Of Cat Food and Katyushas

Bluestone, Naomi

OF CAT FOOD AND KATYUSHAS: A 22-YEAR ROMANCE WITH KIRYAT SHMONEH NAOMI BLUESTONE I can't believe it when 1 see Sophie and Sarah get out of the taxi. A taxi from Pennsylvania Station all the way to...

...The women carry guides to all the cheap eateries in New York, train schedules to and from the city and my irreplaceable World's Fair walking map of Manhattan, with all the buildings marked and color-coded...
...Periodically, we would go to Jerusalem on official business for meetings at the central office of the Ministry of Health...
...Towards the end of my stay in Kiryat Shmoneh, Dr...
...The decision was difficult...
...Perhaps he can tell me what has happened...
...Although there were few costumes, there was no mistaking these people for Americans, Europeans or even the Israelis of the Jerusalem/Tel Aviv corridor...
...Despite this last flaw, I escaped ostracism, because of my watchband, my Nimrod sandals, my tan and my complete lack of any sense of fashion...
...The Grand Canyon in the setting sun leaves such a glow in the memory...
...We see porches, then an official, describing the morale of the people in the miklat, the shelter...
...One thing I wanted to.do was shop...
...If Kiryat Shmoneh was not much to look at, its people were all I'd expected...
...For the first few weeks I would go to bed with my head splitting from trying to follow lectures and instructions in colloquial Hebrew (mine came strictly from the Bible...
...it is like Wall Street early on a Sunday morning...
...I do remember that I had a sudden overwhelming urge to flee the plane that brought me home...
...Although 1 lived in drip-dry and cotton washables, occasionally I would pull out something with a little class...
...Great civic vistas arise before me, lovely indeed, and developed with every physical and aesthetic human need taken into consideration...
...Naturally I expected that Jerusalem would be my new home...
...His news will not be good...
...I remember now how often we left Kiryat Shmoneh, by ambulance to Poria, by truck to Afula, by motorcycle to Hulata...
...They know that when the planes go over those mountains, in 36 hours there will be a retaliatory bombing...
...And I didn't want to leave...
...The old woman still lives in Kiryat Shmoneh, high on the hill, her large belly wrapped around with saris imported from the old country...
...Passengers crushed three abreast exchanged life stories, indulging unbridled sentiment and inhibitory release from the constraints of the prosaic, workaday Gentile world...
...No plane would carry me eastward until I was about to enter my clinical years in medical school...
...I am glad that my cat will eat anything, and that the extra rooms in the house I share with Bobby are productively used as an office and studio...
...Day is done...
...The State of Israel was established so that the Jews of Kiryat Shmoneh could live in Kiryat Shmoneh, thus enhancing the preservation of Israel's more desirable towns...
...The Dal Lake in Kashmir, with its houseboats and shikara gondolas heaped with fresh flowers in the blazing sunshine...
...It is important for me to have her here now...
...Sophie has brought eggplant-on-pita sandwiches, and large green peppers, the kind 1 can no longer eat, for their juice...
...As it turns out, she is right...
...I'm sensing doom, and I don't know why...
...To those of us who have come to think of Kiryat Shmoneh as the embattled focus of a nation's suffering, the sacrificial offering to the neighboring tribes, the scarred accretion of concrete for whose sake the past long months of war were undertaken, it is important to say that Kiryat Shmoneh was always the lamb of the Jewish nation...
...Kiryat Shmoneh will still be there...
...It is starting to look like the south of Spain...
...I smile...
...It looks like every other, impressive to some, loathesome to me...
...I loved that squat, ugly little town, at first for my fantasies, later for the wind that blew down through the valley of the purple mountains marking the borders of the north country...
...Thank God Sophie has not gone Paris on me...
...Although I'd come with a fairly comprehensive schoolgirl's Hebrew, I was utterly tongue-tied for the first few days...
...The short but beautiful twilights at the end of the day were often spent with the wind and my dreams, and two better companions I could not have had...
...The hounds are yapping at his heels, and he cannot run...
...The old lady refuses to use the bomb shelter...
...The Lebanese border, in particular, was fairly quiet...
...I shall never forget one child I saw, whose face was literally covered with crawling flies which it could not or would not brush off...
...All kvelled to hear the language broadcast from the invisible corners of a Jewish plane, and listened enraptured to ditching instructions from the rabbi in the cockpit...
...Daily it was swept ; clean by a wind that raised moods and I billowing skirts alike...
...Don't take that road," they cry, "it only takes you to the water...
...Will it never stop...
...From him, I feel I will get the truth...
...I had hot water and towels, and even toilet paper...
...Sophie looks wonderful, tired but satisfied with the tour of the great country she has never seen before...
...He was always the odd man in his kibbutz, hungering after his ideals and projects for the town...
...She is friendly, bright, Americanized, despite being virtually inarticulate in English...
...Why do I not feel proud of this beautiful bus station, the growth and development, all the signs of "progress" to which Israelis constantly point...
...never since have I felt it without remembering the summer spent in that remote outpost of the East...
...Go home," he said, "and finish your studies...
...There is a party going on inside, a circumcision celebration, and we are invited, but we do not enter...
...He gave me emphatic advice...
...We fly out on Sunday, the sixth of June, 1982...
...We go shaken upstairs, talking about everything else...
...It is hard to imagine the extent of the education that had to take place among these primitive people...
...Thus placed in the role of honored guinea pig, my interests seemed to come second to making a good idea work...
...I took them with a grain of salt...
...What is it...
...June 1982...
