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Tel Aviv, Friday, May 29, 1942
My Dearest Samuel,
Stop what you‘re doing, and hold up your hand. Look at your fingers, and close your eyes. See my hand? My fingers are curling through yours. Their wispy gentleness, tickling the valleys between your own, is a prelude to the tightening squeeze to follow. Now our palms are snug together. Your hand is cold and calloused. Mine is warm and suntanned. My thumb caresses the back of your hand. You look down into my eyes, and I gasp as the world and all its fullness is revealed. It is the beauty of the infinite, the sunburst thrust at me from the depths of your soul, which takes my breath away. It is our love, made luminescent and visible.
I can see this. Can you? It is both our past and our future. It is an anomaly of time and space—simultaneously there, wherever you’re reading this, and here, in Tel Aviv.
For here, in Tel Aviv—finally—I am! I arrived in Haifa three days ago, after almost a month stuck in Gdansk after those German pigs took me off the Vatan. They only let me go after I proved that I was actually Catholic—thank goodness I memorized the Rosary!—and explained that I had taken a Jewish identity because of the Soviets’ rabid anti-Christianity. The Nazis loved hearing that. Afterwards, I was in Malta, and then another three months waiting in Istanbul for the British to approve my paperwork to come to Palestine. Three months working in that stuffy office, with the randy Mr. Bayar whose hands never seemed to stay where they should! But all this you should already know, my love, if you received the letters I sent via Aron—our personal Palestine post office!
The trip from Istanbul was awful, as I knew it would be. No, I did not bend to kiss the ground when disembarking, as so many of my fellow travelers did. My lips are reserved for you, darling—let Eretz Yisrael be jealous! Nonetheless, I was elated as I stepped off the ship and onto the dock at Haifa. For I had one thought: the next time I encounter a ship (for I sincerely hope I may never have to board one again) may be when you arrive.
Aron is a darling, as I knew he would be. He helped me clear the customs officer’s endless questions fairly quickly. In fact, everyone seems to know and respect your brother. As it was too late to make the trip back to Tel Aviv, he took me in a cab to a lovely little hotel in the Hadar neighborhood. On Herzl Street, we watched falafel stand owners compete for customers with shouts and “falafel acrobatics,” as Aron called them – tossing up the crispy balls and catching them artfully in the pita bread. After a wash, he took me to dinner, and then to see Waterloo Bridge at the Armon Theatre. Vivian Leigh is, as you know, one of my favorites. I was pleased to show off my English to Samuel. At least something came of being stuck in Malta all those months, waitressing for British sailors near the port! But the movie was hard to see through the fog of cigarette smoke. And the sunflower seeds! It was like sitting in the midst of a squirrel convention, with the incessant rustle of paper bags, loud cracking, and piles of shells littering the floor.
I slept like a rock my first night in Palestine, a sweet dreamless sleep. Until, that is, I was woken by a god-awful screeching at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t recognize the language, but there was no doubt in my mind as to the content: German bombers, Nazi Stormtroopers, or perhaps the devil himself was on the way, and we needed to take cover. I flung myself out of bed and, still in my nightgown, raced into the hall. I pounded on Aron’s door like a madwoman, and must have scared him silly, as wild-eyed and disheveled as I was. After calming me, he explained to me patiently about the muezzin, who was calling Muslims in the lower city of Haifa to prayer. He sent me gently back to my room, but there was no more sleep for me. This place, I suddenly realized with my head still spinning, has but a veneer of Europe painted over it, and it is mica-thin. Peel it back and the Levant is revealed—glorious in its wildness and terrifying in its barbaric potential.
In Tel Aviv, which we reached the following morning after a bumpy bus ride, the patina of Europe is far thicker. Aron’s apartment is lovely and homey, located on a small, quiet, and shady dead-end street. I‘m writing this at a small table in the guest room, in which Aron has installed me, and from which I will await you, my darling, for as long as it takes. I woke not long ago from a sleep blessedly uninterrupted by morning prayers of any variety. Through the wooden trisim (my new Hebrew word for the morning!) that shade my windows, I can hear the Friday-morning rattle of cars and horse-drawn carts on Bugrashov Street, and the whistle of the policeman directing traffic above the deeper rumble of the Egged buses climbing King George toward Allenby. This city lives and breathes. Tel Aviv, just as I imagined it.
