Art of a Jewish Woman (5 page)

Shuli himself was the local leader of the Jewish nationalist group Keren Hayesod, sanctioned by the Jewish Agency. Their strategy was to use money raised by the Palestine Foundation Fund in England, America, Germany, and France to purchase land from Arab owners. With this money they would construct kibbutzim and moshavs—communal settlements and farms for the immigrants—and expand Jewish towns. Sometimes they took title to land occupied by poor Arab and Beduouin families who did not have clear deeds to it. They did this by paying off local Arab chiefs. For Shuli, Rahela, and their compatriots, Zionism was a nationalistic struggle for a homeland. They were not moved by other settlers’ ambitions to create a Jewish state religion or religious sanctuary, nor were they moved by the fact that they were displacing Arabs from their homes and livelihoods and turning them into paupers and refugees. They rationalized what they were doing with the belief that in time there would be new schools to raise everybody’s educational level and enough new jobs to go around even for the displaced.

Some months after Felice entered Palestine, her sister Hanka arrived. She had finished high school a few months earlier, and their father had managed to obtain an educational visa for her from the British Mandate government that allowed her to study at the Hanna Meisel Agricultural College. Officially it was a visa for the duration of her studies, and she would have to return to Poland afterward. Unofficially the Hanna Meisel school was preparation for joining a farming kibbutz and settling permanently in Palestine. It was an escape from Poland. There was no intention to return, the British be damned.

Still more unofficially it was a youthful passage, for on the kibbutz Hanka met Lova, a young man from the Polish industrial city of Lodz. They married, and Lova, missing city life, found a job driving a bus in Tel Aviv. They relocated there, Lova joining the Histadrut and the Haganah underground.

Before Hanka left the kibbutz, Felice went to see her. They sat on Hanka’s bed, sharing experiences, and she told her sister about Mustapha, the beautiful servant boy in her employer’s house in Jerusalem who wouldn’t leave her alone while she bathed and dressed. They laughed so hard they nearly fell off the bed. Felice also tried working in the fields, but she suffered sunstroke and decided it was not for her. She returned to Tel Aviv, where there was a sidewalk café life, theaters, cinemas, and the beach. She was also more restless, less seduced by marriage, more political than Hanka. With her university education Felice was more able to analyze the conflicting strains of influence and history in the new land. They were troubling.

Shuli proposed to her and begged her to share her vitality, voice, intelligence, and charm with him. “You will be my perfect partner; together we will build the new state,” he said more than once.

“Why do we need to build another circumscribed, nationalistic land, a Jewish state?”

“I need to educate you. We need a state where they won’t kill Jews,” Shuli tried to explain.

“Why shouldn’t it be open for all people who live in Palestine?” she retorted.

Together they went to many organizational gatherings and debated in the Tel Aviv cafés in the evenings, the warm Mediterranean breezes an antidote to the political tensions. Often their group met clandestinely, passing the name of a gathering place secretly to avoid the British police or patrolling army troops. The British were constantly wavering between hostility toward and support for Jewish migration. The Arab High Committee was pressing the mandate to forbid land sales to Keren Heyesod and stop immigration. Jews were intensely lobbying the British government to demonstrate its commitment to the Balfour Jewish homeland declaration. Palestinians and regional Arab states were threatening to throw their allegiance in the direction of Germany, as it too menaced England with war, if the British continued to consider dividing the land into two states.

“You don’t understand the urgency with which we need to act,” Shuli said. “Have you heard what they are doing in Germany to our people, and Poland is following them?”

“I know my father can’t send me money anymore, and he needs to find a way to get Miriam to Palestine.”

“They are trying to get rid of the Jews with legal harassment, taking away businesses, not giving licenses to people to practice their profession or do business.” In fact in Poland over 1,000,000 of the 3,500,000 Jews were unemployed because their businesses had been closed by the government and the owners no longer could hire workers. Partly it was the worldwide depression, and that itself seemed to fuel discrimination against many minorities in Europe—Ukrainians in Poland and Gypsies elsewhere. But raw anti-Semitism was becoming rampant. At the university in Warsaw, the quotas for Jewish students were reduced or eliminated entirely in some fields, and on the campus the Jewish students were physically jostled and forced to sit on special benches in the rear. Whole communities were suffering from hunger and existing through charity from neighbors who had money left. It was a more desperate in Poland in 1935 and 1936 than in Germany.

