On the deck among the sailors and the stevedores I yearned for some distant place where it would be good and in which I’d never been. I remembered how, in 1938, in third grade, we’d written letters to Germany: “Dear Jewish child, Yoram Kaniuk is writing to you from the Ledugma School in Tel Aviv. Flee quickly and come to Eretz Yisrael, because if you do not, you will surely die.” I didn’t write just “you will die” but “you will surely die,” so that the German child would know the difference between “you will die” and “you will surely die.” All the letters were collected in mailbags and sent to Germany and Austria. We’d stand in the new Tel Aviv Port in the midst of the gnats, the flies, with the stevedores from Saloniki cursing and shouting, and the pallid German and Austrian immigrants, to whose children we’d perhaps written that they would surely die if they didn’t come, timidly descended the gangway from the ship to the barges, carefully because the barges rose and fell. Thus they reached the jetty, men mummified in suits, women with fox furs around their neck, and frightened by the burning sun, and I also saw skiing equipment. They perspired on the boats, and we in short pants and white shirts, stood and sang “The ships sail to distant shores / A thousand hands unload and build / We conquer the wave and shore / We are building a port,” and then we’d recite “Hoo hee, what do I see? / A ship with a funnel come from the sea / Where have you come from, my fair ship and what have you brought? / I’ve come from afar / Where Jews wait to sail / With staff and satchel to Eretz Yisrael!”
They probably thought that a troupe of pygmy circus clowns was visiting from darkest Africa. They saw us in our short pants, our ridiculous tembel hats, our rough sandals from the Carmel Market, screaming, and they evidently thought: Asiatics — Barbarians! And they regarded us with contempt because they’d come from Europe, which was no longer theirs but they didn’t know it. They came from my father’s culture, they were steeped in Cimarosa and Cimabue, and I thought about that Europe which had already started to expel them, and about them, who only a week before they arrived in Tel Aviv had probably reached Trieste or some other port and sailed under not the pleasantest of conditions and been hit by the Eretz — Yisraeli disaster that for us was the entire world.
A tired teacher feeling the pain of the nation’s fate — as the teacher Blich described himself— led us to stand and wait for the Jews. And when we saw them coming, right away we shouted, How good it is that they’ve come to Eretz Yisrael, and that was when on Fridays we’d put on shows about the ghetto and stick on beards of painted straw and put Plasticine on our noses so we’d look Jewish, like the ones who sell salt herring and blow their nose like a trumpet and speak Yiddish. Only a few of us knew Yiddish, and most of those in whose homes Yiddish was spoken pretended they didn’t understand it. After all, we are the sons of pioneers, Hebrew labor, Jew Speak Hebrew, and we’ll go to kibbutzim, we’ll be Sheikh Abrek*, we’ll conquer the wilderness, we’ll build and be built in our land. We shall smite our enemies. We’ll drive out the British. We’ll be heroes. We declaimed Brenner’s words, “Blessed is he who dies in such awareness — with Tel-Hai* before his eyes.” Just so we’re not bowed from fear and ugly like the Jews — that’s what we said, stupid kids that we were.
So what are Jews? The ones who came in 1938 when we stood facing them at the port and shouted our welcome? The ones who didn’t heed us? Those were the days when we emotionally declaimed Avigdor Hameiri’s poem: “On paper white as snow / A letter comes from the Diaspora / A weeping mother writes: To my good son in Jerusalem, / Your father is dead, your mother sick … / Come home, my lovely son …” And the reply: “On plain paper, gray as dust / A letter goes to the Diaspora / A pioneer writes with teary eye, Jerusalem, 1928 / Forgive me, my sick mother / I shall not return to the Diaspora! / If you love me / You come here and embrace me / And no longer shall I be a wanderer! / I shall never budge from here …”
In 1939 High Commissioner Wauchope had already been forced out, and the British halted immigration, and the Arabs won in their riots against Jewish immigration, so that Jewish refugees were unable to come, but they tried to come and the majority drowned on the way, and only a few succeeded.
Six
At the height of the war I came back from a talk with my commanding officer at Kiryat Anavim and went to sleep. Before that I’d had some dry bread with mallow. The loaf was wrapped in vine leaves, and somebody said I winced because I was wounded, but perhaps I was just thirsty. Someone woke me up and told me to go up to the Castel*, the old Roman town, with a few guys. He said there’d been some hard fighting that night and we’d taken the, but the guys who’d taken it were tired and needed to be relieved. We went up the mountain and saw them coming down. They were shuffling along like a funeral cortege. Rocking from side to side. One guy who knew me came over and said, Listen, don’t go up there, it’s a shithole of a place. I said that I had to go up. He held a kind of gauze pad with ointment on it against a wound on his arm and said with a smile, You know why it’s called gaza gauze? Because it’s from Gaza. I asked him if it was because they’d found gauze in Gaza one day, and he patted my cheek, laughed, and said, In Roman times or later, I don’t remember exactly when, I was a kid, the best cotton wool in the country came from Gaza and they built a gauze factory there.
The officer kicked him so he’d move on, and we shouted Ahalan—hi there — which was the opposite of what we should have said, and we marched on upward to the big building at the summit. My section commander, Kushi (“Blackie”—to this day I don’t know what his real name was), went up by a different route and was waiting for us when we got there. He said, We’ve got to defend the summit, and if we see anything move then raise the alarm, and if necessary, open fire, and also, we’ve got to keep an eye on the Jerusalem soldiers because they haven’t yet been under fire and maybe they’ll take off. We came to a fine stone building in the shade of thickly leaved trees and sat down. Two guys played cards. I looked at the view. There were those beautiful birds that wove arabesques in the sky. You could hear them twittering. To this day, in the mist of forgetfulness, I can hear them.