...This impressive Israeli "Anglo-Saxon" placed before me a dizzying display of options, any or all of which could be facilitated by a powerful professor with contacts at the Ministry of Health...
...I had no idea that I would remember Kiryat Shmoneh through the years with the romantic glow expressed by Elliott Paul in his reminiscence of the Left Bank, or by the writers of the*Partisan Review, as they recalled their days in the Village, or even the recollections of the riders of Wells-Fargo as they looked back on the early days of Tombstone, Arizona...
...Consider the simple matter of dress, for example...
...And Shalom fears for his country...
...I am hoping it will be a chance for us to talk...
...The urge to leave becomes inescapable...
...My first film in Kiryat Shmoneh starred Paul Newman, who croaked to great applause and simultaneous translation...
...She has earned this trip and saved for it a lifetime...
...I no longer speak Hebrew when I go to Israel, because people are no longer patient, and are not encouraging...
...I suppose I am the only American in history ever to haye borrowed money from a kibbutznik, but the Israeli government gave every evidence of being a gross deadbeat...
...He is asleep, not expecting us 'til the next day...
...Little mamas of eight went to market, carrying in their arms a younger brother or sister, with one or more "in-betweeners" racketing about their heels...
...I recall one hideous occasion when the Kurdish mother of six girls finally delivered a son...
...The old town is now the bottom of a bowl whose walls consist of new housing...
...Don't stay here," he advised, with the wisdom of the ages harnessed in service to his departmental needs...
...My memory of Kiryat Shmoneh is just a memory...
...Or so it seemed to me...
...They hung their wash in the front yard...
...In Safed we are pursued by a mad woman, who screams at us to depart...
...both cannot afford to travel, and he knows no English...
...I had never been in a plane before, although I was almost 24...
...Their dress was colorful, mismatched, bloused and ballooned, or hanging from the hips with no regard for hem...
...She speaks little Hebrew, and has been very sick...
...Davies added that he had been able to secure a stipend from the Government of Israel for living expenses, I began to fly long before the plane took off...
...The last remains of the old ma'abarot at the northern end of town reflected the sun's light from their roofs...
...We are shown the extra, reinforced room added to all the houses in the village for use during times of attack...
...As far as we know, Sophie's mummy is all right...
...Finally, and most overriding, I was a woman alone, and fair game according to the culture of the population...
...Salamonovitch, who devoted his life to the care of the women of this town...
...Obeisances and offerings of song complete, the Emperor returned, and the old man was deposited somewhere near the Central Post Office, tears still wet on his cheeks...
...Shalom looks older, more tired...
...It was she who had written of Danny Levi's death and his father's despair...
...Her responsibilities to her family of origin were enormous...
...Hitchhiking was safe, steady and secure, and accompanied by friends or alone, I managed to see as much as possible...
...Actually, she is chicken...
...They cannot bear the odor of urine in the hidden byways of the Crusader's wall...
...Originally it was anticipated that I would be of little real use to anyone...
...So we talk...
...of the drug addiction, crime and deterioration in her clinic population...
...In the rear of the Mercaz was a labor and delivery suite, which enabled the women of Kiryat Shmoneh to deliver very close to home...
...What do they need it for...
...Sophie came from the south of India to Israel about 30 years ago, and calls her mama, "mummy...
...Security was always a problem, but not the menace it later became...
...I expected some good male line dancing, embroidered costumes, a cacaphony of tongues, 37 different melodies for "Mah Tovu" and perhaps a few good recipes for herbal rice...
...We will see him soon...
...I suppose by now they must be collector's items...
...They came from the developing countries, from South Africa and the UN during my time there...
...They had veritable shrieking contests, to see who could shrei the loudest in labor...
...its emphasis is upon expensive care for sick people, rather than timely, preventive care for the well...
...the framed candid snapshot of Chaim Nachman Bialik on the stairwell...
...A study was going on in some of the kibbutzim of the Upper Galilee to gather data about the incidence and prevalence of rheumatic fever in rural vs...
...This did not represent cowardice, but rather a cultural ethic which made it important to announce the work the woman was doing and the necessity for keeping the Evil Eye away...
...Her husband was often out of work and without chance of advancement...
...They are shelling Kiryat Shmoneh...
...Yes, the climate has changed in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...The father, accompanied by every male in his household, including the grandfather and the rabbi, came storming into the Health Center in the dead of night to demand proof that the son was really his, and that his wife had not swapped a seventh female child with another parturient female to avoid his wrath...
...I was an educated person...
...I leave my old friend wanting to weep...
...The fantasies that I brought to the Upper Galilee were, of course, of curly-headed, tiny Jews from exotic countries, all sitting cross-legged on the floor in huge circles, being "in-gathered"—whatever that meant...
...It was hours before we got them all out of there...
...My digs in Kiryat Shmoneh were far more luxurious than those of recent travellers to the kibbutzim...
...But at the foot of these mountains there was no one-horse town, only Balboa's mighty ocean, and the illusion of home soon faded...
...Although I was the object of much masculine attention in my rough-tough town, most of it was unwelcome...
...They all thought I was peculiar...
...Trips to Israel on El Al in those days were always adrenergic affairs...
...I had not travelled across two continents to roost in the boondocks...
...It is time to come back again," she said.'"You must see the changes for yourself...
...I did not have as much privacy as I would have wished, for the young men who worked at the Mercaz used every excuse possible to try to sleep in my room with me...
...My visits to Israel seem to be following a seven year cycle...
...First of all, I was a stranger, and how does a stranger come to a place like Kiryat Shmoneh...