“But what good is it for people who need work to come here just to take away somebody else’s job? Pretty soon we will all be starving,” Felice countered.

“We will divide the country in two.”

“How? With a handshake?” Felice persisted. Shuli looked frustrated, but she went on, “We should build schools, build irrigation canals, and make roads together; create working alliances. Learn to be friends by working and building the land together. Instead all I hear about is who owns this or who owns that.”

“You don’t understand that it is a question of time. Time! We need to do it now. We can’t just build roads together, a few here, a few there, a few next year, because the British may take back whatever support they have for us any time.”

It was Felice’s turn for anger. “Do
what
now? Kill a few English soldiers with a bomb while they are sitting in a restaurant drinking coffee on their day off?” There was scattered violence and rumors everywhere: stories that Jews were plotting with the British against Arabs; that Arabs and the British were in league together; that the Arabs were going to go it alone; or the Jews were going to act independently.

She asked Shuli, “What do you know about the murder on the beach a few blocks from here? Chaim Arlosoroff. Wasn’t he your colleague in the Jewish Agency, in the Political Department? Wasn’t he the most brilliant one?”

“He was opposed to the Revisionist Zionists. He was for
havlaga
, self-defense only.”

“That’s what I mean; he wanted to go slow, to work with the Arabs. And you want to go fast.”

“Just before he died he said Arabs stabbed him,” Shuli responded.

Felice riposted, “His wife was with him when it happened. She first said it was Arabs; later she said it was four guys from the Irgun,
our
terrorists.”

Shuli’s face hardened, went opaque. “I don’t do things like that. We are against it. But we have to act. We have to be prepared to take in millions of refugees.”

“But you know people who do things like that. You don’t cry when you hear about it like I do, and think what good can come of it. What good is more suffering when there is so much already?”

They also disagreed about socialism. Felice’s socialism was the international labor movement where workers would control the means of production instead of a capitalist elite. For Shuli, everything was subordinate to Zionism, the non-religious version. It required top-down leadership, people giving commands and direction. He felt that the Histadrut labor union and party was too democratic, too much like a collective with one vote per member that couldn’t move fast enough or decisively enough in the present moment.

As much as Felice was attracted by his energy and looks—and by the youths around him bent on remaking themselves invulnerable—he couldn’t convert her to his activism. They were stuck in an irreducible dilemma, just like the British were stuck as go-between would-be peacemakers in an irreducible conflict between the Arabs and Jews.

“How can you create a new society when there are already people here, Arabs, living on the land?” she said.

“You forget, we are buying it from them with money we raise in America and Europe.”

“They don’t understand what you are doing to them, what they are letting happen to themselves, what the money really means. They will never forget when they wake up.”

Shuli brought the curtain down for the evening. “First we need our country, then we need you, Fela, to create your socialism.”

Felice’s world view was for world socialism, a society in which people from many lands were peacefully interconnected. Her father had set her on this path because of the nature of his grain brokerage business. For a long time his office was a room in their small home, and it had the first telephone in Sczuzcyn. Growing up, Felice overheard her father brokering sales of the wheat the farmers grew in the broad, rolling fields of their Bialystock district to distant cities—Warsaw, the German city of Koeningsburg, to Berlin and Frankfurt, and to Riga in Estonia. She heard him conduct business in Polish, Russian, and German. She met his clients and picked up their languages herself.

