This is my substitute, this is my pardon, this is my atonement, this rooster goes to death, and I shall enter a long, happy, and peaceful life.
Together my sister and I held the atonement chicken above our heads, swinging it round and round under the watchful eyes of our mother, who made sure we didn’t miss a word of the prayer that accompanied this ritual.
“Any minute this chicken is going to shit on my head,” I yelled at my mother.
“You should only be so lucky,” she replied. “It’s a sign of good fortune.”
“But I don’t want anyone to shit on my head, not even your stupid chicken,” I fumed.
My parents always fasted on Yom Kippur. They never cheated, not even once. Even in the worst hamsin heat waves, they didn’t let so much as a drop of water past their lips, and they certainly didn’t brush their teeth.
Dad went to the Sephardi synagogue, and Mom to the Ashkenazi synagogue.
Dad announced that his prayers this year were going to be a whole lot more meaningful and heartfelt because we were on the verge of turning over a new leaf. After all these years, Dad had been granted permanency at the Autocar factory where he worked as a guard, and he decided that the time had come to get out of Wadi Salib. He was very disappointed with his party and its attempts to quell the race riots and wanted to provide us, his daughters, with a change of scenery, since everyone knows that a change of place brings a change of luck. We moved school too that year, but this was mere coincidence. The authorities, which had no idea how to handle race riots, decided to transfer my sister’s class from the Ma’alot Hanevi’im school to the Amami Aleph school. Since no plans were afoot to transfer my class, Mom went to the authorities to explain that it was absolutely out of the question to separate me from my sister, since we spent all our time together, and were actually more or less up each other’s backside. The authorities refused, and Mom threw a temper tantrum and made it clear to them that in that case, the older one wasn’t going to transfer, either; it was both of them together or neither one of them. In fact, they should put us both in the same class. Only after I explained to Mom that I wasn’t such a genius as to justify moving me up a year did she agree to relinquish her demand to have us both in the same class, but she was adamant about our attending the same school. The school gave in and agreed to my mother’s deal in order to keep my sister, a straight-A student and a credit to the school.
So we moved house after Yom Kippur. From a one-room apartment on Stanton we moved to an airy three-room rental for which my parents were required to pay an initial key-money deposit; quality of life for the girls.
My dad took out a mortgage, Mum took the rummy, and we moved to Hadekalim Street in downtown Haifa.
Mum opened wide all the windows to let in the air from all directions, and the stench that immediately filled the apartment was absolutely unbearable.
Hadekalim Street, despite its fancy name, was on the edge of the garbage dump belonging to the Turkish market, which was actually located in the courtyard of the building adjacent to ours. In other words, Mom and Dad had bought an apartment right in the middle of downtown Haifa’s shit-hole. They told us apologetically that it was the only place they could afford—and even that required a key-money deposit—because it was cheap.
“It’s true,” my mother recalled, “the windows were always closed whenever we came to examine it thoroughly before deciding on improving our girls’ quality of life.”
It was the filthiest, most stinky street in Haifa, and we never again went down to play. There was nowhere to play.
The only good thing about Hadekalim Street was, again, our balcony.
The balcony overlooked Jaffa Street, downtown Haifa’s main thoroughfare, the street where everything happens. Most of the action took place right opposite our balcony. There was a coffee bar there, although it was more like a saloon, and it was there that all Haifa’s lowlife, seamen, and whores congregated to play backgammon all day, drink arak, and have fights. Twice a week they’d break up all the chairs and tables, until the bar discovered plastic furniture.
And every night until late, or until all his stock was sold, the Bulgarian burekas man stood at his stall on the sidewalk in front of the café, where, with amazing dexterity, he would slice the burekas in two or four sections, peel a brown hard-boiled egg, sprinkle a little salt and pepper on top, and hand it all in a cardboard container to the happy customer.