...They submitted to parturition the way Gary Cooper would have faced a country doc for an amputation under ethanol analgesia...
...We wish you good holiday feasts, and well over the fast," she wrote each fall...
...It is Wednesday, the second of June, and within 48 hours, the bombs will start falling on Kiryat Shmoneh again...
...One day, while sitting in the central plaza writing a letter home to my folks, I discovered that the concept of the Ber-mudashort was anathema to the Oriental mentality...
...Hulata, I notice, has fallen into disrepair...
...Perhaps then I would not be so critical of others who are merely trying to "build" a country in the best way they know, for the benefit of citizens who do not arrive every seven years like feeding locusts...
...But handicrafts, ethnic art, exquisite jewelry and Eastern souvenirs were of excellent quality and still uncontaminated by the need to amass tourist dollars...
...American tourists dressed to the nines were immediately spotted and given the cold shoulder...
...She is a tough old bird, and wants to die in her own bed...
...How harsh and demoralized her letters had become, how depressive and disillusioned...
...For the first time in my life, I was exposed to a rural existence, the feel of open space, the scent of pure air, the softness of a pervasive quiet, and my soul truly healed, as much from the wind and mountains as from the experience of being a Zionist in Israel...
...You remember last year," Sophie prompts my repressed memories...
...I was sent around to all the kibbutz clinics to go through their card files and pull out the relevant statistics...
...Before me was a long, strip city, built in terraces at the foot of the mountain to Lebanon...
...Because he is a depressive and always has been, it will be a truth tinged with sadness, and distorted to fit his mood, but it will be the truth...
...Grateful to me for putting her up for a few weeks on the strength of her friendship with my old friend, she accepts a cold drink...
...When the time came for me to return to Beit Ha-Chalutzot in Jerusalem's Rechavia section, to pack up my bags for departure, I was beside myself...
...She is too far from the safety of Tel Aviv already...
...The first time, Danny was a young boy...
...Sophie wants to go to the borders...
...Shalom Levi and I would give reports of our progress to the bigwigs, and return with great relief...
...What has happened to the town to which I always said I would one day like to return, the town to which I always threatened escape in my darkest moments of conflict with the society around me...
...You always came after the wars...
...Sarah longs for her bed and her siesta, grumbles that only crazy people are out at a time like this...
...Like the Israelis, I was not afraid, and did not hesitate to drive the Mercazjeep when I could, up onto the mountain patrolled by the white UN trucks...
...I do a little two-step to a safer spot...
...You are not local," she shrieks in rage...
...I came back to Kiryat Shmoneh in 1967, following the war, to make sure that my friends were safe and my town still as I remembered it...
...The car was shot full of holes, but miraculously, the only casualty was one old-time nurse who came in the next day with her arm in a plaster cast...
...The nurses giggled as they suggested that I remove the silver friendship ring I wore on the third finger of my right hand, a sign of marriage around these parts...
...Beethoven was turned to vapor with the click of a radio switch, for those were the days (my friend) when driver and passengers alike were not above singing the alma mater when roused...
...When Dr...
...Before they go to bed, they turn on the news...
...but a living one that agitates me still, and whose resolution is uncertain...
...In 1973, again following the war, I returned, for the same reason...
...This vague occupation did not meet with the whole-hearted approval of his comrades, but he came daily to the Mercaz on his little Vespa, full of ideas for the health and well-being of the new settlers...
...It has now been 22 years since that summer of my medical school days...
...I remember one visit from the Minister of Health of Basutoland, a darling British chap who was so British he could barely talk...
...Appetite is lost, for we are afloat in a sea of orange peels and other human detritus...
...They want to see everything...
...The kibbutz children still are educated separately from the youngsters in town...
...We developed a close and loving friendship, despite our language difficulties, for he was comfortable only in Hebrew, and I had similar problems on my end...
...Until the day I left, I was marked as a freak, and stares accompanied me wherever I went...
...You may not believe what you see...
...I remember little...
...The health center fell into ruins, like the Temple of old...
...And so here I am...
...A 14-year-old boy has been killed by a katyusha rocket...
...I could work with the Bedouins in the Negev...
...And if the wind remained etched in my memory by its feel and touch, so also did the wild mountains delimiting the borders of Lebanon and Syria...
...I'm with mummy...
...Inside, 22 years of life have unfolded in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...For a woman who wasn't particularly sending messages, I also got more than my share of supposedly happily-married men, who assured me that their wives would not be upset at all if they strayed with me...
...The lust to return started to gnaw at me from the day that Sophie left my home in Great Neck, just one year ago...
...Then, I might not have accepted his advice so sensibly...
...Most of the mid-wives were Sephardi women, living in town, and trained to serve their own people...
...The 14-year-old boy...
...inner city populations...
...The corner looks the same, as rundown as ever, with Army adolescents lolling about and looking for lifts southward...
...They would drive miles and miles to buy cat food at a discount...
...Although now birthing suites, rooming-in and family-assisted childbirths are quite common, the Mercaz in Kiryat Shmoneh was one of the first I know to combine the science of modern obstetrics with the naturalness of at-home delivery...
...He never wanted me to leave...
...Even when I arrived, relatively late, this town was the Australia of Israel...
...This time, you leave before the war...
...They have been permanently coiled in the salons of Givatayim...
...Occasionally there would be stray bullets...
...The sex of the children of the new olim was also vitally important...
...You are of no use now...
...Delightedly she unfolds the white sari she will wear to Josepha's wedding next month...
