LIFE WAS HARD, AND EVERYONE in the family did his part. The boys stayed in school up to ninth grade and then left home to work as apprentices.
“The girls,” tells Nathaniel apologetically, “saw that the situation in the house was not good, so they left, too. Sara, the older sister, found work in Jerusalem, and the younger Shoshana moved to the youth village in Ben Shemen.” Nathaniel sold the farm and moved to the near town of Afula, where he tried his luck at dairy farming.
Since leaving her parents’ home, Shosh hadn’t had contact with them. On the few occasions when she spoke of them to me, she called their town mockingly “Afulevke.” The youth village of Ben Shemen lies in the hills on the way to Jerusalem. There, instead of a farmer’s poor and narrow vision, the new world of a renascent Israel was opened to her—a “state in the making.”
The founder and manager of the youth village was Dr. Zigfried Lehmann, an educator who believed in tilling the soil, Zionism, and the value of people. Shosh admired him. More than once she told me Lehmann was the best person she ever met. She would compare him with Yanush Korchak, a great writer and educator who went to his death in a Nazi extermination camp with his orphan students.
According to Lehmann’s vision, the youngsters ran the life of the village without adult help. The students of Ben Shemen lived in dormitories, studied and worked in all the branches of the farm, and sold its products. They created a vibrant social and cultural environment, celebrated holidays, and did scouting activities on Saturdays. They lived in groups, each group in its own house, so that family units were formed that functioned at work and while studying.
AT BEN SHEMEN THE IDEAL was personal accomplishment. The goal was taming the land, and indeed many of the graduates established new kibbutzim or joined existing ones, and almost all of them joined the Hagana, the Jewish defense force, the forerunner of the IDF. There Shosh found herself in a new and special company, the military avant-garde of the Jewish settlement movement in Palestine in the early 1930s. Since then and to the end of her life, this society was her world, and its values hers. In the fervor of beginning a new society and a state for the Jews, her provincial parents, the poor bookkeeper and his wife, the hen, were pushed out of her life and left behind. They were ghetto folk, bourgeois, leftovers of an old world that no one took pride in.
After finishing her studies in 1932, Shosh—like all her friends—found her way to the Hagana. On March 9, 1940, on a Saturday night, Shosh Tatar married Zvi Spector. I was born on October 20, 1940.
BY THEN, THE WORLD was at war. In the beginning it seemed that the British, who controlled the Middle East and Palestine, were going to lose and be driven out. The fear was great. To our north, Syria and Lebanon were controlled by the French Vichy government, a Nazi puppet state. To the east, in Iraq, the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali rebellion broke out. To the west, Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps marched toward Egypt and the Suez Canal on its way to close the pincers.
The Jewish settlement in Palestine, which numbered less than half a million, was scattered among more than a million Arabs, who began to smell an opportunity to get rid of the Jews. Many of the Jewish youngsters joined the British army and went to Europe to fight against the Nazis. The Hagana, which had organized for a desperate defensive battle in Palestine, looked for a way to cooperate with the hated British Mandate regime to get arms.
On May 18, 1941, Zvi Spector went to sea in command of a boat with twenty-three men, and a British liaison officer aboard, and never returned. This was a top secret and perilous mission, coordinated between the Hagana and British intelligence, and for that mission the British lent the Hagana a patrol boat, the
In 1941 Shosh was left alone with a seven-month-old baby. She was matter-of-fact about it. Among her papers I later found a typed document stating, “Since my husband, Zvi Spector, volunteered for activity connected with the war effort, and since he didn’t return and his fate remains unknown, I hereby agree to take the sum of six hundred Palestinian pounds as final indemnity. I hereby free the military authorities, the government of Palestine, and all Jewish foundations in and out of country from any financial responsibility, and undertake to indemnify them for any charge connected to the above.” At the end of the page was her signature, in her beautiful script. Since then nobody owed her anything, and she owed nothing to anybody, and kept all inside her.
She made her own decisions, and decided to invest herself totally in the military wing of Israel’s national struggle. She was one of the founders of the Palmach, the strike force of the Hagana, headed by Yitzhak Sade.
“If anybody wants to know the actual date of the establishment of the Palmach,” she once told the press, “it was on the eighteenth of May 1941. It’s over forty years that I have lived this date.” It was Shosh Spector together with Zehava, Sade’s wife, and a cleaning woman, who were the founding three women in the first group. In the following years the Palmach was Shosh’s whole life.
By nature she was meticulous and punctual, obsessively responsible. The missions she took on were fulfilled to the last detail. From the beginning she took on the job of adjutant for manpower and administration. When World War II ended, the struggle against the British Mandate regime was renewed, mainly because of their refusal to allow immigration of the remnant of European Jews to Palestine. The Palmach went underground, and the Brits issued warrants for their arrest. Shosh kept the master list of the names of the Palmach members. She dragged the box of cards with her and hid it first at Kibbutz Mizra, then at Kibbutz Alonim. When she visited me there—I was taken in by her close friends there, the Admons—the box was under her bed.
I found that card box once, when I crawled under her bed to catch a small bird that had flown in the room and vanished.
“Get out of there!” she ordered me sternly. And when I asked her what all those papers under the bed were, she gave me a grown-up lecture. “If the Brits come and ask questions we both die and reveal nothing regarding this black cardboard box.”
I was five or six, and I shall never forget the excitement of that moment. I had become partner to a conspiracy, like Emil and the detectives. The body of the bird was finally found pressed between the card box and the wall, her tiny body dried up. For some time I kept a feather that changed beautiful colors in the sunlight and didn’t tell the other children what I knew.
The Brits didn’t come that night, but on June 29, 1946, remembered as “black Saturday,” they surrounded the kibbutzim that hosted Palmach training camps. The leaders of the Jewish settlements were arrested, and thousands were taken prisoner and sent to detention camps in Latroun and Raffah. The Palmach List—that black box—was discovered at Mizra. But the data were coded, and Shosh had the key. Meticulously, she reconstructed the lost data.
WHEN THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE broke out in 1947 I was with her in Tel Aviv. We lived in a small top- floor apartment at 78 Allenby Street. As long as my secondary school studies continued, I returned home at noon. It was a considerable walk from the “Education home for workers’ children” at 13 Bezalel Street. We children would cling to the fences and watch the British officers playing tennis with Jewish ladies. They all were dressed in white. Then, past Allenby Street to King George Street, at the intersection, I used to stop to watch a blind mandolin player. This was an interesting corner, with news bulletins scribbled in large script on a placard above his head. This blind man with his two vacant eye sockets was indeed a sorry sight. Each day a new disaster visited him: on Sundays, he was struck and robbed of his belongings; Mondays were when his house was burned about his head, and so on, each day of the week. We were taught at school about compassion and love of humanity, and all mine concentrated in this thin skeleton of a guy. I also read about little Hanna’le who helped an old woman to carry her sack of coal although she was dressed for Shabbat with her white dress, and the reward she eventually received from the good fairy. Looking at the blind man filled me with a sweet and agonizing pity.
Then I walked up Allenby Street, pressing my nose to the display window at Peel Shoes, then studying the jewelry and the cream cakes in the other windows along the road till I finally reached No. 78. Then I climbed up the four flights of stairs to the top, inhaling the smells of cooking potatoes and jellied meat from behind the doors. Near
