My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (26 page)

And yet this denial is astonishing. The fact that seven hundred thousand human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed. Asdud becomes Ashdod, Aqir becomes Ekron, Bashit becomes Aseret, Danial becomes Daniel, Gimzu becomes Gamzu, Hadita becomes Hadid. The Arab city of Lydda is now the new immigrants’ city of Lydda. A dozen towns and hundreds of villages and thousands of sites receive new identities. An enormous refugee rehabilitation project is carried out in the homes and fields of others who are now refugees themselves.

Yet the denial of the Palestinian disaster is not the only denial the Israeli miracle of the 1950s is based upon. Young Israel also denies the great Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century. True, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem is being built in Jerusalem. Every April, Israel marks the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. And in wheeling and dealing with the international community, the tragedy of European Jewry is mentioned and used. But within Israel itself, the Holocaust is not given space. The survivors are expected
not
to tell their stories. A dozen years after the catastrophe, the catastrophe has no place in local media and art. The Holocaust is only the low point from which the Zionist revival rose. The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories. Furthermore, the Israeli continuum does not have room for the individual. That’s also why the Holocaust remains abstract and separate. It’s not really about the people living among us. The message is clear: Quiet now, we are building a nation. Don’t ask unnecessary questions. Don’t indulge in self-pity. Don’t doubt, don’t lament, don’t be soft or sentimental, don’t dredge up dangerous ghosts. It’s not a time to remember, it is a time to forget. We must gather all our strength now and concentrate on the future.

This denial, too, is not without reason. Although vibrant and confident, Israel is not strong enough to deal with the horror of the past. It is still a scrappy society fighting for its life and its future. The Jewish state is a frontier oasis surrounded by a desert of threat. It is not mature enough for self-analysis. It is not tranquil enough to see its own drama in perspective. There are far too many challenges. There is far too much
pain. Without self-discipline and self-repression and a degree of cruelty, everything might disintegrate.

But the price of denial is dear. Yes, Ze’ev Sternhell and Aharon Barak are too ambitious to notice the price. They enthusiastically embrace their new identities, wanting to run as far away as possible from the past. But the introspective Appelfeld looks on with dread at what is taking place around him. People replace a name with a name, a tongue with a tongue, an identity with an identity. To survive, they cleanse themselves of the past. To function, they flatten themselves. They turn into people of action whose personalities are rigid and deformed, whose souls are shallow. They lose the riches of Jewish culture as they are shaped by a new synthetic culture that lacks tradition and nuance and irony. They create a loud, externalized way of life that is eager to display a forced gaiety. They have lost the place they came from without knowing where they are heading.

The two denials are actually four: the denial of the Palestinian past, the denial of the Palestinian disaster, the denial of the Jewish past, and the denial of the Jewish catastrophe. Four forces of amnesia are at work. Erased from memory are the land that was and the Diaspora that was, the injustice done to them and the genocide done to us. As they struggle to survive and cast a new identity, the Israelis of the 1950s bury both the fruit orchards of Palestine and the yeshivas of the shtetl, the absence of seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and the nihility of six million murdered Jews. What vanishes under Ben Gurion’s hasty development is the beauty of the land, the depth of the Diaspora, and the great historic cataclysms of the 1940s.

It is highly likely that this multilevel denial was essential. Without it, it would have been impossible to function, to build, to live. An obstinate disregard was crucial for the success of Zionism in the first decades of the twentieth century, and a lack of awareness was crucial for the success of Israel in its first decade of existence. If Israel had acknowledged what had happened it would not have survived. If Israel had been kindly and compassionate, it would have collapsed. Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old nation into which I was born.

