“I knew a Shmuley Besser,” she said, remembering how he used to hold the camera as though it were made of glass. “But he is dead.”
“This is from a Yeheskiel Besser,” he said and handed her an envelope.
She took the letter, which had been opened and carelessly refolded. “It’s from Shmuley’s uncle,” she said. “He writes that I am to join him at Kibbutz Alonim. Is that far from here?”
“Not far,” Seligman said. “Close to Haifa. I have many friends there. They will be sending someone for you tomorrow.”
“What do you know about my friends here?” Shayndel asked.
“Names?”
“Dubinski,” Leonie said.
“Dubinski, Leonie. You are going to Kibbutz Dalia.”
“That is also near Haifa, isn’t it?”
“How did you know that?” Tedi asked, impressed.
“I think that is where Aliza’s uncle Ofer lives. I wonder if she had anything to do with this. Is that possible, Monsieur Seligman? I worked in the infirmary with Mrs. Gilad. Nurse Aliza Gilad?”
“I have no idea how these assignments were made.”
“What about me?” said Tedi. “Pastore.”
“You are going to Kibbutz Negba. That’s in the south,” he said. “And you should go and pack your things. They’re coming for you this afternoon. You may have to stop overnight somewhere; Tel Aviv if you’re lucky.”
“Negba,” Tedi repeated, trying to get used to the sound of her new home.
“Do you have any letters for Weitz?” said Zorah, trying to sound as though it didn’t matter.
“You are Weitz, Zorah? No letter.” He consulted his list again. “But you are going to Kibbutz Ma’barot. I hope you speak Romanian.”
“Why?”
“They’re all Romanians down there,” he said, and made a circle with his finger beside his ear. “A little crazy, you know?”
“What about Esther Zalinsky? She’s my cousin. Also her little boy, Jacob. The name is Zalinsky.”
He ran his finger down a list. “Kibbutz Elon.”
“Where is that?” Zorah said.
“That’s up in the north. Mostly Poles, so your cousin will be fine. You can tell her,” he said. “Pastore leaves today but the rest of you have until tomorrow. Enjoy Beit Oren while you can. Good morning.”
Zorah turned to Shayndel. “This is a disaster,” Zorah said. “Esther is a terrible liar and the minute she opens her mouth they’ll know she’s a peasant. If she winds up among a bunch of doctrinaire Poles, they’ll throw her out. You have to do something. You have to get it changed so I go to the same place.”
“I can’t do anything about this,” Shayndel said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Zorah said. “Tell them who you are, what you did in the war. They’ll all shit in their pants and do whatever you ask.”
“I don’t think so,” Shayndel objected. “The whole idea of the kibbutz is that everyone is treated the same.”
“That is not the way the world works,” Zorah said. “Not even in a kibbutz, my Zionist friend. And listen to me, Shayndel, I will not permit those two to suffer anymore. You can fix this, I know it. And I am not going to leave you alone until you say you will.”
“You might as well do what she says,” Leonie said. “She won’t let go. You know perfectly well that our Zorah is like a tick.”
Shayndel pulled away from Zorah’s grasp. “All right, I’ll try,” she relented, and chased after Seligman.
Zorah trailed behind and watched as Shayndel caught up with him. Seligman turned around with the bemused, tolerant smile of an adult responding to someone else’s annoying child. After Shayndel made her request, he put the clipboard under his arm and actually lifted his finger to deliver a lecture about procedure or fairness or some other principle. But she interrupted, saying something that made him stand up straight and look her in the eye.
He lowered his chin and asked a question.
As Shayndel answered, her eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened, and in that moment the immigrant girl turned into a battle-tested commander. At one point, she reached up to her shoulder as though she were searching for something. She leaned close and pointed at the clipboard.
Seligman bit his lip as he flipped through the papers, pretending to look for something, taking a long time to prove that he was the one who wielded the power. Then he made an offer, screwing up his face like he was biting into a slice of lemon.
Shayndel nodded her thanks primly and walked away with the hint of a swagger in her step.
“So where are we going?” Zorah asked.
