I awoke in the middle of the night happy with the knowledge that something good had happened. I tried to think what it could have been, and then remembered; I peeped under my bed and saw my new shoes, sparkling away even in the dark of night. I stroked my shoes and smelled their new smell and then laid them down carefully on the floor so they wouldn’t get dirty. I fell asleep again, happy.
Yesterday the whole family had gone down to the wadi, near the movie house, to buy me and my sister shoes for the first time in our lives.
I wanted black patent leather shoes like the ones my sister’s friend Chaya had, because they had a permanent shine; and my sister wanted red shoes.
Mom tried to persuade her to go for black or white shoes, because they go with everything, but my sister was adamant that red goes with everything too.
The shopkeeper measured my foot on a metal shoe gauge with numbers running up its middle and told my mother that I was a size 28.
“So what size shall I bring?” he asked. Dad said to bring a size 29, but Mom wanted 31, so they’d last for the next three years, as my feet grew.
They compromised in the end on a size 30. The shopkeeper brought out a pair of black patent leather shoes, pushed a lot of cotton wool into the shoes so they wouldn’t fall off, and let me try them on. He brought a pair of red shoes for my sister, not patent leather.
“I don’t have red patent leather,” he apologized.
“So what?” My sister snatched a shoe from him and sat straight down to try it on. “I don’t like shiny shoes,” she said, and looked at me in disdain.
I stroked my black patent leather shoes, and my sister stroked her red shoes, so that Mom and Dad would see that we loved our new shoes and wouldn’t suddenly change their minds and decide not to buy them for us.
Dad told the shopkeeper that he would pay for the shoes in nine installments, and that he needn’t worry.
“I’ll have the money to pay for the shoes,” he said; “don’t forget there’s a general election in November.” And the man nodded his head in understanding and straight away wrapped up our shoes with no misgivings whatsoever.
It was the first Passover in our lives that my sister and I had new shoes that had been bought especially for us. In subsequent years, they bought new shoes for my sister, whereas I got to wear her castoffs.
It was also the first Passover that my sister and I were each given a new white pleated skirt. Instead of being paid in money for shortening dozens of such skirts, Mom had received two new white pleated skirts that just needed taking up, for her two daughters.
Mom packed our new skirts and new shoes in a suitcase, and we took the train to our uncles and aunts in Hedera for the seder.
She was pleased that her daughters were dressed in new clothes for this seder and proud that she was able, at long last, to show them off to Niku, her brother, and Eva, his wife.
We arrived at the railway station and joined a very long queue at the ticket counter. The train carriages were also already packed with people traveling to Tel Aviv.
Dad squeezed me, my sister, and the suitcase in through the open window and we saved seats until he and Mom could buy tickets.
When the train set out at last from the station, I stuck my head out of the window, and Dad shouted at me that I would get my head chopped off by a telephone pole. But I didn’t care. I loved the feel of the wind on my face, and to watch all the houses seeming to fly past as we gathered momentum; sometimes I’d see people waving to the train from inside their homes, and I would wave back enthusiastically.
A bus waited for us at the station when we alighted in Hedera, and I didn’t understand why an entire bus would be waiting for only four people, or even a few others, getting off the train, or how the bus driver knew the time of our arrival with such accuracy, so that we didn’t have to wait for it four hours as we sometimes had to wait for a bus in Haifa.
My sister explained to me that the bus knew in advance when the train was due to arrive, just as in Haifa we knew when the train was setting off in the direction of Hedera, but I didn’t really understand what she was saying.
Niku and his wife, Eva, had immigrated to Israel in the 1930s. Before obtaining a senior position with the Histadrut, the General Labor Federation, Niku had been a ghaffir with the Jewish Settlement Police. After doing their bit drying the swamps, Niku and Eva settled in Hedera, where they built their own little corner of heaven and raised their three children. Niku and Eva believed that if they couldn’t succeed in turning Mom and Dad into instant Israelis, then at least we, the girls, would rid ourselves of all our Romanian mannerisms and become prickly little sabras with all the necessary Zionist idiosyncrasies built in. They were annoyed with Mom for not taking the trouble to learn Hebrew, when she should be speaking only Hebrew with us. Mom argued with Niku that he should have taught his children another language; if not Romanian, then at least Yiddish, since it’s always important to know another language, apart from Hebrew.
