I stood on the balcony watching Ya’akov being beaten by his father with a belt and feeling terribly sorry for him. Someone must have snitched to his father that he was stealing from the grocer’s. My sister came out to the balcony with a glass of milk and told me that I ought to drink milk, too.
I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I must, or I would never grow.
“So what,” I said and continued to feel sorry for Ya’akov, whose father was beating the life out of him. My sister told me that if I didn’t drink my milk, she’d pour hers all over my head.
“I dare you,” I replied, and she poured a whole glassful of milk all over me.
That evening I ran a high temperature, and my mother told my sister that it was because she poured milk over me, but on the way to the doctor’s the next morning Mom explained that it was probably because I had caught tonsillitis again, and she hadn’t meant it when she told my sister that it was because of her, but she was cross with her for wasting a glass of milk.
There was a long queue in the doctor’s office, and we got number eighteen even though we’d arrived there first thing in the morning. Mom tried to fib by saying that she was number nine in line, but someone else was number nine and people started shouting at Mom that she was a liar. I was terribly ashamed.
When we left, we saw a policeman, and he asked me why I was crying. I told him I was sick, and that I was afraid I wouldn’t get well before Independence Day.
He said of course I’d get well, because there’s a whole week to go until Independence Day.
Because I was sick, Dad bought me a blackboard and colored chalks and my sister immediately called Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa down from the floor above us and said that she was the teacher and she was going to teach us how to write our names in English.
English is an easy language to write. All you do is scribble up and down; here and there you draw in a circle, and you have to take special care to join the letters together and leave a reasonable space between them so the words are separated and there you have it, English. Easy peasy. Not like Hebrew, which is a hard language to handle.
My sister wrote down her name and said that from now on she would be known as Josephine, because she had decided that her name should be the same as that of the heroine in Little Women. After all, she explained to us, the name Josephine is the equivalent of Yosefa, which she shortened to Sefi, except that people who call their daughters Josephine are not Jews, and we are. She even started showing off how she could enunciate the J in Josephine the way they do in American movies, and forced us to do the same.
Dad explained to my sister that you can’t just go around changing your name, and that she had been named for her grandfather, Yosef, and it’s not their fault that she was born a girl and not a boy, and that a person’s grandfather’s memory has to be honored. And anyway, he said, names have to come from the Bible; you can’t just invent all kinds of other names. My sister complained that all she’d ever wanted to be was special and different from everyone else and it’s not fair that they had to give her a boy’s name and that it’s she and not they who’ll have to bear that name for the rest of her life.
Sima wanted to be teacher too, but my sister wouldn’t let her because the blackboard belonged to me.
“Then I want to be teacher,” I piped up immediately, but my sister said that I’ve got tonsillitis and am therefore not allowed to talk.
In the evening, after they had forced me to eat some chicken soup, Mom leaned over me and recited the witches’ prayer in Yiddish, spat three times, tfu, tfu, tfu, and forced me to say the words after her, words in Yiddish that I couldn’t understand, and in the end, Dad and Sefi as well had to say Amen and Amen to the entire House of Israel. Four days later my temperature dropped and I was able to join in the Independence Day celebrations, the best holiday of our year.
On the evening before Independence Day we went up to Herzl Street in the Hadar neighborhood to watch all the youth movement kids dancing the hora, our hearts full of pride for having achieved a sovereign state of our own, despite all the tyrants and in spite of all the enemies that surround us on all sides.
We went to bed early so there would be no problem getting up at five o’clock the following morning.
The annual Israel Defense Forces parade, pride of the Jewish nation, was being held this year in Haifa. One year it’s in Tel Aviv, the next in Jerusalem, and once every three years it takes place in Haifa.
We all woke up in time. Mom and Dad had already prepared the sandwiches, and we hurried off to grab a good spot in the middle of Ha’azma’ut Street, where the parade passes at ten o’clock; we had to be in the front row so no one could block our view of our national pride. We clapped our hands when the tanks rolled by, and we shouted for joy when we saw our soldiers, so proud and so handsome, and just see where we are now, despite Hitler, may his name be cursed for all of eternity, tfu, tfu, tfu—spit three times and grasp a bunch of your hair, waiting for the first bird to arrive to save us from the curse so it shouldn’t come back on us, heaven forbid.
After all, every toddler knows that when you place a curse on someone, you have to spit three times, grab a clump of your hair, and wait for the first bird that comes your way.
My ever-practical sister explained that I should try not to do any cursing unless I was sure that there were birds flying in the sky; otherwise I might find myself holding on to my hair the whole day long, and when there is no bird, you get stuck with the curse. It’s the same when you see a black cat.
There was a sudden downpour, and although Dad wanted to stay to see the end of our national pride parade, Mom wouldn’t let us, because of my tonsillitis and the fact that my temperature had gone down only a few days before.