“Nowhere yet,” Shayndel said. “You’ll all be staying here until they come up with a place that will take the three of you. It may take a few more days. But you have to understand that this may be temporary. You could be split up again at any time.”
“I just want to get them settled,” Zorah said, and raised an eyebrow. “And wherever we go, I will let it be known that we have a friend in very high places.”
“You are relentless,” said Shayndel. “Go tell Esther and Jacob.”
Zorah took Shayndel’s hand. “Thank you, my friend.”
Tedi had nothing to pack, so she wandered around the kibbutz, inhaling the comforting aroma of baking potatoes, the happy stink of the goats, the dry-kindling smell of fallen pine needles. A few kibbutzniks asked where she was going, but none of them had been to Negba. They wished her good luck and safe journey and invited her back for a longer visit.
By midmorning, she was sitting on a bench near the front gate, where Esther and Jacob found her. Tedi hugged the boy so tightly that he pushed away and said, “You are strong,” and ran back toward the children’s house. Esther kissed her on the forehead and scurried after him.
A little while later, Leonie, Zorah, and Shayndel sat down with Tedi, but nobody felt much like talking.
After a while, Leonie said, “Too bad that Nissim fellow isn’t going to the same place as you.”
“I heard they took all the Iraqis straight to Yagur,” said Shayndel. “By now, they’re probably scattered around the country, where no one can find them.” The others nodded.
They ate a quiet lunch and returned to the bench, moving closer together as the afternoon wore on. Esther and Jacob came by again, but Jacob could not sit still and Esther promised to return. Shayndel took Tedi’s hand. Leonie put her head on Tedi’s shoulder.
Tedi was grateful for the silence, sure she would break into pieces if anyone asked her a question.
At three o’clock, another woman from Atlit joined them on the bench. She was carrying a one-year-old baby and a basket full of pink and white clothes, gifts from the kibbutz nursery. “I hear it’s hot in Negba,” said the young mother. “But it’s close to the seashore. That will be nice, don’t you think?”
It was nearly five when the jeep pulled up to the gate. The moment she saw it, Tedi jumped to her feet. “Does anyone have a camera?” she demanded. “I want a picture of us together—Shayndel, Leonie, Zorah, and me.”
The woman with the baby got into the jeep, but Tedi refused to budge. “I cannot go without a photograph,” she said, her voice suddenly high and shrill. “Surely someone has a camera.”
Seligman walked over. “You lot again? What’s the problem now?”
“All I want in the world is a photograph,” said Tedi. She showed him the small paper bag that held all of her worldly possessions, but it was her brimming blue eyes that undid him.
He offered her his handkerchief and said, “There’s an old Brownie in the office.”
The driver honked his horn. Leonie went over to ask him for a little patience, and Seligman returned with the boxy black camera.
“Get ready,” he called as he ran toward them.
The girls stood in line as he peered through the lens. “Everyone smile. One-two-three. That’s it. Good. Good luck. Goodbye. ”
Tedi hugged him. “Promise you’ll send it to me: Tedi Pastore, Kibbutz Negba. Write it dow
n.”
He chucked her under the chin. “How could I forget anyone as pretty as you?”
“No, no,” she insisted. “You must write it down. I will not go if you don’t.” She grabbed his pen and clipboard and scribbled her name and the kibbutz on a piece of paper, and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.
Her friends surrounded her. The four of them held each other, weeping and whispering salty oaths.
“See you again,” said Zorah. “This is not good-bye.”
The driver leaned on the horn and gunned the ignition.
Tedi sobbed as she ran through the gate. She kneeled on the seat as the jeep pulled away and shouted, “Write to me! Shayndel, Leonie, Zorah! Remember: Kibbutz Negba. Tell Esther good-bye. Give Jacob a kiss. We will see one another again.”
Epilogue
The Photograph
Seligman forgot to empty his shirt pocket that night and Tedi’s address went into the laundry, where the ink washed away and the paper melted to lint.