...They are glowing...
...They will wait for me in the car...
...An eagle's wings...
...All my memory points are obliterated, my bearings shattered by whole new complexes of development...
...They spit seeds in the movie hall, making the floor a slimy crunch even before the subtitles came on...
...Aliyah is over, no one wants to come to us, the students don't return...
...The blazing white heat bounces back off the sidewalk...
...Even more terrifying to him were site visits from visiting firemen, who came to the Galilee for overnight stays to see what we were doing in our highly touted health center...
...I found their allegiance to me, rather than to their own men, fascinating...
...My original proposal was to postpone my senior year of high school and spend a year in Israel, but even in those days, when the urge for aliyah still blew in the wind like the scattered dust of dandelions, the second generation (in my case, third) Jewish-American agenda of school, work, college and graduate school proved too strong for even the competitive Zionist fervor...
...We would have been wrong to leave her and tramp or bus to the borders...
...Sakeenr the Libyans would scream at the Moroccans, while the Indians sneered and the Tunisians, Algerians and 25 other assorted North Africans and "Orientals" would offer commentary of their own...
...Sated on bagels with cream cheese and Nova Scotia salmon, whole choruses of strangers sang the songs of their youth as if the coming days would recreate the happiness of those earlier times...
...Chicken soup and ftanken were the mainstays, and if I wanted Eastern food, I had to take to the streets to find it...
...Clearly, the more wealthy members of the town live as close to the lip as possible...
...Overhead, the roar of planes...
...Rarely could one become confused, unlike today when Israelis have become so well-heeled and chic they cannot be distinguished from anyone else until they open their mouths and release a stream...
...Apparently the ability to drive was also a crazy characteristic of American women, as was my capacity to drink light beer like a man...
...Tiberias...
...The single men wanted me to take them to America...
...I myself did not know what a lasting impression this wind and these mountains would leave in my heart...
...Retired...
...In those days, there were very clear-cut differences in appearance between visiting Americans or Europeans, and home-grown Israelis...
...It takes more than five generations to knock the Yemenite out of them," sniffed one of the mid-wives in sympathy...
...We must leave, we have no time to find him, to tell him how much he meant to us, when we were young and in training, and solicitous of the world...
...If you work out.well," he said, "we're thinking of establishing a formal program to bring more young people over here to work...
...The uncompromising sexual aggressiveness of the sabra men was almost as uncomfortable to deal with...
...Now he devoted his time to being the only full-time health educator in the State...
...Sophie's little niece is only 17, too young for marriage, and behind the joy there is concern and apprehension...
...His young medical student moves in with him, freeing a four-bed guest room...
...I'll get shot down for this, but how much can Zionism withstand...
...Now he is dead, and his namesakes are sitting on tricycles...
...He is sick, scheduled for the hospital...
...Her husband stays home...
...He not only welcomed me, but arranged a scholarship to cover most of my travel expenses...
...Sarah is adamant...
...of the prejudice against her Iraqi husband, acquired late in life...
...I do believe that if I had not been so adaptable, my work would have suffered...
...you gotta be nuts to sleep down here...
...They were supervised by the Medical Director of the Mercaz, Dr...
...Naive, perhaps, but I was in mind of an atmosphere of reunion, at which Jews from all over the Eastern world would be exchanging reminiscences of days and places past, much as our camp reunions used to "in-gather" us around Thanksgiving time...
...I became very ill...
...Since this scutwork occupied only part of my time, I was encouraged to participate in all the activities of the Center...
...Later, as the men became more voracious in their pursuit of the lone American female, the ring went back in self-protection...
...She would instruct them on the feeding of their children, and construct ingenious household contraptions for sick care, for which public health nurses have been famous since the days of Lillian Wald in our own country...
...There's so much to be done...
...It is just about the only thing that does seem the same in all of Israel...
...A local community health center in Kiryat Hayovel (since become world famous...
...Night after night, they will come home blistered and sun-stroked, full of purchases, happy memories and advice for their hostess...
...The end of the line...
...I feel it...
...We stop in Acre, too, but my mother is afraid of getting lost in the Old City, and Sarah and Sophie cannot understand why I head for the sea like a turtle wishing to lay her eggs in the sand...
...I curse myself for not coming back sooner, for not giving myself time to adjust to the inevitable, to identify with its perpetrators, to make it as my own...
...Kiryat Shmoneh had watchbands, but not much else...
...A taxi from Pennsylvania Station all the way to Great Neck, Long Island, with the railroad just a block away...
...They all wore the same watchband, and my first purchase in Kiryat Shmoneh was a similar one that I would not part with for many years...
...The road seems the same...
...We are expecting you...
...Most of the people of Kiryat Shmoneh were so glad to see an American try to speak their language, they would have forgiven me anything...
...Mostly they preferred Westerns...
...I attended my first delivery in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...Is his depression contagious, like most depressions, or have I brought my own back to him...
...It is the 15th anniversary of the Six Day War...
...This building represents all that we have tried to overcome in Western medicine...
...Often her climb would have been in vain, for there was no way to warn people of her arrival...
...It was anathema to my mother, too, because of my chubby knees, but that's another story...
...I wonder cynically if they are still using scopolamine...
...Until it dies down, or I am removed from it, my mind is transported back to the summer that was, and the wind that blew there...
...Everyone was impressed with me...
...My mother looks at me as we tighten our seatbelts...
...This is as far as she goes...
...A good night's sleep...
...The women now travel to Poria for their hospital deliveries...