Yet in the three days I’ve been here, I’ve learned that there are actually two cities here. There is the day-to-day Tel Aviv, with its kerosene vendors and crowded outdoor coffee shops, its markets and placid shaded boulevards. But there is a dark veil hiding another city—perhaps “shrouding” would be a more apt word. This is the city of anxiety, of fear bordering on desperation. This is the city where pharmacies quietly sell out their stocks of family-size packages of cyanide tablets, even as more arrive. This is the city where no young men are seen—all have gone off to volunteer for the British army, or for the Hagana, the semi-legal Jewish defense forces. I’ve told you that Aron now works for them—although he told me to use the name of his nominal employer, Kofer HaYishuv, which is a fund set up to finance the Hagana’s activities.
There’s no need to look further than today’s headlines in Davar, which Aron translated for me, to find the source of the angst among the Jews of Palestine: Rommel’s advances in Libya. The Axis is pushing for Tobruk, a major Allied port, and the fear here is palpable. If Tobruk falls, the Germans’ road to Palestine becomes that much shorter, as do their supply lines.
What is not in the papers, but what everyone nonetheless knows, is that the British are now preparing to implement the not-so-secret plan they call Palestine Final Fortress. If Rommel reaches Egypt, the British will pull out all forces from Palestine ahead of the inevitable German invasion.
If this happens, the half million Jews of the Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—will be at the mercy of the local Arabs, who have made no secret of their support for the Nazis, and who have proven how vicious they can be when unfettered by British soldiers. And after the Arabs have their way, the Nazis themselves will get what’s left of us. My love, the stories we’ve heard of what the Nazis are doing to Jews in Europe are true. The rumors I heard from every fellow refugee from Vilna to Tel Aviv are true—despite the Allies’ convenient, and perhaps willful, ignorance of their veracity. Aron claims that the Yishuv leadership has undeniable proof of the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe. Thus, there’s good cause to assume that this is what awaits us all if Rommel succeeds. This, then, is the shroud that dims even the optimistic brightness of our Tel Aviv sun. This is the winter night to our lovely spring days, the dark to our light.
Yes, “our.” Have you ever noticed how authors use “we,” when their actual meaning is “you”? It’s as though they attempt to make opinions—criticism or praise—more palatable through self-inclusiveness. As a writer, you will perhaps doubt the sincerity of my newfound affinity for your—now our—people, these Jews I’ve been living with for nearly two years. I know your feelings toward Zionism, or nationalism in general, darling. One can’t expect your father’s Universalism to have passed you over entirely, despite it having done exactly so with your brother! Yet given what we now know about the fate of European Jewry, together with our simple understanding of the way the world works in the age of the nation-state, can you truly argue against the logic of Jewish sovereignty? And given what you know of me, is it really so hard to believe that I include myself in this “we”?
There is an incredible resilience to these, my new people. Whether born of desperation, sublimity, or some miasmatic combination thereof, their power, like my awe of it, remains undiminished. Over the past weeks, the Yishuv leadership, Aron tells me, vigorously debated the option of evacuating the Jewish population en masse, if the British pull out. Some suggested that just the leadership should leave, setting up a government in exile ala Poland. Some advocated that only women and children evacuate. Yet the incredibly brave and sadly salient decision was that there is nowhere left to run. That is why the leadership has endorsed their own part of the Palestine Final Fortress, a plan they’re calling the “Northern Plan” on good days, or “Masada on the Carmel” on more desperate ones.
Your brother is working frantically, day and night, to bring this plan to fruition, and I hope soon to help him. The Zionist leadership is organizing the evacuation of the entire Jewish population of Palestine north of the Carmel mountain range, and the Hagana has already begun fortifying it as a final line of defense. The Carmel, Aron explained, is the only natural physical barrier between Palestine and Egypt. Rommel’s tanks can roll right over the coastal plains in a matter of weeks with no large-scale British resistance, but there’s at least a chance of slowing them with the Hagana’s small guerilla forces in the mountain passes. It is a plan audacious in its nobility and heartrending in its desperation.
So, I now say “we,” but without the author’s faux inclusiveness. The tribulations I thought ended when I arrived in Haifa may have just begun, but I will face them together with my newfound people. Yet it would be so much easier to face them with you! I know, my love, that I am a selfish, selfish woman, having wasted an entire letter complaining to you. I have been strong these past 21 months, truly, and I know that my experiences have certainly paled in comparison with your own. But this does not stop the tears that come unbidden when I put out a hand towards your side of the bed and find it cold. It does not change the way my stomach drops when I instinctively turn to share some discovery or revelation with you, only to discover your absence each time anew.
Now, stop what you’re doing, my darling, and look to the west. Do you see me? I’m standing here now, on Aron’s porch in Tel Aviv, waving, waiting. Do you see the longing in my face? Do you see the tears tracking my cheeks? You’ve never stood up a date with me yet. I’m expecting you to keep your promise.
I love you with all my heart,
Danuta/Lea