From their little village, her father felt as if he were looking out upon the whole world. Even though he had never traveled beyond the cities where he did business, nor had he formal education beyond high school, he had come to believe in progressive socialism. He told his daughter that society could function best with a system of collective and government ownership of principal industries, along with democratic organization of the basic production and distribution of goods and services. Her father Moishe Ozerovicz’s fantasy during her childhood was that in a new democratic Poland, Felice would be a ranking Polish diplomat and the young son Berci, born when Felice was 14, would be the first Jewish prime minister. It was an idealistic desire for assimilation—the complete breaking down of ethnic, religious, and political boundaries. This dream became Felice’s even as Nazism and Polish anti-Semitism stifled it.

Felice’s intellectual gifts made her an apt pupil for her father. Despite her mother’s complaints about so much money being spent on a girl’s education, Moishe championed his daughter’s gifts and sent her to a secondary boarding school in Wilno in the northernmost state of Poland. Wilno was a center for higher education in Eastern Europe, and social and political causes fermented there. Felice became a free thinker. She concentrated in philosophy for her graduation examinations at nineteen. She learned to analyze, formulate and articulate her political positions. She had formed her first political allegiance with socialism, not with the Zionism born in Wilno, nor with communism, which strongly influenced many students because it wanted to give voice and control to the powerless workers. For Felice, socialism also appealed because she felt it gave voice to intellectuals and others who valued cultural and humanistic pursuits.

In Palestine she and Shuli debated each other like two fevered politicians without a referee until it became clear to her that though she might love him, and he her, she could not marry someone with whom she had such a fractious intellectual relationship.

She went to the beach to think. The waves talked to her and she wanted to hear what they said. A vendor came by selling ears of corn with butter. She was hungry, but she told him she didn’t have any money. He gave her one anyway. A little while later he returned and gave her another one. Life was like that for her. She told him she would find him when she had money. He said he knew she would. He was a gentle man, and she realized she needed to be with somebody who was not trying to shape her like Shuli was trying to do, turn her into something she wasn’t. His life was permeated with Zionism and Felice didn’t think she could share it with him. She couldn’t share his excitement and commitment. If she stayed with him, it wouldn’t be right for him, and she had to find what was right for herself. She felt courageous enough to make a decision and live with it.

What’s more, she laughed to herself, she knew she had to move away from him because they couldn’t afford to keep her in the house. She was always hungry and had such a great appetite that they joked that they would rather dress her than feed her—a good bargain because she never wanted more than she could carry in her suitcase. She said she would pay them back as soon as she had a job. She paid everybody back, including the cab driver.

So she made plans to leave the stucco bungalow that she had been sharing with Shuli, Rahela and her husband and their just-born baby, and frequently another newly-arrived immigrant. Their little Villa by the Sea, as they called it, was like a stop on an underground railroad for a relative, friend, or friend of a friend in passage to the next stop in his or her life.

For a few weeks Felice took a job with a German pharmaceutical company as a representative carrying samples and literature to doctors’ offices, doctors who were mostly German émigrés. It was boring, meager work. Then she found her first really professional position through a help-wanted advertisement. Dr. Sayeed el Hadj needed an assistant. He was an Arab dentist, a graduate of Beirut University who practiced in neighboring Jaffa three kilometers to the south.

Jaffa was one of the oldest cities and ports in the world, millennia old, known as Palestine’s “Bride of the Sea.” It was the disembarkation point for the Romans, for medieval Christian crusaders coming to the Holy Land to “save it from the infidel,” for the Turks reclaiming it from the Crusaders, and now, as always, for pilgrims en route to Jerusalem. It had changed hands more than 30 times across history. It also received English and American cloth, French perfumes and lace, rice from Egypt, coffee and tobacco from Turkey. It was the embarkation port for most of Palestine’s exports: the famous sweet Jaffa oranges went all over Europe and even to America, vegetables went to Egypt, and sesame seeds and oil, wheat, and cured beef sailed to England, Turkey, Egypt and Austria-Hungary.

To be close to her job, Felice rented a room in a flat from a couple from Bucharest in the southern margin of Tel Aviv that had first been settled. It was in a formerly stately old mansion in what had been a neighborhood of Sephardic Jews of North African origin. Its streets were narrower, more tortuous than the new Tel Aviv laid out on a grid.