...Those lovely Arab buildings, the antiquities, the lazy charm, all dwarfed by the hotels, the conveniences for the hordes, the renovation-restoration-reconstruction signs...
...We stop by the lake, the beautiful sea where once I plunged in my green and white checked dress, to have a picnic lunch...
...In its stead stands Kupat Cholim, a traditional, secondary medical care center for ambulatory patients...
...He was killed right where you are standing...
...They are quite wise by now...
...Cursed by the housewives, whose laundry it sent flying from the drying lines to the garbage below, it swept small objects in front of its path, and rustled around corners like an indignant broom...
...Shalom Levi...
...Instead, it was replaced with a nostalgia more painful than the bereavement...
...In short, I expected a living replica of the color cuts in the Hadassah Newsletter...
...Once, while driving along the southern California coast, I saw a mountain that resembled those back home in the north of the Galilee, and for a while, the homesickness went away...
...I doubt that I would have collected it at all, had my summer in Israel not improved my assertiveness, my Hebrew and my knowledge of certain insults carefully culled from the Arabic, which I showered on the clerk at full voice in front of a room full of cheering standees-on-line...
...We are back in that familiar furnace of mid-day laziness...
...Only Kiryat Shmoneh still looks as if some mad child with an erector set had placed concrete blocks as human dwellings, then added bomb shelters to destroy any hope of beauty...
...That narrow digit of land jutted upward like the finger of the hand-charm that repeals evil, according to the superstitions of the Arabs...
...To this day, there is a certain wind, of a certain velocity, a certain softness, a certain chill, that occasionally so closely replicates the sensuous wind of Kiryat Shmoneh, it makes me stop in my tracks, almost lose consciousness...
...They have not finished buying out the country...
...It is something extraordinary...
...I returned moments later, but the infant was already out...
...After all, there are now automobiles on the streets of Kiryat Shmoneh...
...A prison population nearby...
...It was clear that central headquarters, cramped as they were down behind the Post Office, was not the place for me to hang around and study the practice of public health and preventive medicine in Israel...
...The short Israeli weekends, fettered as they were by the reinforcement of rest at the expense of recreation, had been insufficient for me to do many things I had wanted to do...
...I am human...
...Only by being accepted could I do my job as well as I did...
...it is Wednesday, the second of June, 1982, past noon...
...I note there is no office for him in this modern building...
...The Mercaz is gone...
...Davies suggested that I take several weeks to travel through the country...
...The new olim talked a lot, and loudly, and publicly...
...There were few who could have understood my feelings, for priorities were elsewhere, and the songs of Rachel were sung only by the pioneers, who did not live in that flat little town...
...Their deliveries were utter pandemonium, in which it was difficult to assess the true extent of their pain...
...For me it was a time of testing and growth, of accomplishment and satisfaction, of learning new skills and developing close human relationships...
...Towards the close of that sophomore year in Philadelphia, I wrote to Professor Michael Davies at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center to inquire about the possibility of spending a summer in Israel as a student trainee...
...To my surprise, the heady feeling of being belatedly in Zion did not diminish after landing...
...And through the years, for 21 years, her letters alone came faithfully, bringing news of the other Israel, the oppressed Israel...
...It was their custom to pack olives and perishables in the cool waters of the toilet, performing the functions for which this instrument was intended in places less adapted to the purpose...
...I was, he informed me, the first American student ever to receive funds from the Government of Israel to study there...
...For a week, my head has been buffeted with impressions of new building everywhere...
...I try to assure Sophie that it is someone else's house, someone else's neighbor, someone else's rocket...
...Perhaps he will be able to do something with this, when he gets his health and spirit back...
...They don't recognize him, but never mind...
...Inglish, Inglish," shouted a growing mob of little boys, who became more menacing by the minute...
...To me she will always be wearing the old green Public Health nurse's dress with the white V-collar and the short bobby socks, and the metal watchband with the chain links that doublesybver to fit every wrist in Israel...
...The Taj Mahal in full moonlight, with clouds passing over the snow-white dome...
...But the purple mountains behind my town became a part of me, not only because they were beautiful, but because without them I grew homesick...
...My professor of preventive medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, delighted that one of her girls was going abroad, shook down the rest of the faculty for the remaining monies I required...
...I remember nothing more...
...Pay no attention," says a passerby, touching his forehead in the age-old gesture of the sane depicting the mad...
...Come back with your husband, he says, it's not too late...
...The pilot health center that once symbolized the innovative, pragmatic, extraordinary spirit of Israel has vanished...
...Most of it required money, all required taste...
...It's true, the old idealism is gone...
...Not confined to the town itself, she would reach homes in Menara, Margaliyot and other out-of-the-way places, and she was always warmly welcomed when anyone was at home...
...We are grateful...
...Even the wind has failed...
...On the bus to Jerusalem, I was ripe for more of the celebratory incense that has tickled the nostrils of Zion-bound travellers from the period of the medieval poets until the present era...
...He needs to talk badly...
...What will I find in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...Perhaps this was because the Israelis were still engaged in their struggle against American-Jewish imperialism, and had not yet been co-opted by Coca-Cola...
...of the long search for a cramped apartment in a bad neighborhood—"The Russians get everything," she wrote bitterly...
...I don't want to stay, crazy lady...
...There's plenty of work for him to do in this world still...
...They slept underneath their beds, which were used for storage, and tolerated filth, flies and insects in large numbers...
...When little Miriam the midwife picked up a huge pair of scissors for the episiotomy, I suddenly felt faint and had to go for a drink of water...
