When Memory Comes/My Home, My Prison
Jacoby, Tamar
Books: SELFHOOD & RESISTANCE IN 1942 Pavel Friedlander's parents began to sense that the circle was closing in, and that as foreign Jewish refugees living in Vichy France, they could be...
...He mentions a study done by a friend of children's perceptions of death: .when young Israelis were shown a picture of animals fleeing gigantic flames—an image that terrified Swiss children—many of them saw only animals playing together...
...What united them was their common suffering...
...Writing at the time of Sadat's first visit to Jerusalem in December 1977, Friedlander is more uneasy than jubilant: more than ever, this was a time to ask why the pursuit of security had led again and again to war...
...In writing When Memory Comes, an eliptical, meditative account of his childhood and his decision to go to Palestine in 1947, Friedlander is trying to come to terms with his feeling that he WHEN MEMORY COMES Saul Friedlander Translated by Helen Lane Farrar, Straus & Glroux, $9.95, 186 pp...
...I would gladly have seized a bomb" she says, "and flung myself at the enemy, regardless of the cost...
...She reports the deportation of refugees from towns destroyed by Israeli troops: bedraggled columns of people, bused to the border where they wait on line to sign documents declaring they will not return to Israel...
...He buried himself in his studies, a seamless school routine, the certainties of the Catholic faith...
...The children of the West Bank were forced to learn Israeli history at school...
...But even as he recalls the film, he is struck by the incongruous "soft spring sky, in Rome" where one survivor talks of Auschwitz...
...More than anything, though, Freidlander would like to believe in peace—and unlike many Israelis he is prepared to make the necessary compromises...
...But she is convinced that what she sees as the psychological costs of oppression can only be redressed by fighting back...
...But he also knows that he cannot deny his memories, not even the unthinkable ones that seem "buried once and for all...
...It was thought that Raymonda would be safest in Israel...
...He and the other young Betar sailing from Marseilles to Tel Aviv on the cargo ship Altalena had been prepared to fight for no less than "both banks of the Jordan," even if that meant subverting the 1947 UN Partition Plan and the official policy of David Ben Gurion's government...
...He sleepwalked and was unable to make friends...
...for her what is important is that by taking up arms, the terrorists "restored our sense of dignity and selfrespect...
...Several times in My Home, My Prison, Raymonda Tawil makes the now fairly commonplace observation that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world...
...Looking back during the summer of 1977, Friedlander returns again and again to the "necessary defenses" that protect us from our own suffering...
...And he himself says very little about the Nazis: there is a single rapid glimpse of Treblinka, a description of another friend's film...
...Paul-Henri stayed on at the school, studying to become a Jesuit priest...
...Speaking for the people of the West Bank and for women in Arab society, she dislikes the idea that "might is right...
...only in the name of a state could they answer violence with force...
...Friedlander has no fascination with horror...
...Concerned as she is to protest the injustice done in the name of security in the West Bank—the hasty arrests, the torture of suspected radicals, the demolition of their families' houses and extended confiscation of land—what now matters most for her is simply the act of resistance...
...But even in the safe and ordered world of the nuns, the boy was troubled by a strange "melancholy apathy...
...The peace initiatives are going to bring to light the hidden contradictions in our society...
...Her own relief work took her to Jerusalem, where she smarted at the triumphant celebrations...
...Her guests argued about their tactics...
...Defeat does not suit Raymonda Tawil, a courageous and often brash woman, used to asserting her way...
...Like the Palestinian people as a whole, the PLO is fighting for its very existence...
...In 1947 her 'father refused to sell his land to the Jews, but when he fled from the country some months later the property was confiscated by Ben Gurion's government...
...The women seemed to dress more drably...
...My Home, My Prison traces the growth of Palestinian nationalism from the early 1960s when the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan refused to allow the people of the West Bank to arm themselves to resist Israeli raids...
...Seeing red in this way, her reservations about the guerrillas collapse...
...It is a single bright flare of the horror that remains hidden in the rest of the book...
...Those Palestinians who stayed in the West Bank were sullen and indifferent...
...Rechristened Paul-Henri—an unmistakably French and Catholic name—the Czech boy passed the war years at Sodality boarding schools, unaware that his parents were deported and eventually killed at Auschwitz...
...to Tawil they appeared to be hiding behind the traditional veils that had largely disappeared before the war...
...He writes of "the extraordinary mechanism of memory" and its power to conceal "the unbearable...
...She holds firmly to the notion that the terrorist attack on the Kiryat Shmonah schoolhouse in 1974 was justifiable retaliation for an Israeli raid on Beirut exactly a year earlier...
...Certainly this account of her own experience, first as an Arab child brought up in Israel, later organizing protests in the occupied West Bank, bears witness to the Palestinians' sense that they too are a persecuted people whose only recourse is violence...
...According to Tawil, the dazed refugees had less need for aid and UNRWA rations than for something to restore the dignity they had lost when their homes were destroyed...
...Finally it is the contradictions in his own feelings about Zionism that seem most vivid, and most unsettling in When Memory Comes...
...At the "salons" that Tawil began to hold in her home, attended by Palestinian intellectuals and foreign journalists, the PLO was already a central topic in 1964-5...
...Tawil was born in Acre, then part of Arab Palestine, the daughter of a shipping merchant and an educated woman who had lived in America...
...It was some months later, after a conversation with a Jesuit who might have become his teacher, that he realized they were dead: "For the first time, I felt myself to be Jewish...
