3
Palmach
THE EYES: THE FIRST THINGS you would have noticed when looking at Shoshana Spector. They were terrific eyes, bright and extremely intelligent. The wide pupils were surrounded with bright green, almost yellow irises, and the colored area all plowed with miniature labyrinths like tree-root systems, and speckled with tiny marks.
She lost me at Kibbutz Givat-Brenner.
She arrived at that big kibbutz in the autumn of 1951, three years after the War of Independence had ended. The struggle for the revival of the Jewish state was over—at least so they thought at the time—and the time was right to settle old scores. My mother, the number one woman in the Palmach, was sent for a year of study in America (she had hoped to establish a rehabilitation plan for handicapped veterans), and when she returned, she was fired. Apparently the newly organized Israel Defense Force didn’t need her and all the knowledge she’d accumulated. Like some of her comrades, she decided to try a new life in a kibbutz. This is how she showed up at Givat-Brenner, dragging behind her an eleven-year-old boy she didn’t really know.
Later she used to blame me, half seriously, for this decision. “The boy wanted to live on kibbutz,” she would complain, spreading her arms sideways, grinning as if hiding something. Perhaps she knew that the truth was that I did want to live on a kibbutz, but on a different one, Hulatta, which was on the other side of the country, where I had other parents.
HER MEMORIES FROM HER CHILDHOOD in Jaffa were sharp and colorful.
She liked to remember herself as a barefoot urchin running around the Arab market, cheeky and dirty, with two wild braids, which, when not washed with kerosene, were crawling with lice. In the winter, hot sahlab (a Middle Eastern pudding) was sold from a container carried on the back of the seller and poured out over his shoulder into a cup. In summertime there were cold, sour drinks such as suss and tamar hindi. All her life she longed for that Jaffa market that disappeared after the 1948 War of Independence, and she sought it in other markets. Sometimes she pulled me after her to the Carmel Market in South Tel Aviv, where she would pry and bargain and snoop into all the stalls, an olive here and a piece of salt fish there, and I shrank with shame hearing the vulgar language that suddenly came from this smart, sophisticated woman and the replies of the vendors. For her, this was romantic, although she herself was not romantic. Her Arabic, anyway, was always strong and convincing.
In her childhood in the twenties, there were not many Jewish families living in Jaffa. Her father, Nathaniel Tatar, wrote in his diary, “I was almost the only Jew who lived among the Arabs.” Shoshana was sent to school at the Christian mission. There she was taught in Arabic and English. To show me her mastery of the languages and to amuse me, she used to recite all sorts of poetry she had been required to memorize in both languages, and would preach to me in forceful Arabic, “Rach A Shitta, Jaa Seif” (the winter has gone, spring has come). Sometimes she would sing off-key, “Di Yea Ken John Peel” or “Elsie Marley, the wife that sells the barley honey” and Shakespeare’s “the hei and the ho and the hei.” I especially enjoyed when she taught me a song she called a ditty, and to this day I remember part of it:
Master Bullfrog, grave and stern,
Called the classes each in turn;
Sitting there upon a log,
Taught them how to say “Ker-chog.”
ACTUALLY, SHE DISCONNECTED herself from her family, and saw her parents—in comparison with her friends from the Palmach—as “provincial.” Even when she took me to the north, she didn’t stop to see them, and they didn’t visit us and never called or wrote.
Her connection with her past existed only in her stories, not in the reality I saw as a child. Even her weird family name, Tatar, didn’t connect to anything I knew. Shosh seemed to me some force of nature, existing by itself and with no origin.
ONLY ONCE DID I SPEND the night at her parents’ house, and then I realized that they really existed. I was about five years old then.
It was close to the end of World War II, perhaps in mid-1945. I don’t know what caused their daughter, Shosh, to visit them on that day and leave me there for the night, but the memory remains sharp and clear.
A heavy summer heat hung over the Izreel Valley. My grandparents—they were about sixty—had a small house and a small farm on the outskirts of the provincial township of Afula in the valley. The house had two rooms. Both doors opened to a veranda in front. The veranda was closed in, and served as foyer and guest room. Bracha’s kitchen was a cubicle at the right side of the veranda, and inside were two kerosene stoves coated with gray enamel. Blue flames shone behind two little glass doors, and two large aluminum pots stood on them, boiling, full of laundry and food. The floor’s cement tiles had sunk, and Grandpa used the cool dents under the bed to store watermelons. I squeezed in there and lay down on the clean floor. My grandfather pulled me out, stuck a book in my hand, and ordered me to leaf through it.
Nathaniel Tatar was a sinewy man in his undershirt, and his eyes were bright and hard like my mother’s. His face was dark and furrowed. When he found out that I knew how to read, he tested what I could understand, his stiff finger moving along the lines of the book. Grandma Bracha, in cotton dress and apron, hurried to save me from him. She brought hot tea in glasses, and dry biscuits. She looked small and shriveled near her husband, and her Hebrew—in contrast to his—was poor and distorted, and suffered from a heavy Russian accent. I once heard Shosh, my mother, calling her “the hen.”
“Ess, ess, Yingale,” the hen told me by the table, and when I didn’t understand she explained, “Eat, eat. No horror.”
My mother left and went about her business, and I was left with the old folks.
The smell of kerosene filled the entire house from Grandma’s tiny kitchen. At noontime another smell joined it, the DDT she sprayed from a pump, to keep the flies and gnats away. I liked the smell, which hovered like a cloud of tiny, cool particles. After lunch, which was chicken guts (she taught as she fed me: “belly button,” in Russian, is “pupik”), she closed the windows against the hot wind, lowered the curtains, and sent me to their bed for a forced noontime nap. When I opened my eyes she was sitting at the corner of my bed, sailing into a long and vague story about the city of Bukhara, and then she passed somehow to anecdotes from the life of the Bedouins. Most of what she said I couldn’t understand. Grandfather was out at work, and my mother hadn’t returned yet. Grandma dressed me and sent me to shred fresh clover with a bladed wheel (“You kerfooyl, kerfooyl!”). I scattered the cut clover