...We have been 15 years separated, yet our professional interests have always coincided...
...The hard-hat mentality of the village men made them poor companions, and all those my age were married...
...Stupid...
...Telephone connections to the kibbutz are still rotten after 22 years...
...Never, never had I seen such beauty before, and rarely do I expect to see it again...
...hour after hour the phone rang and no one picked up...
...Even during that summer, it was hard to express my feelings for the natural beauty around me...
...It looks demoralized, not maintained, the lawns not cut, the flowers growing wild...
...Dear God...
...And the shelter is worse...
...I feel overwhelmingly sad...
...I had to fight with myself to stay seated, not to disgrace myself by letting my parents meet my unaccompanied bags the next day...
...Heart attack...
...Israel is small enough for the whole country to be one magnificent public health laboratory...
...Sophie was also my inspiration, for she was a confirmed, ardent, living, breathing Zionist, whose every move was imbued with love of country...
...They were boisterous and noisy and elemental...
...Even his daughter had another baby, she with a daughter already in the army...
...It was the only delivery or operation I ever had to miss because of squeamishness, and the memory keeps me humble...
...I am bombarded with memories, flooded with nostalgia, reverberating from the impressions of yesterday and the week that has passed...
...Five years later, my own roots were established firmly in this country (I hope not irretrievably so), and so far, no storm or root-rot has come to shake them loose...
...I did not want to pick up a street Hebrew and asked to be introduced to anyone who spoke flawless Hebrew...
...I resolved to go to Kiryat Shmoneh and spend my summer with the new immigrants being settled there...
...This little girl, too, was named for the lost uncle...
...Nomi, come quick, it's my mummy's house...
...When you have completed your specialty training, come back...
...I had a long heart-to-heart with my friend and mentor, Michael Davies...
...I was an American, which in those days meant power, money, prestige, foreign exotica, horns and a tail...
...The house has been attacked by a giant, berserk bowling ball...
...He tells me about his terrible weekend alone once in New York, unable to find me because he did not have my address...
...He certainly has sized up my neighborhood accurately...
...Nevertheless, the summer that I spent there was undoubtedly the happiest and most rewarding of my life...
...It would be wiser to go where the action was...
...Sophie explains...
...But first the news...
...The women were fat, the men wiry, and the children grew in bunches like bananas all over the streets...
...Pocketbook searches and X-ray scans are fairly recent detractions from the happy feelings of yearning at last fulfilled...
...I found myself translator for the weekend, and by the time he'd gone, I was a basket case...
...But our dear Professor Davies had another agenda...
...The white heat is taking its toll on me...
...I tell him I will think about it...
...For two days, Kiryat Shmoneh has been under fire...
...They still want him to return to labor more befitting a kibbutznik...
...But of course, they couldn't have taken the train with those huge brown suitcases, so full of American-purchased, trans-formed-for-overseas, major and small appliances for kitchen, bathroom, laundry and utility shed...
...To it were banished the poor and the primitive, those who had fallen out of favor with the bureaucracy, persons fulfilling a tour of government service (like the nurses with whom I worked) and a handful of pioneering souls who went because, like Australia, it was there...
...Tending his garden...
...He bit the dust...
...I was happy to adopt Israeli dress, for I found it-comfortable, neat and sensible, although when no one was looking, I still shaved my legs and axillae...
...I know heartbreak when I see it...
...My heart sinks...
...The heat is now oppressive...
...It's my mummy's neighbor," Sophie says...
...They have been shlepped all over the map for six weeks, hours in airports, bus stranded in the great Southwest, rip-offs in souvenir-land, cheap meals at McDonald's to which they are both now addicted...
...There must be nothing in it but a bed, but in this house, like those of others, it is also used for forbidden storage...
...I see flowers up above...
...Her invalid son lives with her, and her granddaughters (whose mother has escaped her marriage and gone south...
...Travellers worshipped Israeli artifacts of daily life, symbols of a glorious future sprung from a sublimated past...
...The cinema seems to be new, the plaza expanded...
...It is too hot to sleep there," complains mummy...
...I let them take me where they will, to shops full of the merchandise I have spent my life rejecting...
...Five minutes after I'd slammed the door and waved goodbye, an ambush occurred...
...The sun came up in the middle of the night on command of jet bugles, and the new day dawned with the runways of Idlewild not yet cold behind us...
...The children know every plane that flies...
...This time I got no further than my parent's rented flat in Jerusalem, where I was sick again for the whole two weeks, sick from the lingering remains of that unwashed fruit in the conquered territories...
...But when it was discovered that I knew some Hebrew, I was given a true assignment...
...Accordingly, there were many lonely nights in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...In the morning they begin...
...Tiers of metal bunk beds, and a concentrated odor of urine worse than at the Crusader's Wall, worse than the BMT in mid-August rush hour, worse than any hospital room in which I have worked...
...They are truly Sophie's children, for each month she comes to supervise, shop, deposit monies and provide the same stability she used to provide for me and the babies she bathed so carefully...
...Up the hill to Sophie's mummy...
...It had taken me seven years to reach this country, which, like Jacob's wives, had to be earned the hard way...
...but perhaps he should have...
...But we must see one more man, the person I have wanted most to see...
...One is prematurely adult, saddled with familial responsibilities before she is into lipstick...
...I enjoyed making rounds with Sophie as she climbed up the mountain...
...After 25 years of blue-and-white boxes, it seemed a clear case of girl biting dog...
...Never has our reputation been so low," he says...
