Here’s another pearl of memory. Was my father really there? Does this story say anything? Is it even important? I’ve written it fifty times since I was a deckhand aboard the Pan York in 1949, when we brought refugees from Europe, when we searched for them in all kinds of holes in Italy and Yugoslavia, and when they came begging us to let them board and there was no more room and they shinnied up the hawsers to board the sardine can that was the Pan York.
One morning I was working on deck scraping off rust and the sea was rough. I saw a group of immigrants coming up from the depths of the ship’s underworld to eat and wait in line for the toilet. They stood in line for hours, and the ship was lurching, and I saw a woman who took out a little toy mirror, which she’d evidently bought from a haberdasher in the ship’s belly because they bought and sold even when they were packed in like sardines, and she tilted her head back, shook out her hair, and curled it with one finger and smiled at herself in the tiny mirror and looked happy.
In Tel Aviv, at night, I lay helpless. I had this talent of thinking about something until I actually entered it. I didn’t really know what I was forbidden to know. I imagined that my father had fallen off a roof, and I felt the break and the pain and I felt death. It was hard for me and I thought that the Jews, well, it was impossible that they shouldn’t have a home. The interim year had been 1945, the connecting year, the middle year between the destruction and what seemed then to be our great strike in the battles against Jewish destiny. Two years had passed since the war in Europe ended and hopes were high. I didn’t really know what the hopes aspired to, but we felt it was good that they were there.
Four
At Hanukkah in 1946, the last one before the war broke out, the winter was harsh. Hail in abundance, strong winds, snow piled up in Jerusalem and Hebron, and we climbed Masada*, where Jewish rebels had taken their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman Empire, to touch the Holocaust that had become real for us. In the past, during the Jews’ harsh years, we’d known a little about it, but we were mainly preoccupied with the struggle between the left-wing Achdut Ha’avodah and Mapai political parties, and didn’t understand what we read in the papers.
We climbed the winding, potholed path to Masada, but we couldn’t see a thing because darkness was upon the face of God’s deep, and we reached the summit. The mountain was terrifying, broken, forsaken, orphaned, and wounded, and on top it was flat and barren. A black sky lay on top of us with its multitude of stars. We shivered with cold and excitedly stood to attention. The Dead Sea shone in a pure light that did not come from the sun because it had not yet risen. We placed a stone on which we scratched “If I Forget Thee, O Diaspora” and said something about how the Germans had exterminated the Jews. We hadn’t heard any details, I was to meet my father’s cousin only later, and we knew very little about the concentration and death camps. A guy from the Palmach who accompanied us pulled out his pistol and fired one shot into the air, and it sliced into the silence, and it was moving to see a Jewish pistol round fired at the enemies of Israel.
I left my friends, who lay down deadbeat and fell asleep in the middle of the biting cold of the desert, and walked away slowly. The blackout enforced in the country throughout the war had now been lifted, and intoxicated I looked at the beautiful lights flickering from afar: Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Jallah especially, but Jerusalem too. That colorful scene in the middle of the night moved me; one of my friends, I don’t remember who, came looking for me, and found me — a schmuck standing on the cliff edge. I pointed at the lights and told him that it looked like the Christmas I’d seen at the Migdalor Cinema in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, with James Stewart, who out of the goodness of his heart sacrificed himself for his family, and he was in despair, grieving for his lost and wasted life and he came to a bridge over a frozen river to leap to his death. At that moment appears Clarence, a chubby angel sent to help him and who’s working on earning his wings and has to do a good deed to win them. Clarence jumps into the river and shouts for help, and Stewart, who hears him, jumps into the freezing water and rescues him, and the angel screens a flashback of Stewart’s life, and Stewart sees how he changed the lives of so many people and how much goodness he showered on them and how selfless he was, and he takes back what he’d said, that it would have been better if he hadn’t been born, and he comes back to reality, and all the people he helped in his life come to his house with presents, and all this happens on Christmas Eve, with the tree, the lights shining from it, the tiny fairy lights on its branches, and a great light shines as the bell on the Christmas tree tinkles, and Stewart’s daughter says that when the ringing is heard, it means that an angel has earned his wings.
My friend was amazed by the story, which in his view was so alien to the Jewish Masada, the mistaken choice of death, which is innocent of any tree or sound. You’re crazy, Yoram, he yelled. What’s Masada and Jewish heroism got to do with a shitty film at the Migdalor? And I said to him, Perhaps there is a connection but only in my twisted mind. Masada lay deep inside me, troubling me, I was obsessively preoccupied with the glory of death and liberty, and also with the genocide, in that a people like that had punished itself with genocide. My mother had been among the first of this country’s sons and daughters who had climbed Masada, Masada that the Jews hadn’t liked mentioning, for they had idolized Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai who fled and came down from the wall in a coffin, and who made sure it stank of excrement so that the Romans wouldn’t open it, and had asked the Romans to let him build a yeshiva in Yavneh and didn’t say that it was to save Judaism, and the Romans thought he was betraying his brethren. Afterward the great slaughter of the Jews took place, and the mass suicide so loathsome and abhorrent to the Jewish sages, and only the traitorous Flavius Josephus who wrote the history of the Jews perpetuated it.
But the Jewish-Arab struggle created a need for heroes. The people in Eretz Yisrael espoused the Masada rebels, who preferred death to slavery. Standing on that cliff facing the darkness illumining itself on the desert became a mystical experience for entire generations of Israelis.
I stood and thought that today’s Hanukkah and the long days had started to come to an end and the world is kindling lights and I heard a rock falling into the chasm and I felt I was falling, but luckily my friend grabbed me and pulled me back, and I said to him that if I’d taken one more small step I’d have become a Roman stone at the foot of the mountain.
Then I looked again at the beautiful infinite lights of the Arab towns and I said that if you stand on the edge of the abyss, as the songs back then termed our national situation, you’re like the Jews seeing Paradise beyond the end. And then a guy called Nehemiah came running and called us to help his Palmachnik friend who had been wounded by a stray bullet fired from the pistol hidden in his pants pocket because he fancied a girl he shouldn’t have. And one of the youth leaders ran ten kilometers to Kibbutz Beit Ha’arava to bring a dressing, and we sat there pressing on the shot guy’s arm so he wouldn’t lose any more blood, and only some five hours later the youth leader and a medic got back to us. We went down to the Dead Sea and saw a platoon of British soldiers there, it wasn’t easy getting down, we walked south beyond the spit and reached the Jordanian side, and the mountains loomed over us and we swam beneath them, lying on our back with our satchels sprouting from our belly like fat flowers, for we couldn’t sink but were burned by the salt water. Above us the mountains of Moab were spread proudly, and jagged projections of dark rock in the darkness of the hill, and there was a bat, and an eagle traversed the sky, and we laughed, we couldn’t believe that we really could lie on the water without sinking. A girl swam at my side, I don’t remember who she was, she reached out and touched me, and it was very unusual for a girl to touch you. I looked at the mountains, and light of sunrise began to emerge from behind them, and the desert shadowed it all into a bed of beauty, which for some reason seemed to me to be sad and perhaps even superfluous here, in the light moving over this darkness, and I held her hand in mine, I looked at her, she didn’t look at me but I felt the warmth crawling into me and I was hot. You see, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that terrible expression “the edge of the abyss,” coined by the poet Alterman, which if you’re standing on it you can see Paradise but also the opposite.