It was a full year before the roll of film was developed and returned to the kibbutz. The pictures were laid out on a table in the dining hall, but no one recognized the four young women standing by the gate. Seligman had left Beit Oren and even if he had been there, he would have been hard-pressed to remember the name of the girl who had begged him to take the picture, much less where she had been sent.
The other pictures in that batch were group shots of one sort or another. There were weddings and holiday meals, parties and dances. The snapshots were all meant to go into a kibbutz archive, but they had a habit of disappearing. Wedding photos were taken almost immediately, purloined by brides for family albums. The photos of birthday parties vanished over time, claimed, far too often, by young widows who had no other pictures to show their fatherless sons and daughters.
Because no one could identify Tedi or her friends, their picture was consigned to an envelope with blurred images of crowded Seder tables and out-of-focus horas. Over the years, the leftover photos were moved into a cardboard folder, which yellowed as it was transferred from desk drawer to filing cabinet.
From time to time, one of the more enterprising Beit Oren children would discover the cache of old pictures and use them for projects about early kibbutz life, until finally there was barely anything left from the 1940s.
In 1987, the Beit Oren kibbutz went bankrupt, ceased being a collective, and reorganized as a spa and mountain hotel for tourists. Some of the old-timers stayed on as part-owners, but only a handful of them remembered what it had been like in the days before statehood.
For now, the Kibbutz Beit Oren archive—a few letters and some first-person accounts, as well as a handful of orphaned pictures—resides in a battered gunmetal gray cabinet inside a tiny, damp, cinder-block building within sight of the swimming pool.
The visitor from America walked through the chill of an overcast March morning, up the winding pathway surrounded by enormous hosta plants, sheltered by graceful pines. She had taken a tour of Atlit, now an education center at the site of the old internment camp—a museum surrounded by a barbwire fence. The story of the heroic rescue and the perilous climb up the mountains had moved her to learn more.
Leafing through a fly-specked folder in the one-room hut, she picked up a photograph of four young women. “Could these girls have been among the ones who were rescued?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Gershon, Beit Oren’s unofficial historian, an unbowed, still-handsome elderly man whose recent illness had not dimmed his smile or the light in his blue eyes.
“I was not here at that particular time,” he said. “I was back in Romania, helping to bring more of our people to Israel. It is possible that these girls could have been among the group from Atlit, but there are only a few of us left from those days, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve got the best memory of the bunch.” He smiled. “Perhaps someone at the museum can tell you. They have computers there, you know.”
Gershon cleaned his glasses and took another look at the picture.
Shayndel and Leonie stand at the center, hip to hip, arms around each other’s shoulders. Their heads are tilted, almost touching. They are the same height and wear similar white, short-sleeved blouses; even their smiles seem to match, except for the fact that Leonie’s eyes are open so wide, she seems haunted.
Leonie hated having her picture taken. Her husband—a doctor she met in ’46—would beg and tease to get her to smile for the camera, but she would always turn away. After ten childless years, they divorced, and Leonie never remarried. For forty years, she worked as a clerk in a Tel Aviv hospital; when the staff was assembled for its annual portrait, Leonie hid in the last row.
Shayndel gazes straight into the lens. Her grin leaps off the paper, still infectious even after forty years.
It is the same forthright expression she wore in the early pictures of her with Malka and Wolfe in Europe. The same in the later family snapshots, sitting between her son, Noah, and her daughter, Tedi.
Tedi stands to Leonie’s right. She is a full head taller than the others, a blonde beacon with a tentative smile. She blinked just as the shutter closed. Her hand is raised as if to wave.
Shayndel was pregnant when she found out that Tedi had been killed in the Egyptian attack on Negba.
At Shayndel’s left, Zorah seems to be moving toward the camera, her right shoulder ahead of the left. Although her lips are pressed together, not quite smiling, her eyes are dancing. She looks younger and more carefree than anyone else in the picture.
Meyer was killed in ’48, weeks after the declaration of Israel’s statehood, and Zorah married a Polish survivor. They raised two sons in a cramped, three-room Jerusalem apartment, and she worked in the library at Hebrew University until her death. At the memorial service, students and professors recalled her infallible memory, her green raincoat, and the way she pressed candied dates on anyone who walked into her cubicle. Shayndel read the obituary, which reported that the distinguished cardiologist, Dr. Jacob Zalinksy, delivered a moving eulogy about her abiding friendship with his mother.