...In Amman she married, but soon convinced her husband to move "back to Palestine," to the town of Nablus, then part of Jordan...
...He recognizes "the permanence of the Jewish world, but also the permanence of the Arab world too— now face to face...
...But then his unexplained moodiness returned—a growing, paralyzing fear of death that isolated him from friends and prevented him from working...
...He also had a personal score to settle: now, some three years after leaving the Sodality school, he would "prove" that he was Jewish by fighting ' 'alongside all the Jews who are dying in Palestine.'' He left for Israel' 'to answer violence with force . . . Only within the framework of the state could we answer violence with force...
...Tawil deplores violence and oppression in any form...
...Tcnnar Jacoby lived "on the edges of catastrophe . . . not so much a victim as—a spectator...
...She is proud of her stubbornness and defiance...
...But if the ' 'logic'' that led him to embrace Zionism as a high school student in 1947—"Didn't we have to abandon our role as victims...
...Many of the men were jobless...
...She is also trapped by it...
...But these moderate views are no match for the indignation she feels, that righteous indignation nourished by her sense of the Palestinians' suffering...
...He was determined not to become a passive victim—not to repeat the mistake of his parents who died, he suggests bitterly, for a Jewish identity they had denied in trying to live as if they were French or Czech...
...He circles back again and again to the troubling Israeli habit of unquestioning loyalty to the nation and its ideals...
...he vaguely assumed that his parents had been delayed, perhaps by illness or quarantine, in coming to find him at the school...
...By 1947, when he left France for Israel, he was prepared to fight for the Zionist cause...
...Not only are they a people without a homeland, but also, as her sometimes shrill book shows, a people whose notion of their own suffering has encouraged unquestioning loyalty to a nationalist cause...
...When Israeli troops arrived in the West Bank in 1967, she was hiding in a shelter with her children, recalling the war of 1948—for her, an eerily similar galling defeat...
...Long troubled by the inflexibility of official Israeli policies, it is in 1973 that he first understood that' 'our intransigence was based on principle...
...Commonweal: 408...
...But she has moral scruples...
...Political activity was banned, a strict curfew imposed, radicals were sent to what Tawil calls concentration camps...
...Books: SELFHOOD & RESISTANCE IN 1942 Pavel Friedlander's parents began to sense that the circle was closing in, and that as foreign Jewish refugees living in Vichy France, they could be certain of nothing in the future...
...Tawil has been arrested twice for her part in the Palestinians' struggle—for organizing civilian demonstrations, particularly among women and high school students, and for her contacts with the PLO and with west bank Mayors...
...He doesn't deny the need he once felt to take up arms...
...Proud as she is, Tawil feeds on the shame and d spondency of the Palestinians to strengthen her resolve...
...she advocates dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, and knows that an effective solution will not be one that is forced on either poeple...
...They are unable to "believe in peace...
...As in the case of the people she speaks for, this harassment by Israelis seems only to have strengthened her determination to go on fighting for the Palestinian cause...
...His experience has made him reticent, and he knows the danger of self-pity and of taking pride in one's own suffering...
...And yet for all the changes, he is struck above all by the "imperious resurgence of the past" that he first recognized as a child unable to sleep in a convent dormitory and then again when he decided to go to Israel with a group of Betar, the youth movement associated with the Irgun guerrillas...
...He had never heard of Auschwitz and seemed to have forgotten that he was a Commonweal: 406 Jew...
...Thirty years later, Friedlander is concerned with the sacrifice of lives and the expulsion of the Arabs who had been living in Palestine...
...She left Israel some ten years later, just before graduating from high school, to join her brothers in Jordan: "As an Arab, did I have any future in the Jewish-dominated state of 4 July 1980: 407 Israel...
...MY HOME, MY PRISON Raymonda Hawa Tawil Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $12.95,265 pp...
...And yet she dwells on the humiliation of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank...
...When he recovered, his memory of his parents had faded...
...He became feverish and, deciding to let himself die, waded into an icy stream...
...Humiliated first by the Jews who had driven them from Palestine, now by other Arabs, many Palestinians began to advocate a more radical view of selfdetermination...
...In a way not unlike traditional diaspora Jews regarding Israel, she feels she cannot criticize her defenders...
...Many Israelis too, he finds, are guided by a traditional sense of identity: "Since the beginning of its history, this people has seen itself as alone and surrounded by enemies...
...They arranged for their son to be put in the care of the nuns of the Catholic Sodality...
...More disturbing though are the fundamental contradictions in the Zionist project and what he sees as the character of the people who have been drawn to it...
...she seems sincere in the belief that they can "live side by side in mutual respect...
...He recalls the Jews that he met in Paris: "they move forward with passion, but also blindly," drawn by a "vision of the group...
...When the resistance fighters arrived in August 1944, the nuns and their charges mourned the passing of Marshal Petain...
...trade and financial connections with Jordan had been cut and many refused to look for work in Israel...
...seemed coherent enough, it was in part because Freidlander did not yet know what Zionism would mean for Palestine...
...He looks back over the interrupted pattern of his life—a series of abrupt and thoroughgoing shifts of identity, as he moved from Prague to Vichy France in 1939, then in 1946 from the Sodality school to the Jewish quarter of Paris, and less than two years later to Israel...
...her parents were Orthodox Christians, and she could be sent to convent schools...
...She sees it as a matter of honor, blood for blood...
Vol. 107 • July 1980 • No. 13
