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Tel Aviv, September 17, 1940
The spotty shade of the date palm in Dizengoff Square, where I’d ended up after another sleepless night, did little to alleviate the heat of the morning. Hamsin dust had crept up on the city in the night, born by southerly winds from Saudi Arabia. It hung heavy in the languid oven of Mediterranean air, clouding vision and impeding breathing. I sat in the grass, fanning myself ineffectually with a flyer for Argentine Nights, which was playing in the nearby Allenby Theatre, featuring “the incredible Andrews Sisters!”
Through the haze, I watched the trickle of human activity flow by. Here, a young mother stopped a high-wheeled pram to softly coo to the squealing infant within. There, a businessman sweating in jacket and tie constantly moved his hands, deep in animated conversation with a short-sleeved, sandal-wearing colleague. Beyond them, two British soldiers, clearly off-duty and looking for diversions, smoked and watched the slim young mother with casually lascivious eyes. In front of me, the fountain streamed endless arcs of water. Behind me, automobiles scurried around the traffic circle.
I sat on my figurative rock above this human stream, as it seemed I always had. The effervescence of human joy and the detritus of its malaise flowed by me. In truth, it barely dampened the soles of my shoes, even on my infrequent forays into its current.
It had not always been so. In Warsaw, the stream had nearly engulfed me, the sensitive boy who cried easily. At movies in the Era Cinema on Targowa Street, while trying to maintain concentration over the notorious squeaking of its wooden chairs, I would tear up at the slightest hint of emotional strife. When Stefania died so tragically in Puchalski’s version of Leper, I literally fell to the floor, and curled under the chair despite the sticky floor, as overcome with grief as if my own love had left me so tragically on the day of our wedding.
***
I was wholly immersed in this stream of emotion, so deeply that my father called me to his study, wearing the serious look that announced a father-son chat. He gestured for me to sit facing him, he in his wooden-backed, wheeled office chair, I in the overstuffed armchair by the window that overlooked the Vistula. The river shone bright blue in the sunshine. Through the open window, the lemony sweet scent of blooming water lilies wafted in, and I could hear the ducks chasing each other merrily on the muddy banks.
Father looked at me for a pregnant moment, his forehead wrinkled in consternation as if unsure how to begin. Finally, he spoke. “Feelings make us human, son. What we experience in the world should make us feel. And feeling things as intensely as you do is a blessing. If everyone felt things so strongly, and did not choose to dampen or ignore their feelings, the world would be a much better place. But part of growing up, part of being a man, is learning to control your feelings, sometimes even to conceal them. We can argue whether or not this is healthy or preferable, but it is nonetheless the way society expects us to act. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
I thought I did, and I inwardly vowed, in the immemorial filial traditional, to please my father. I set myself to the Herculean task of hiding the waves of anger, sadness, and sometimes even joy that so often threatened to physically double me over.
By the time I was sixteen, I felt in control—an adult, as much the master of my emotional fate as my father. I was ready, in 1929, to face whatever the world would throw at me.
Or so I thought. For even as the Great Depression began to chip away at my father’s securely bourgeoisie façade, Josef Warszawski began to dismantle my own emotional dam—pebble by pebble, brick by agonizing brick.
***
“Got a fag, brother?”
The voice jarred me, but did not completely extract me from the vivid memory into which I had sunk. I reached for my pack of Simon Artz’s, ever-present in my shirt pocket, without even looking up. I shook one out mechanically and thrust it in the general direction of the voice, then fished the small box of wooden matches from another pocket and did the same. Only then did I raise my eyes to squint at the figure that loomed above me. The sun, mocking the scant shade the palm strove to provide, lit his face blindingly from behind, obscuring his features. All I could see was his uniform—the blue garb of a Jewish Auxiliary Policeman.