To confirm this point I turn to the Spiegels, whom I have known for years and whose familial biography I find striking. The head of the family, Erno Spiegel, is no longer alive, but I manage to speak with his ninety-two-year-old wife, Anna, on her last days of lucidity. Their daughter Yehudit adds her own memories to the family’s life story. And as I leaf through the family’s records, photo albums, and documents, I find the Spiegel story to be yet another powerful example of the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

Anna was born in the Carpathian Russian town of Svalava in 1918. When the Germans invaded in the spring of 1944 she was a twenty-six-year-old beauty. A knock on the door, a yellow Jewish star, the herding of Jews into the local brick factory. Ten days later the Jews were marched through the streets to the train station. They spent three days in a sealed cattle car, then arrived at Auschwitz. Anna’s sister-in-law and four-month-old nephew were sent to the left. Lucky Anna was with the hundreds of women sent to the right: first to a crowded shower hall, then to have a total body shave, which led to a total loss of identity. She spent three days in the camp barracks as the flames of the crematorium danced in the windows. But because Anna was young and strong she was sent to a succession of work camps: an airplane factory, an airport, hard labor in the woods. She made the retreating march, with thousands of others, to the Elba River, where those who survived the trek were liberated. On the train to Prague many female survivors were raped by Russian soldiers. In Prague, she was reunited with her brothers and a sister. All returned from hell, though their parents and sister Sheyna would never return. In Prague, Anna met Erno Spiegel.

Spiegel was born in Budapest in 1915 but raised in the Carpathian Russian town of Munkacz. Prior to the war, he served as an officer in the Czech army. In 1941, he was sent by pro-Nazi Hungarians to forced labor camps for two years, and in 1944 he was sent by the Germans to Auschwitz. A twin, Spiegel was taken from the Auschwitz platform to Dr. Mengele’s twin compound and appointed by Mengele to be the twins’ master. His job was to monitor and organize the twins subjected to Mengele’s experiments, including his sister. On several occasions, he saved lives, including his sister’s. At night he tried to ease the young twins’ loneliness and allay their fears. He promised them that their parents
had not died and that when the war ended, he would reunite them with their families. At the end of January 1945, Spiegel left the just-liberated death camp with thirty-two children. Soon after, his surreal convoy of survivors wended its way through the ruins of Europe. After he brought the twins to their hometowns, Spiegel went back to Munkacz and then moved to Carlsbad. He returned to his old vocation of bookkeeper. On a visit to the capital, Erno met Anna, and three months later they married in Prague’s ancient synagogue.

In May 1948, the State of Israel was founded. In March 1949, Erno and Anna Spiegel and their two-year-old daughter entered the port of Haifa. Israeli soldiers boarded their ship and handed out oranges. Anna was beside herself. The Land of Israel, the State of Israel, Jewish soldiers, oranges. She felt it was a triumph over Hitler. Anna and Erno together were a triumph over Hitler. Two-year-old Yehudit was a triumph over Hitler. The State of Israel was an absolute triumph over Hitler.

From Haifa the Spiegels were sent to the Be’er Ya’akov immigrant camp. The army tents were surrounded by barbed wire, and the March rain penetrated the tarps and turned the floor into a muddy puddle. All around the camp people shouted and complained. The jumble of immigrants from a jumble of countries spoke a jumble of languages. Baby Yehudit contracted acute dysentery, which endangered her life. In some tents, babies quickly succumbed to the disease and died. And yet Anna Spiegel was happy: our land, our state, a place of our own.

While Anna struggled in the camp, Erno went to Tel Aviv to look for a job. He found work as a bookkeeper in a small accounting firm. The Spiegels saved every penny. Finally, nine months after arriving in Israel, they had enough to move to a one-and-a-half-room apartment in a housing estate on the eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv.

The Spiegels arrived in Bizaron in December 1949. Between Bizaron Street and Victory Road were the long white housing estates that had been hastily erected on the sand. Pedestrian paths bordered small muddy yards. At the end of one of the paths, three concrete stairs led from the mud to a small covered entrance. On the right was the apartment of the engineer Dr. Fischer, on the left the apartment purchased by the senior bookkeeper, Mr. Spiegel. Thirty-four square meters—one
room, one half room, a toilet, a kitchen—that made Anna Spiegel cry: at last they had a home.

Apart from the Jewish Agency’s three metal beds, the tiny apartment was empty. But within days, the crates the Spiegels had sent from Carlsbad arrived: blankets, towels, bed linens, crocheted tablecloths, pots, pans, silverware, two tea services. An electric stove, a mechanical meat grinder, a coffee grinder, a poppy seed grinder. The heavy Czech furniture that could not fit through the door of the miniature apartment was exchanged for light, modern Israeli-made tables and chairs. When Erno Spiegel became the bookkeeper of the just-founded Cameri Theater, more furniture was added: armchairs, a sofa, an icebox, a radio. Within one year the empty public housing unit became a warm home enveloped in the aroma of goulash and paprikash and poppy-seed yeast cakes that Anna prepared in her tiny kitchen.