...Never before had I spent so much time beating my fists against unwelcome chests, and once I was reduced to needle and thread to repair my favorite dress, victim of a casual date with an unrepentant fifth-generation Jerusalemite...
...It is hard to keep perspective when one comes only once every seven years...
...But who could be frightened on a plane to Israel...
...The second time, he was devouring fruit on his mother's porch, looking tall and handsome in his frogman's uniform...
...I stand on the step, horrified at the huge cracks and craters on her walls...
...My preceptor, Mr...
...The kibbutz women who came in to deliver in our facility were invariably stoic, stiff-lipped, fairly silent and utterly understated about their deliveries...
...Access to town in those days was via the afternoon bus from Tel Aviv/ Jerusalem and the morning bus back down...
...The food was plentiful and excellent, being served up three times a day by the Mercaz cook, who was one of the Eastern European vatikim who staffed the Center...
...I look at my watch...
...And then there was Kiryat Shmoneh, high in the north, where a pilot health education center had been set up to serve the town and the surrounding kibbutzim...
...We walk the town...
...The locals were appraising me, too...
...I remember her very well, her handsome, tooth-free smile, her curried veggies...
...He cannot get over the luxury, the wastefulness, the materialistic lives...
...They love my home, my middle-class Jewish home, the oriental rugs, the books, Naomi Bluestone, who is currently completing a residency in Psychiatry, is Associate Clinical Professor of Community Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the author of So You Want to Be a Doctor?, published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard in 1981...
...If Bobby comes, will he pick fruit, or design buildings...
...We know that his family is ha\f-meshugah since Danny died...
...Sophie and I hitched a ride with the soldiers to Quneitra, on the Golan, still raw and open, with street after street of deserted houses, food still on the table, piles of clothes still lying on closet floors...
...Retrospectively, it was too bad that no one gave me a course in cultural anthropology before I left the States, for it might have saved me some hairy moments in my outback...
...He still wants me to come back...
...To me, she is the image of Israel that I carried in my heart long after I left the Upper Galilee and tried to be a good and typical American again...
...For twelve years, we had heard of these emotional deliveries by the planes of El Al, and none of us was ready to alight like a blase veteran of the East-West shuttle...
...He tells me of his visit to remote relatives in my very suburb...
...He wants to know why I have not brought my husband to meet him...
...I offer to send him my reprints...
...My life at the Mercaz was full of excitement and hard work...
...Your town is junked up with art galleries and cutesy repro and tourist traps and buses lined up like large behemoths at the water trough...
...Once I left a car full of nurses returning home to their kibbutz after a visit to Tel Chai...
...Across the fields of the Galilee I see the weeping eucalyptus...
...I could read and I was nearly a doctor...
...Their fellow nurses are already en route back to Tel Aviv, while they are settling in for two precious weeks in New York...
...Forced to speak an unfamiliar language, because virtually no one knew my own, I acquired a new voice...
...Rad Ha-yom...
...The children are crawling all over his lap...
...Accustomed to claiming identity as a medical student, it was remarkable to suddenly be defined as a single American woman loose on the prairie...
...There is no point in finishing medical school in Jerusalem when you are lucky enough to have a place in a first-rank school in America...
...In fact, they screamed the house down...
...I can read between the lines...
...And Shalom Levi...
...The littlest grandson was named for his uncle . . . Shalom says it was a year before he could call the infant by name...
...You must go to the Cloisters," they say, thrilled with their discovery...
...Fortunately, he did not add, "It's only five more years...
...The little one has taken to cutting school as a gesture of protest against the loss of her mother, and her father lies in the back room with a swollen liver...
...Never before had I known such a wind, or known what it could do to unsatisfied longings...
...I had developed a cold and sore throat...
...She still wears her brown sandalim, and a dress no one would write home about...
...Certainly I was not prepared for the reality of poverty or culture shock as it was concentrated in Kiryat Shmoneh, or the unlikely attachment I would develop for the town, an invisible, magnet-like force, well-resisted, that would haunt me for at least two decades...
...When I got off the former, I was accompanied by chickens, goats, battered cardboard valises and families of many children rising inches above each other like a nest of tables...
...Devoted to their integration with the kibbutz population, he proved one of the most inspirational and provocative figures in my life...
...It was not until the day before my departure that I finally was handed a check for the monies due...
...There is no office for him here, either...
...Davies turned his last screw...
...Sophie says it was too badly damaged by rockets to be saved...
...July, 1981...
...At this moment, Dr...
...of the economic sanctions against our women in Kiryat Shmoneh...
...Shortly, the bus driver kindly announced to the superannuated new immigrant from Poland beside me, the bus would be rounding the Judean hills on which sat the object of his lifelong desire...
...Perhaps I am wrong, but I never trusted Sadat, really...
...July I960...
...Josepha's sisters parade their finery, too...
...How different my life would have been had I run yowling down the ramp, like some creature in a grade B movie...
...New gods of medicine are being worshipped...
...Actually, they were old Quonset huts that shone like pure aluminum...
...So am I. It has been 15 years since we have seen each other...
...And I did...
...I suppose one of mine has been, "What if I would have stayed in Israel in 1960...
...Energizing and debilitating alike, it was called by many names...
...They need a hot shower...
...But something has gone sour here...
...I inquire after Dr...
...Old ladies secreted plastic utensils with Hebrew letters as if they were made of copper and brass...
...I feel an irrepressible urge to get out...
...Can you imagine," he says, "two people living alone in a huge house...
...Over and over, Sophie would teach these people the functions of soap, water, basins, tubs, sinks, towels, etc...
