I sent the postcard to her old address, 164 Arlozorov Street, even though I had no idea who lived there now.
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Whenever someone asks me about my famous grandfather, I want to tell them about my grandmother, may she rest in peace, but no one wants to hear. Which artists and works of art influenced you when you were young?
On Arlozorov Street, one hundred meters from my grandmother, lived my aunt Noa Eshkol. A choreographer, the creator of movement notation. A guru with a group of believers who worshipped the ground she danced on. A woman who chose to oppose. Prizes. Clichés. Falseness. Hair-dying. Instead of children and grandchildren, she had cats and dogs. Instead of serving refreshments to her guests, she served beer. Instead of an upper floor in her house, there was a large, unfurnished space where you could run wild while the adults argued politics down below. She liked to argue, Aunt Noa. And express opinions so bizarre that they were infuriating. And now, as I write this, I suddenly see a fragmented line I never saw before, connecting her and Shira, my eldest child. Aunt Noa gave me the first record in my life—Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July. I smoked my first cigarette in her house. She didn’t come to my wedding because she didn’t like formal events, but when Dikla and I went to visit her a few weeks later, she was very excited and kept saying how much Dikla impressed her. Two minutes after we arrived, she was already stroking Dikla’s hair and saying how soft it was. When Dikla tried to share a few anecdotes from our wedding, she stopped her in the middle and said: You know, it’s amazing, the difference between the tone of your voice, so reasonable and moderate, like a metronome, and the movements of your hands. They have…a private choreography of their own…full of passion…do you dance? she asked. I danced in a group in high school, Dikla said, but nowadays, only at parties. Aunt Noa nodded slowly, as if considering asking her to join her group, which had broken up years earlier. Then she took us to her studio on the third floor, showed us some new wall carpets, and said, Choose one, a gift. While I almost swallowed my tongue from shock—it was well-known in the family that Aunt Noa didn’t give or sell her carpets to anyone—Dikla walked around silently looking at them for a few minutes until she chose the one with the hidden wound, and Aunt Noa said, You have good taste. Then we went downstairs, opened more and more beer bottles, and talked, that is, it was mostly Dikla and Aunt Noa who talked, and occasionally Aunt Noa stopped to compliment Dikla on her original opinions, or on her eloquence, or on the way the color of her skirt matched the color of her tights. When Dikla went to the bathroom, Aunt Noa lit a cigarette, gave me a long look, sighed, and said, Oh, how much it will hurt. What will hurt, I asked. Aunt Noa took a drag of her cigarette and said, When she leaves. But seeing my grimace, she exhaled and added: I didn’t say it isn’t worth it, kid. She’s really something, your wife. It isn’t every day that you see such a beautiful combination of pride and delicacy.
She loved beautiful things, Aunt Noa. And since she rarely left the house—in fact, why didn’t she? what was she so afraid of?—she wanted beautiful things to be brought to her.
Those Saturday visits to my grandmother and then my aunt were intertwined with my childhood: We went from Poland to bohemia in five minutes. We left my grandmother’s house with large bags of secondhand clothes and walked up the street to Aunt Noa, who afterward, would cut those fabrics into pieces that would be sewn into her brightly colored wall carpets. She had begun making those carpets during the Yom Kippur War because she couldn’t dance when friends were being killed every day, and since then, she had created more than a thousand. She didn’t receive pieces of fabric only from us; they flowed to her from factories and sewing workshops all over the country. She blocked out designs on large sheets of cloth and then sent them, along with the pieces of fabric, to her dancers-admirers to do the menial work of sewing. The breathtaking results hung on the walls of the studio as if it were a gallery, and as a kid, when I finished jumping around to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, I would stand in front of those carpets and try to understand them. Then I’d give that up and try to dance to them.
Aunt Noa never agreed to show her wall carpets in a real gallery. Nor did she agree to be interviewed or receive an award from Tel Aviv University. And she didn’t agree to die.
She suffered great physical pain during her final years—slowly, before our eyes, she turned from thin to skeletal—but still clung stubbornly to life so she could finish yet another carpet. Yet another dance.
After Aunt Noa’s death, my father collected materials that could serve anyone who wanted to write her biography. Among those materials, I found love letters she had written in her youth from London to someone named Robert who lived in Israel. When I read them, it occurred to me that there is a gene that makes the people who possess it feel a more intense sense of longing than other people. And that gene is hereditary.
They sent the material to publishing companies that rejected it, claiming that the name wasn’t well-known enough to the public at large for her biography to sell. I’m writing about her now so that others will remember