For Erno Spiegel, work was everything: a source of income, a safety net, therapy. Work kept away bad thoughts and memories, he told his wife. Every morning at eight he would put on a suit and tie, don a hat, and take the bus to the theater’s office. Every afternoon at four, the bus would take him home. After a light meal he would rest and listen to the news on the radio and read the centrist
Maariv
newspaper. Then, at his desk in the hall, he would audit the accounts of private theater productions for which he was well paid. This was how there was enough money to add another room and to buy Yehudit a piano.

Anna Spiegel was a housewife. In the mornings she cooked spicy Hungarian dishes. In the afternoons she took Yehudit to private piano lessons. She was particular about her looks and her daughter’s looks: she sewed, ironed, and embroidered their clothes. Once a week was laundry day. Once a month was seamstress day. Every once in a while, she would take a Hebrew lesson at the Ulpan or attend a gathering of mothers at the women’s club. Unlike Erno, Anna never stopped talking about over there. And about the great miracle that happened to her family and to all other Jewish survivors when they came here from over there.

Yehudit attended the housing estate’s kindergarten and elementary school, first in the adjacent neighborhood and then in the housing estate itself. Almost all the children in her class were the sons and daughters of Ashkenazi immigrants, almost all of them Holocaust survivors. From
time to time someone would say, “Daddy screams at night.” From time to time someone would say, “Mommy is sick again.” They would discuss the number tattooed on a mother’s arm, the number tattooed on a father’s arm. Partisans, ghettos, concentration camps. But all these shadows could not obscure the miraculous events taking place around them. In 1953 Israel began to drain the swamps of Lake Hula in the Galilee. In 1954 it was digging the first parts of the National Water Carrier that would eventually bring water from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev desert. In 1955 oil was discovered in Heletz, not far from the Gaza Strip. In 1956 Israel won the Sinai campaign. So in the housing estate’s school there were no doubts anymore. It was absolutely clear that the children wearing blue and white for Israel’s ninth Independence Day were the children of hope. And Yehudit Spiegel was the most striking among them. There was nothing Yehudit couldn’t do. Sports, scouting, English, French, piano. She was the head of her class, the leader of the youth movement, a medal-winning athlete. In her pleated blue skirt and embroidered white shirt, eleven-year-old Yehudit Spiegel was the daughter of triumph. Triumph over Mengele and Auschwitz and Birkenau. Triumph over the damned Germans. Triumph over the horrific past of the Jews. In the name of Erno Spiegel from Auschwitz-Birkenau and in the name of Anna Spiegel from the labor camps she would go forth and conquer the world.

So when I choose the place that evokes the Israel of 1957 more than any other, I don’t choose my hometown of Rehovot or a kibbutz or a moshav or a new town. Nor do I choose Jerusalem, Haifa, or central Tel Aviv. I choose the Bizaron housing estate.

In 1957, there are nineteen blocks in the Bizaron
shikun
. In every block there are sixteen families. Most are European: Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs. Almost all of the parents are survivors of death camps, forests, ghettos. Like Yehudit, many of the children were born immediately after the war, in the ruins of Europe. The families are small—no grandfathers, no grandmothers, no uncles or aunts. Every family has only one child, at most two. Behind every living family lurks the shadow of the larger family that has ceased to exist. Over there, Mr. Teicher had another wife. Over there, Mrs. Cohen had two other daughters.
Shoshana’s mother is in bed all day long because her little brother and her baby sister never came back from the camps. In the tidy, clean apartments of night watchman Weinstock and Labor Party functionary Katz, whose wife suffers endless bouts of migraines and fatigue, no one is allowed to raise a voice, to horse around, to disturb the wives. The demons must not be woken. Although they are only in their thirties and forties, almost every parent in the housing estate is bereft of a father or mother, of a family that is no more. Almost every child in the housing estate knows that his or her parents have a past that one should not ask about. The Bizaron housing estate lives its life under a silent mountain of death.