Gershon pointed at Zorah. “See how this one hides her arm behind her back? She must have been a survivor from the camps.”
“But she looks so happy,” said the American.
“Why not?” he asked. “She was alive. She had made it to the land of Israel. From the look of this picture, she had friends. She was young, pretty.”
“That sounds like a happy ending.”
“I hope she was happy. I hope all of them were,” said Gershon as he slid the picture back into the folder. “But that wasn’t the end.
“That was just the beginning.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to many teachers, friends, guides, and supporters in Israel, beginning with Baruch Kraus, principal of the NFTY-EIE High School, from whom I first heard the story of the rescue from Atlit. Elisheva Benstein was an indispensable translator, researcher, reader, driver, and ally through the whole process. Alon Badihi, in his role as Executive Vice Chairman of the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites, enthusiastically aided and guided my research, arranged visits to the Atlit Illegal Immigrant Detention Camp, and organized meetings with site director Zehavit Rotenberg, and historian/ archivist Neomi Izhar, who were gracious hosts and generous resources. Thanks also to Hagit Krik, Atlit Camp Guide; to Kibbutz Yagur and Kibbutz Beit Oren for use of their archives; and to Moshe Triwaks of Matar Publishing for his kindness and encouragement.
It was a privilege to meet with Tzvi Carmi of Kibbutz Beit Oren, and Haifa resident Osnat Blechman, both of whom experienced Atlit firsthand. Thanks also to Sara Emanuel, Haya Harari, Ruth Gorney, Murray Greenfield, Dr. Gershon Yelin, and Dr. Naftali Hadas, who shared their stories of Atlit, the war, and the years before the founding of the state of Israel.
My friends and teachers, Lorel Zar-Kessler, cantor of Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley, and Rabbi Tara Feldman accompanied me on visits to Atlit and helped me understand wha
t I saw and heard there.
For their advice, comments, and various forms of encouragement, I am indebted to Eleanor Epstein, Laurie Gervis, Marcia Leifer, Ben Loeterman, Rabbi Barbara Penzner, Sondra Stein, Sebastian Stuart, and Ande Zellman. Thanks to Amanda Urban at ICM and everyone at Scribner, especially Nan Graham, Samantha Martin, Susan Moldow, and Paul Whitlatch.
I was cheered on by my family—daughter Emilia, mother Helene, and brother Harry. Jim Ball, my husband, was a rock—as always.
Amy Hoffman and Stephen McCauley have been strong, wise, and patient writing group partners/coaches/nursemaids every step of the way. I am glad to be in their debt, forever.
Continue reading for a preview of Anita Diamant’s
The Boston Girl
A Novel
Available from Scribner December 2014
| 1985 |
Nobody Told You?
Ava, sweetheart, if you ask me to talk about how I got to be the woman I am today, what do you think I’m going to say? I’m flattered you want to interview me. And when did I ever say no to my favorite grandchild?
I know I say that to all of my grandchildren and I mean it every single time. That sounds ridiculous or like I’m losing my marbles, but it’s true. When you’re a grandmother you’ll understand.
And why not? Look at the five of you: a doctor, a social worker, two teachers, and now you.
Of course they’re going to accept you into that program. Don’t be silly. My father is probably rolling over in his grave, but I think it’s wonderful.
Don’t tell the rest of them, but you really are my favorite and not only because you’re the youngest. Did you know you were named after me?
It’s a good story.
Everyone else is named in memory of someone who died, like your sister Jessica, who was named for my nephew Jake. But I was very sick when you were born and when they thought I wasn’t going to make it, they went ahead and just hoped the angel of death wouldn’t make a mistake and take you, Ava, instead of me, Addie. Your parents weren’t that superstitious, but they had to tell everyone you were named after your father’s cousin Arlene, so people wouldn’t give them a hard time.