producers, and transport companies, and enrolling teachers, educators, and office workers. The local Communist Party opposed the Histadrut because they felt that it was
sub rosa
fundamentally interested in a Jewish state rather than the international workers’ movement. The communists wanted a united Arab-Jewish workers’ movement.

The Histadrut had created the Haganah underground militia, outlawed by the British, dedicated to the principle of self-defense. It was busy raising money, smuggling arms into Palestine from abroad, and stealing weapons from the British police and army. A secret spinoff from the Haganah was the Irgun, a militant Zionist group that did not feel Jewish nationhood could wait out the slow pace of international diplomacy. For them it was not to be just self-defense; they would take the battle directly to the Arabs, but attacking the British was not on the table. A secret breakaway group from the Irgun was the Stern Gang, a terrorist group that felt any organization, civilian or military was fair game if they thought it could advance the cause of independence. If Jews had faith in Britain and favored accommodating their evolving plan to partition Palestine into two countries, the Stern Gang saw them as enemy collaborators and could attack them; if Arabs stood in the way of new settlements they were targets; if the British didn’t see the need for throwing open the gates to Palestine to all Jewish refugees
now,
the Stern Gang would drive them out.

The organizations split, mutated, faded away or slipped into the shadows, and new ones emerged, depending on the shifting local and international politics and crises of the 1930s. Further, like a cloud over the whole struggle was the split among Jews into the non-religious, socialist left and the religious, militant right that opposed the rise of trade unions as instruments of political action.