Right next to the café several stores sold cheap household goods and cleaning materials and stalls piled with duty-free clothing from abroad, smuggled in by seamen and sold cheap on the street until the next police raid. And there was also the delicatessen with the nonkosher salamis and real Bulgarian cheese and all kinds of delicacies that came from abroad and were sold dirt-cheap on Jaffa Street opposite our balcony. From all over Haifa people came to do their shopping downtown, from the Carmel, Hadar, and Ahuza neighborhoods, as well as from the outlying towns, known as the Kiryas.
My sister and I spent hours on end sitting on the balcony at a small table that served as a reserve dining table when we had guests, watching the strangers below and speculating about their lives.
After school we stayed at home, reading books, and my sister continue to educate me in the ways of the world: Keep your mouth closed when you are eating; walk with your head up and your back straight so you don’t get a hump; place a book on your head and pull your neck upward as if you can feel someone pulling you up by the top of your head; don’t roll your R’s, so as not to emphasize that you are Romanian. Swallow them.
Don’t swear.
Don’t be rude.
Don’t spit.
Don’t kick.
Smile politely, enigmatically.
Don’t look people straight in the eye, even if you are dying to do so; lower your eyes humbly. Stop looking at the world with that judgmental expression on your face.
Say little and learn to listen, because most people in the world have more to say than you have, until you grow up.
These were my sister’s ten commandments.
But most important, the most important thing of all, is to be special, to be different from everyone else. No one in my class knows anything about me, no one even knows where I live, and no one knows what my parents do for a living.
I am a complete mystery to them.
“Of course, it’s because you’re ashamed to say,” I said to my sister, and she replied that it’s her choice not to say.
In the 1960s, when everyone wanted to be like everyone else and look alike and not be different or stand out, because they wanted Israeli society to be homogeneous, Sefi chose to be different because she understood that different is special.
Sefi attended the prestigious and snobbish Reali High School. When it was her turn to go down to the grocer’s store, she made a point of dressing nicely so that if she bumped into someone from her school they would think that she was just passing, same as they were.
Unlike me, my sister never went down in shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops on her feet; she really made an effort to look as if she was going out on the town. Even Tova and Malka, her childhood friends, were made to swear not to tell anyone in their class where she lived. The whole class, including the teachers, knew that Sefi lived in Hadekalim Street, but they were all certain that Hadekalim Street was a nice street lined with palm trees in the Carmel neighborhood.
And my sister never put them right.
When anyone asked me the way to my home, I used to say, “Just follow the smell, you can’t miss.” And again my sister said that because I’m pretty I could allow myself to say whatever I like.
“So what?” I said to my big sister, who thought that she was merely wise. “You’re pretty, too.”
But my mother knew how to take advantage of my natural talents, and when she went to the market, she forced me to go with her. According to my mother, when the greengrocer sees a pretty girl, he gets confused and gives her the best produce and even a discount. The butcher used to give Mom free food for our dog; whereas were it not for my coquettish smile, he would have sent her packing empty-handed. She didn’t dare force Sefi to go with her to the market because she didn’t think her smile was flirtatious enough. Besides, Sefi would certainly have refused to go because she spent all her time doing homework, so that she could be top of the class in the prestigious Reali High School as well.
The best gift I was given from my life in Wadi Salib was the ability to get along in life.
Sefi was given inspiration.
For six years we lived in the lowest and dirtiest street in Haifa.
When Sefi grew sick and tired of Hadekalim Street, with the Turkish market touching the port, she explained to my dad that if we didn’t move house immediately, I would turn into a streetwalker, even though I attended the Leo Beck High School, since a girl of my age needs company and the only company in the vicinity were those downtown losers. “And she is already that way inclined,” she added.
Dad became stressed, persuaded Mom to take an even more enormous mortgage before I turn into a loser, and we moved to Hapo’el Street in the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood, opposite the Tamar cinema, where that Nazi usher had taunted Dad by refusing to let him in to see Oklahoma!
Sefi and I then experienced a rebirth, and were no longer ashamed of our neighborhood and our Romanian heritage. On the other hand, there still wasn’t much for us to boast about.