We saw more and more of these in recent months, as the city was plastered with posters encouraging young men to join the British-sanctioned Notrim, Auxiliary Police, “to protect people and homeland.” Putting past tensions with the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine behind them in favor of a common cause, the British needed all the local manpower they could find. They were desperate to shift more forces to the North African front, where the name Rommel was being heard in ever more reverent terms on both sides of the lines.
“Hot as shit today, eh, brother?”
I nodded in silent agreement, and looked away. Josef’s strong features swam back to me—the stubborn cut of his jawline, the thick swath of black hair that he constantly brushed away from his left eye, the thick-rimmed glasses that gave his gaze a remote intensity. He never looked at me so much as through me, as if he always saw something of greater significance beyond the horizon.
Josef was the leader of the Warsaw chapter of the Gordonia youth movement. He’d recruited me—more ardent ideologues might say “poached”—as I came out of a meeting of the rival HaShomer HaTzair Zionist movement. For a reason I still didn’t understand, he’d chosen me, ignoring the rest of the crowd exiting the lecture. Right there on the street, the cobblestones shining after a night rain, his breath fogging in the cool air, he’d begun to speak of redemption through working the land and personal sacrifice.
His words drew me in at first, but I lost all power of verbal comprehension when he grasped my shoulders dramatically with two strong hands. He looked deep into my eyes, and asked me something of undoubtedly profound significance to which I had no choice but to answer “Yes.” I had no idea what I’d agreed to, but I found myself walking beside him, my shoulders still tingling where his touch refused to fade.
I carried my silent torch for two long years. Finally, convinced that my feelings for him were reciprocal, even as I inwardly trembled at the finality of broaching the subject, I decided to write him a letter. I agonized for weeks, writing and rewriting, revising and erasing. I’d known of my own feelings—so very different from those of my peers—for years, yet I never dreamed that one day I’d find another with whom to share them. My inner dilemma became so all-encompassing that I nearly forgot its secrecy. It consumed me, as only a yearning teenager could be consumed. The pain of it became as familiar as breathing.
I never sent that letter. Yet, as I hurried out the door to yet another Gordonia lecture eschewing the evils of socialism and lauding the glory of pioneering in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, it remained in an unsealed envelope on my desk.
My mother—who never checked her sweet, well-intentioned curiosity for anything as trivial as respect for her children’s privacy—found it.
Josef never reciprocated even a modicum of my feelings.
I discovered this when I finally, after two more agonizing years, professed my love for him in person—the unsent letter by then a distant memory. We sat by a lonely campfire in 1933, guarding the watermelon field near our newly founded Kibbutz, Mishmar HaSharon. The mosquitoes buzzed in our ears, and the night closed in around us, shutting out the rest of the world. It was just us and the fire, the perfect setting. It had been building in me for so long, it was almost a physical relief to confess.
Instead of taking me in his strong arms, as I had so fervently yearned, Josef tactfully shook his head at first. When I persisted, he raised his voice, letting the disgust creep in.
I left the Kibbutz on the first bus the next morning, and arrived in the raucous central Tel Aviv bus station that afternoon—sweaty, destitute, heartbroken, and just short of desperate.
***
I started violently, unconsciously scooting away from the young policeman I’d given a cigarette before vanishing into my reverie, whose resemblance was hauntingly similar to Josef.
“Take it easy, brother. I’m not going to bite.” He scrutinized me with a shrewd, street-smart policeman’s eye that didn’t synch with his new-looking uniform. He lit his cigarette, and we both watched the flame of the small match standing audaciously tall in the absence of any breeze, before he snuffed it out.
As he returned the matches to me, our hands brushed lightly, and I surreptitiously jerked my hand away, as if burned.
He surveyed the square intently, then returned his gaze to me. I saw now that he had a stern Oriental visage—dark hair, olive skin, heavy brows. He was powerfully built, but in a loose and lanky way that radiated graceful, not brutish, power. His deep-throated Hebrew was unaccented, unlike my own, which likely would never lose its immediately recognizable Polish twang.
