The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (4 page)

My grandmother, Sima, my mother Zika, and my grandfather Avram.

Zalman Shazar, who in 1963 became Israel’s third president, was my great uncle by marriage. He was married to Rachel Katznelson, my grandfather Avraham’s sister. Rachel was a writer and a Zionist labor leader and established women’s unions fighting for women’s rights. Shazar himself held several important political posts before being chosen the third president of the state of Israel, a largely ceremonial position. He was also a writer and a poet, and in his youth he would captivate audiences for hours with his long speeches. Sima was very close to them, and every Saturday she would join Zalman and Rachel for a luncheon at the president’s residence. She occasionally asked me to join her and we walked together to the presidential residence, a few blocks from her house. In those days, it was a beautiful and respectable home located in a quiet corner of Rehavia, though it was rather humble as presidential mansions go. I was very young at the time, but I remember those visits vividly. They were all very old by then, in their seventies, and the food was never very good. We called the president Dod Zalman, or Uncle Zalman, and his wife Doda Rachel. On Dod Zalman’s birthday,
which like mine, was during Hanukkah, he would invite the entire family to his house. This meant hundreds of people: judges, cabinet ministers, distinguished doctors, artists, all of whom were members of my extended family. Today Dod Zalman’s portrait is on the 200 shekel bill. When my children were young, I showed them the bill with Dod Zalman on it, and they were floored: “We have a great uncle who is on money!”

Zalman Shazar, who in 1963 became Israel’s third president, was my great uncle by marriage. Here I am shaking his hand, with Savta Sima during Hanukkah celebration at the President’s residence in Jerusalem.

When Sima turned 80, she received a letter from the general director of Kupat Holim telling her how much they had appreciated her many years of service, and that it was time to make room for younger doctors, mostly new immigrants who had arrived from the Soviet Union, who were in need of her position. She tried to take it well, but it was truly devastating for her. To keep her occupied, my mother took apart old sweaters and gave her the yarn, from which she knitted beautiful bed covers, one of which I still have. Sima died when I was in high school after a protracted struggle against leukemia.

It seems clear to me now that the harsher aspects of Sima’s personality were the result of her having lived in an era when women were not supposed to have a career, and emotions were forcibly subdued. This could not have been easy for her. By contrast, Sima’s daughter, my mother Zika, is a warm and loving woman, with a small and strong physique and a loud and distinctive laugh. When she was
younger, she volunteered to serve in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. She told me that the best part of her service there was that she was able to see Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, three Middle Eastern cities known for their great beauty. She married my father when she was 19.

When we were kids and my parents had friends over, they would make my mother laugh just to hear that infectious sound. Her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could not wish for a better advocate and supporter. She is a wonderful cook, something she says she learned from her mother-in-law. She has impeccable taste in clothes and décor. Her house is always beautiful, and her yard always in bloom.

I learned a great deal about my family from my mother. She taught me to be a Zionist, but not by being dogmatic. She did it by imparting her love for everyone—family members and those outside our family—who played an important role in the revival of the Jewish national home. She also imparted to me her love of the Hebrew language and culture by teaching me to appreciate modern Hebrew poetry and prose. The two most prominent men in her life, her father and her husband, dedicated their entire lives to the cause of Zionism, and she shared their stories with me throughout my life. She was never active politically—she refused to be interviewed or to be in the public eye—but she supported her father and then her husband as they committed themselves to the cause.

I knew my father’s mother, Savta Sara, as a short and slightly round woman with eyes that squinted when she laughed. As a child, I clearly preferred her to my mother’s mother, Sima. Sara would prepare a great stew with a sauce that I would soak up with fresh white bread and then devour. She baked delicious pies and pastries that smelled wonderful, and she told funny stories. On cold Jerusalem winter days, when I would go to her warm apartment after school, I was always welcomed with a pair of warm slippers, a woolen sweater, and the smell of her delicious, hearty cooking. Her hair was long and thin and always pulled back in a bun, and with her high cheekbones and squinting eyes, her features resembled those of an old Mongolian woman. As a boy, when I was sick and had to stay home from school, the best prize was to have Savta Sara come and tell me stories. “If you want a story you have to take your medicine,” she would say, and the sweetness of her presence more than made up for the bitter medicine.

Unlike Sima, Savta Sara completed only three or four years of schooling, but she could speak and read Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian. She read everything she could get her hands on, including all the Yiddish classics, and would retell us the stories by heart, especially those by the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. She read everything published in Hebrew, from newspaper articles to the finest literature.
Among her friends and acquaintances were great literary names like poet Haim Nahman Bialik, author Haim Hazaz, and Israel’s beloved songwriter Naomi Shemer, whose mother was Sara’s lifelong friend.

My father’s mother, Savta Sara.

If Sara had any shortcomings, I was not aware of them as a child. Later in life I realized that in her eyes no one was ever as good or as smart or as right as her brother, her sons, and her grandchildren. And she had an almost insatiable desire to meddle in the affairs of others, mostly her friends and family, and this would often come at the price of broken relationships. But all of my father’s comrades in arms who served in and around Jerusalem knew that they could always count on her for a bed and a warm meal should they need it, and that no advance notice was ever necessary. Unlike my grandmother Sima, who was a very independent woman, Sara needed people around her.

She was born in the Ukraine in a
shtetl
(Yiddish for “small town”) called Lipowitz in the Pale of Settlement, an area designated by the Russian government where Jews were permitted to reside. She did not know her birth date other than that she was born in 1901, so my mother decided that we would celebrate her birthday on the fifteenth day of the month of Shvat, or
Tu B’Shvat
, as it is called in Hebrew. It is the Jewish holiday dedicated to celebrating trees and nature. The whole family would gather at her house on that day to eat dried fruit, nuts, and her wonderful homemade pastries.

She came from a poor family whose home was made of mostly mud. “If you poked your finger through the wall,” she would say, poking a finger at an imaginary wall, “it would make a hole large enough that you could look outside.” Then she would laugh her hearty laugh.

My father and younger brother Dov, who was fondly called Dubik.

In the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Sara was a teenager and she decided to become a
komsomolka
, a “young communist.” She agreed once to go to a gathering of young communists that was held on Yom Kippur, the holiest of the Jewish holidays. But while on the train, she had a change of heart. She knew that if news of her traveling by train on Yom Kippur reached her father it would kill him, so she got off the train and returned home. “She was not meant to be a revolutionary,” my mother said. “Her older brother, Eliezer felt that there was no future for young Jews in Russia and that remaining there may be dangerous. So, together, Sara and Eliezer left their home and family and began their journey to
Eretz Yisrael
, the Land of Israel.”

They stopped in Turkey for a year in a temporary Zionist camp called
Mesila Hadasha
, where Jews could work while they waited for the British authorities to issue them permits to enter Palestine. From there they traveled by boat to Eretz Yisrael, or
Palestina
, as the Jewish immigrants called Palestine. On the boat from Constantinople to Palestine, Sara and Eliezer met Baruch Ifland, a young Jewish man on his way to start a life in England. Eliezer convinced Baruch to come with them to Palestine and, when they arrived, Baruch married Sara. Together they worked to fulfill the vision of the Zionist labor movement—Jewish people from all walks of life flocking to Eretz Yisrael to work and rebuild the Jewish homeland.

Sara and Baruch had two children, my father Matti and his younger brother Dov, who was fondly called Dubik. Dubik became a farmer. He had six children, and he was everyone’s beloved uncle. Sadly, he was 42 when he died of a heart attack.