But Niku was adamant—only Hebrew! So my mother, who never once went to an ulpan for learning Hebrew, and in any case was hard of hearing, spoke to Niku’s children in a mixture of a little Hebrew, a little Yiddish, and a little sign language. And they all understood her.
Of course, Rivkale, Itzik, and Yossi had been nurtured from birth on a love of Zion and were perfect Israelis. We townies from Haifa, from Wadi Salib, no less, envied them. We envied them first of all because they lived in a lovely house, with a garden and flowers and trees and a lawn; and most important, they had fruit trees—orange, lemon, plum, and loquat. They even had an orange press in the shed in the garden, which they used to squeeze fresh orange juice for us and supply us with vitamins. Altogether, the ability to pick as much as we wanted, to eat as much as we could until one night we twisted and turned with agonizing stomachache from stuffing ourselves on plums, made us feel we were in the Garden of Eden. And second, we envied them because in their home they spoke only Hebrew.
At night we slept in Yossi’s room. His parents opened out his steel bed, raised the bed beneath it, and joined the two. Sefi was first to grab the better side—the one next to the wall. Yossi slept on the other side—the one taken by people who get up early in the morning; at five thirty that hyperactive kid was already awake. I was stuck with the crack along the center of the bed, which was actually a gap measuring several centimeters across between the two beds, because of the significant difference in height. I didn’t sleep a wink all night because I was terribly embarrassed about sleeping with a boy, even though he was my cousin, and anyway, I was frightened of farting in the middle of the night and not being able to keep it quiet. All night I lay there like a statue, not breathing or turning over. Rather like porcupines making love—very, very carefully.
When we went to Rahamim’s grocery store in the morning to pick up a few things the grown-ups had forgotten to buy for the seder, I saw Yossi push a packet of candy and a bar of chocolate into his pocket. Rahamim asked Yossi what to jot down on his mom’s account, and Yossi told him just the things we’d been sent out to buy. “Are you sure that’s all?” Rahamim asked Yossi, and the little thief said that he was one hundred percent certain.
I snitched to Dad that I’d seen Yossi stealing stuff from Rahamim’s grocery store, and Dad said that he wasn’t a thief.
“Yes, he is,” I told my dad, “he stole candy and chocolate.”
Dad told me that even if Yossi thinks he’s stealing, Eva pays for everything later, because Rahamim also writes down everything he’s seen Yossi putting in his pocket, so as not to shame him.
That evening we wore our new white pleated skirts and I wore my new black patent leather shoes and my sister wore her red matte leather shoes. My sister wore the close-fitting blue top with the red buckle, which of course went beautifully with her shoes. I wore a brown top, and it didn’t match, even though I had black patent leather shoes that were supposed to go with everything.
We sat down ceremoniously at the perfectly laid table, as befits a traditional kosher family seder. Although Niku and Eva were secular and did not even fast on Yom Kippur, as my parents did, they never skipped so much as a single letter of the Passover Haggadah; we waited patiently for God to bring forth the Children of Israel out of Egypt with clenched fist and an outstretched arm.
I was waiting only for the afikoman and watched Niku’s every move to see where he was hiding it. I noticed nothing suspicious about him, and when the time came to look for the afikoman, we all spread out across the length and breadth of the room. My sister searched the sofa, Itzik moved all the cushions aside, Yossi searched in all possible cracks, and I made straight for the pile of records in the dresser. I flicked through all the Russian records that were there and that Eva loved to listen to because she had come from Russia. When I discovered a record in Hebrew, by Yaffa Yarkoni, I pulled it out of the pile and felt the lumpiness of the afikoman. Yes!!! I’d found the afikoman. Now I could ask for anything I could think of.
I wanted to ask for a bicycle. But I was embarrassed to, because I knew that it cost a lot of money, and anyway, with all those hills in Haifa, no one could ride a bicycle.
I wanted to ask for a football, but was embarrassed because I was a girl.
Most of all I wanted to ask for a blue top with a red buckle, but I knew that such tops exist only in America.
“What shall I ask for?” I whispered to my sister.
“Ask for a book,” my sister advised me quickly; “it makes the best impression.”
So, to defy my sister, who wanted a book for herself, I asked for a coloring book. “One for me and another for my sister,” I added.
My mother glowed with pride at this demonstration of sisterly love, never suspecting that I was only being contrary not asking for a reading book because this was what my sister wanted.