“You look familiar, brother. Where have I seen you before?”
I vaguely muttered a response about working in a bank, where lots of people come and go. He shook his head, and my stomach dropped in flooding recollection. I scrambled to my feet, claiming to be late for a meeting, and tossed a harried goodbye over my shoulder as I walked briskly away, nearly running into another pair of British soldiers in my haste. I excused myself in broken English, and scurried on.
He knew me. Of course, he knew me. From London Square. And I knew him, perhaps better than I would have preferred.
“You can’t walk away from who you are, brother,” he said, his clear voice pursuing me in the tepid stillness of the morning. “Wherever you go, there you are. Right? Wherever you go, there you are.”
He laughed, and his mocking shoved me insistently forward, even as his words bore me back, past the memory of Josef, to another conversation altogether, in which I’d heard those very words. It was the last conversation I ever had with my parents.
***
I hadn’t experienced a lot on this earth, but I’d seen enough not to believe in human nobility in any form.
My father claimed to believe, always an optimistic advocate of the fundamental goodness of the human soul, his own included. This, at least, held true until he was confronted with an actual, not theoretical, moral conundrum. Then, without fail, he would tear away the sheer curtain of his “nobility” and make his choice based on preconception and self-interest, like we all do.
Thus, his reaction in 1931, when I was 18 years old, did not surprise me. On a chilly fall evening, sheets of rain combed the hairy vegetation along the banks of the Vistula, and lashed the dining room windows of my parents’ flat. The rivulets running down the glass distorted the usually merry lights of Old Town, visible across the river, creating messy luminescent smears that leered at me until I turned away. I faced the three figures at the table, trying to keep my voice steady. My hands clutched the edge of the tablecloth so tightly that my plate squirmed perceptibly towards the table’s edge.
“So, I have some news,” I said over the slurping noises coming from Samuel’s side of the table. My mother’s chicken soup did not lend itself to quiet consumption.
“My Certificate came through,” I blurted.
The slurping stopped, and only the violent swishing of the rain was audible. Even Samuel, whom I knew had no idea what a Certificate was, stopped eating and stared.
The shocked silence was broken as my mother’s spoon clattered noisily to her plate. She jumped abruptly to her feet and rushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, clutching a napkin to her contorted mouth.
Father also rose from his place at the head of the table. He strode icily from the dining room, leaving Samuel and me alone.
Samuel looked at me, wide-eyed and questioning.
I reminded him that a Certificate was official permission from His Majesty’s Government, which had been granted the mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations after the Great War, to immigrate. “I applied nearly a year ago, remember? Now it’s happening. I’m leaving for Palestine in three months, together with Josef and the rest of our chapter. We’re a garin now. We’re going to build, with our own hands, a new settlement in the Land of Israel. Can you believe it?”
Samuel sat silent, his 13-year-old brain turning this information over and over, until he finally understood its significance.
I had tried to help him understand and appreciate the tenets of Gordonian Zionism, which I’d embraced wholeheartedly—partly out of genuine ideological conviction, and partly owing to Josef’s influence, tutelage, encouragement, and attention. Samuel, however, expressed far more interest in books, the school orchestra, and Walerian Kisielinski’s escapades on the soccer field, than in the future of the Jewish people in its ancient homeland. I knew he respected me, even worshipped me. He would truly try to listen as I recounted an evening’s lecture, or the details of my summer experiences in the Kibbutz Kielce training camp. He would try, but his stare would usually go vacant shortly after I began talking. When he drifted away like this, I could either leave the room or commit ritual hari-kari on the spot, with equal lack of impact on his reverie.
Now, however, he was paying attention. He looked at me pleadingly, his large brown eyes filled with tears. “But what will I do, when you’re gone? Who will be here with me?”