...As Sarah's little Peugeot crosses the intersection in Rosh Pina, my heart starts skipping a few beats...
...There is trouble arranging a place for us to stay...
...She refuses to drive us any farther north, to any of the borders...
...My mother, 74 and indefatigable, brushes her teeth...
...We gave away so much and got so little in return...
...Sophie's friend Sarah, the nurse, widow of the shofet, child of Jerusalem, has frizzy ringlets, the kind we used to destroy with large rollers and small beer cans...
...That's my mummy's house...
...I agree with her, stunned by the ugliness, the squat and hated ugliness of my town...
...When provoked they fought, even the women, who would stage public gladiatorial combats reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich demolishing another dame in a barroom brawl in a Western of her own...
...There are few people for us to talk to...
...On more than one occasion I was arrested by the sight of two women rolling on the sidewalk in front of a ring of cheering spectators, as they pulled each other's hair, bit, scratched, kicked and socked one another...
...I ate some unwashed fruit accidentally...
...I sat mute and miserable until one day I just opened my mouth and talked...
...Needing no further cue, the old man rose to face the back of the bus, and belted strongly down the aisle, "May-al pisgat Har Hatzojim, shalom loch Yerush-alayim...
...They had a cat...
...How I love this girl...
...Their first trip to the United States of America, and already they have found every discounter east of the Mississippi...
...Down we go...
...Sophie and Sarah retire to my living room while I clean up the dinner dishes and Bob goes up to his studio to draw...
...He would love it...
...Jerusalem, for that matter, had not yet imported its SuperSol correct in all detail from America, nor were there any stores larger than the basic Ima v Aba dry-goods establishments crowding Ben Yehuda Street...
...We sit on the bed, a pajama party, like the old days in college, unpacking, groping for hangers, you take the blue towel...
...The old lady has survived enough abdominal surgery to fill a whole day's O.R...
...For a few moments, faces darken...
...The women of Kiryat Shmoneh, on the other hand, vented their emotions...
...The lake that was once mine has now been turned over to the masses . . . like a White Russian I return to my mansion to find eight families in my parlor...
...Participating in a new way of life opened doors for me that have remained open through all my professional career, constantly sensitizing me to the influence of culture, habit, custom and individual preferences on all areas of life, not excepting health...
...Soapsuds dripping, I race to the living room, to the television, to the mellifluous intonations of John Chancellor...
...she was childless and from a culture which considered childlessness intolerable...
...Then the set shuts off and all is quiet...
...That would have been perfectly fine with me...
...1 ask myself that question frequently, and the answer is that I would be a veteran American in Israel by now—or one of the many who would have returned after getting it out of her system...
...Repeated appeals for the promised living expenses gave me a good taste of the now famous Israeli "bureaucracy/ protektsiyaT mechanism...
...If America was the melting pot, Kiryat Shmoneh had to be the wok, in which the most colorful Israeli Veggi-persons would get stir-fried every Saturday night...
...Deliveries were accomplished by young midwives, barely 18 years of age, who had completed courses to enable them to catch newborns with ease and skill...
...In the basin, there is graffiti, broken bottles, the look of a slum...
...I probably would not have been able to purchase even the simple objects I did had I not borrowed money from Shalom Levi, Polonius notwithstanding...
...My unconscious steps in...
...The next day I am back at work...
...Beating a hasty retreat, with the backs, of my fat little knees badly exposed, I was happy to regain my health center/ and I never wore those hysteria-producing objects again...
...It was never replaced...
...He has become interested in death and dying, since his son went down...
...est tombe . . . Hu met...
...Someday even the ruins of Rome will be restored, leaving nothing in their place...
...I capitulate, unable to pursue my memories or my attempts to deal with them...
...of gutturality...
...The march to Lebanon has begun...
...In everyone's life there is at least one "historical if...
...They told me, with the square-edged frankness of all Israelis, that my accent was an abomination before the Lord, but that my speech was slow, clear and absolutely grammatically correct...
...schedule at a major teaching hospital...
...All over Israel I have been seeing such lovely human touches in architecture, landscape design, in public plazas and private gardens...
...It seemed thoroughly appropriate, indeed requisite, for old men to be kissing the dieseled earth, and for fellow-travellers to disappear without a backward glance into the arms of their sobbing, long-sought siblings who'd preceded them to Eretz Yisrael...
...A dedicated physician who was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he established a high standard of medical care for these women, and when I arrived, there had been only one maternal death out of 2,000 in four years, and that one unavoidable in anybody's hospital...
...Salomonovitch, who in the fashion of Europeans of his generation, spoke seven languages, (English wasn't one of them, unfortunately...
...Shalom Levi, was a long-time member of Kibbutz Hulata, and had once been a fisherman...
...The local dairy, fruits and veggies, then as now, were magnificent...
...Like a miasma...
...They like my cheap 'American tchatchkies, my expensive Siamese cat, they like everything...
...I was repeatedly told that the only person in Israel who spoke flawless Hebrew was Abba Eban, which shut me up completely...
...The camera pans the ugliness of Kiryat Shmoneh...
...Get out and see it...
...In vain, I search for familiar landmarks...
...I was given a private room in the Mercaz Ha-Briut, the pilot health education center in which I was to work...
...What a rock she was for me during those months when it seemed to me that no one, but no one in Kiryat Shmoneh could speak any English...
...Yet in town after town, what I had remembered as the town is now just an internal remnant, the core of a carousel of moveable new neighborhoods...

Vol. 8 • December 1982 • No. 1


 
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