His words, perfectly framed as they were by lovable pre-teen narcissism, hit me hard. I had no answer for him. How could I explain that he had not, truly, played even a minor role in my decision to leave? I loved Samuel in an abstract way, much as he listened to my Zionist rantings, but I wasn’t fiercely devoted to him in any sense. He was there, and my brother, and that was that. In any case, I didn’t have a chance to explain then.
My father’s voice rang out across the flat. “Aron, will you please join your mother and me in my study?”
Father sat in his wooden office chair, and I—now an adult—sat in the overstuffed armchair, as I had so many times as a child. Instead of kind-eyed guidance and soft-spoken counsel, however, my father’s voice broke as he told me what he’d read in my letter to Josef. The look of anguish on his face was so pronounced that my eyes immediately filled in response to a noxious combination of guilt and empathy.
True to his prudence and perhaps prudishness, he’d waited for the right time to confront me with what he’d read in the letter my mother found. He stayed his hand, until my dramatic dinner table announcement forced it.
“Wherever you go, there you are, Aron. You’re not going to escape this by leaving for some godforsaken life of certain deprivation, and possible depravity.” My father’s words bounced off me like stones against armor. “Leave our ideological differences aside for now, Son. This is not about your Zionism or my Integrationism. This is personal. We can try other doctors, other procedures, which could alleviate your... condition. Stay here and let us help you. Don’t make a rash decision that you will later regret. Eretz Yisrael is not going anywhere.”
And thus, it began.
***
And how does it end? I asked myself while rounding the corner of Bugrashov, sweating and wheezing slightly from the exertion in the dusty air. I turned into my street, and made a beeline for the cool comfort of my flat.
Well, here I am in Tel Aviv, fairly well-off and utterly corrupt. I meet stray policemen in dark parks to alleviate my burning loneliness. Josef, the true reason I became a Zionist and emigrated to Palestine, is dead on the banks of Nahal Alexander.
How does it end?
My parents were dead in Warsaw. I’d received a laconic telegram from Samuel, who was now in Vilnius, to that effect. I’d never exchanged meaningful words with them after the vicious argument that rainy evening. I left home two days thereafter, and moved in with Gordonian friends. I next saw my parents at the train station on Chmielna Street, the morning I departed for the port of Constanta, Romania, from which I was to embark for Palestine. Our goodbye was brief and formal, my mother’s face flushed from crying, my father’s eyes grim and disappointed.
True, I had begged my father for funds after I left the Kibbutz, and he had acceded, ensuring—after several flea-bitten days in a hostel—that I could live comfortably until finding gainful employment. His introduction to his Tel Aviv banking connections, which had jump-started my meteoric career, had been readily—perhaps guiltily—offered. But I would never have a chance to express my love for them, or to tell my mother how much I admired her determination. I would continue, for the rest of my days, to long for my father’s strong arms to enfold me once again into a world of comfort that shut out the pain and complexity of adult life.
How does it end?
My pesky little brother, to whom I’d grown more and more attached as our correspondence continued over the past years, was either freezing in a Soviet gulag or already dead. The love of his life, Danuta, a woman I greatly admired based on what little I knew of her, was trapped in Vilnius. She awaited Samuel’s unlikely return, but had written to say she was in danger of retribution from the Soviets for consorting with a subversive if she remained there. Yet if she returned home to Warsaw, she could face German wrath for consorting with a Jew.
So, how does it end? What if that still depends on me?
I’d never been able to wallow in desperation, always preferring to dig myself out of a hole rather than languish therein. Whether this trait signified great character or abysmal cowardice, I didn’t know, but where others vacillated, I acted. Where others hesitated, I pounced.
Perhaps I could use the skills that served me so well in business to help the one person in the world for whom I still hold fond, if remote, feelings.
I took pen in hand and retrieved a fresh piece of stationery from the top desk drawer.
Now is the only time any of us ever have to do right. Amends are made, not granted.
I wrote with no hesitation, excited to take the first steps on a road to possible redemption.
Dear Danuta....
