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Tel Aviv, Monday, June 22, 1942
“Tobruk has fallen. It’s all over,” Sean said.
“What? Oh, bloody fucking bollocks!” I called in English from the kitchen, over the hissing of the kettle and the rattling of pans. While I’d been planning breakfast, one of the precious eggs Sean had haggled for at the Carmel market took a suicide roll off the counter, apparently preferring obliteration to cooperation in my omelet project.
Morning sun squinted through the wooden slats of the trisim, painting the kitchen floor tiles in yellow and black stripes. I bent to gather what I could recover of the egg into a bowl, and silently vowed not to mention the mishap when serving breakfast. The sounds of Tel Aviv waking up flowed in through the open windows, along with the glorious smells of early summer: dust, jasmine, wood and diesel smoke.
“What’s happened, then?” I came into the dining nook, where Sean rested his forehead dramatically on the Palestine Post, and stretched to see past the blond curls covering the top half of the front page. “Are you devastated about... air operations in the Aleutians, then? Eh, mate?” I affected my best Aussie accent, which Sean never tired of mocking. He claimed I sounded like a “ghetto jackaroo with a head cold.”
Then he lifted his head, and I saw his face... and the headline it had been hiding. The Germans were claiming that Tobruk had fallen to Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Panzers. We both knew what it meant, and what came next.
I set the pan I’d been holding down roughly on the table, and sat gently on the chair next to him.
“There were more than 50,000 men defending Tobruk,” he said softly.
I touched his hand, and he did not pull it away. I knew of Tobruk’s legendary defenses, and that Sean’s younger brother Adam was among the ranks of its defenders. Tobruk, the only deep-water port between Benghazi, Libya, and Alexandria, Egypt, had been wrested from the Axis in an eight-month siege the previous year, and massively fortified by the British. In capturing the port, Rommel had gained a crucial strategic asset on his eastward push, in addition to taking a large part of the British forces out of the equation. This meant the Desert Fox could dramatically shorten his supply lines and redouble his efforts to push towards Palestine.
“Rommel’s men are known to treat prisoners fairly,” I said softly. This, too, was true—although I was not at all sure it was what Sean needed to hear. He had just found out he may have lost his little brother, and now faced the very real possibility of losing me.
He roused himself from the table and straightened his uniform. The shadows of three diamonds—recently replaced by the single crown of a Major—still showed on the faded cloth of his epaulets. He ignored the food I’d set in front of him, and shrugged off my further attempt at comfort—which was only slightly less clumsy than my handling of the eggs.
“I need to get to the office,” he said. “It’s the end of days, my love, and I’m one of the four horsemen. Unfortunately, I’m on the black horse. I may not be able to meet you this evening. I’ll ring you.” He strapped on his pistol holster and breezed out of my flat, blowing a distracted kiss over his shoulder.
The door slammed behind him with a finality that chilled me. Tobruk, I knew, had been pre-defined as the first domino in the line. With its fall, the British Army would immediately put the plan to evacuate Palestine into action. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I looked around the silent flat, in which the ghostly presence of this man—this man I loved, I reminded myself—lingered. Through the door to my room, I could see the crumpled bedclothes, still redolent with his scent. The wine goblet his lips had caressed just last night still stood at attention on the coffee table. In the empty guest room, his spare shirts still moped in the closet. Every part of this flat, and my life, retained and radiated Sean’s touch and caress. Yet with him overseeing the group administering the British retreat, and I myself deeply involved in implementing the Northern Plan—which would shortly come to be called Haifa-Tobruk—it was highly likely that I would never see him again.
***
Late the night before, not knowing that at that moment the last of Tobruk’s defenders were fighting, dying, or contemplating capture, I walked along Gordon Beach alone before heading over to the Armon Hotel Bar to meet Sean. I stared at the First Quarter moon, already sinking toward the western horizon. My eyes traced the glittering arc of the moon path on the flat sea as it shimmered into the distance.
It was not the same path about which Danuta had whispered to Daniel on the Baltic Sea. It was not the same path that Samuel, perhaps, watched that very moment somewhere far away. It was not the same path, nor did it point in the same direction, yet it had the same source. I kicked at the sand with a bare toe and wondered if all our paths were of common origin. Did we all seek the same thing, driven by core desires deeper than knowledge? Did not all human paths—meanderingly individual as they were—inevitably converge?
Yet my path did not appear to be converging with anything. It so dramatically diverged from that which my father had imagined for me as to make it unrecognizable. So had my brother’s, of course, but his divergence was not entirely of his own choosing. Mine, Father would have said, was one of free will—willfulness, my mother would have added. I smiled at the memory of my father’s face, then frowned, as the harsh words we’d exchanged before I left Warsaw came back to me.
“Nationalism is destroying society, son, not furthering it. Can’t you see the inherent artificiality of the nation-state? Can’t you recognize that division is just that—divisive? We need to work for inclusion, and slowly broaden its scope until it overcomes these illusory national borders we erect.”
Suddenly, just behind me, an air raid siren took an audible breath and its familiar yet terrifying banshee wail began to rise and fall. Automatically, my stomach dropped and my heart skipped a beat. That sound! That cursed sound carried such power—the power to turn me from a proud, thoughtful man into a rabbit discovered munching lettuce in a garden—that it instinctively and frantically sent me scrambling to hide. Furious and terrified in equal measure, I began to run across the empty beach.
Then the siren stopped. Seconds later, it began again, a single, static cry. All clear. A false alarm. I stopped running, pulse racing and head pounding, and sat down hard in the sand.
Forcing my thoughts out of rabbit-mode slowed my heart. Illusory national borders, my father had said. Illusory. To me, my father’s path had been illusory—willful assimilation into a society that never missed an opportunity to express its collective rejection of him. He truly believed, perhaps right up to the moment when the German bomb took him and my mother, that integration of the diverse and antagonistic segments of Poland was possible. He truly believed in the essential goodness of humanity. I still admired his naiveté—if only because it represented true faith, of which I was incapable.
I had no black and white; everything shimmered in shades of grey. Any hope of faith in my father’s Universalist prattle died in me when the semi-frozen saliva of the Polish policeman had hit the back of my neck. I wonder now if he—wherever he was today—had any idea of the life-changing power his bodily fluids had possessed.
***
I walked home from school on a winter afternoon in late 1929, a troubled sixteen-year-old. In class we’d discussed the recent destruction of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, in Palestine. My mind still reeled from the descriptions of that massacre.
I pulled my cap down over my frozen ears. Samuel, who tagged along behind me as he did every day on the way home, did the same—less from cold than from adulation, I knew. He was unusually chatty that afternoon, prattling on and on about some convoluted classroom intrigue, until finally the babble got the better of me.
I stopped, turned abruptly, bent down to his level, and looked him the eye. “I really, truly, and honestly do not give a shit. Would you please just shut up!”
Even in my frustrated state, the look of hurt in his eyes affected me... quietly.
Fifty or so souls had shown up to the Nationalist Party demonstration on the corner of Szeroka and Petersburska streets, across from the grand round synagogue building in which I’d never set foot. They wore their signature black berets and matching armbands, and carried typically belligerent signs.
Jews Out! Catholic Polish State NOW!
Catholicism and Nationalism - True Polish Brothers
I took Samuel’s hand and led him hurriedly into the slushy street. Skirting behind a passing streetcar and avoiding a spindly-tired Model T, we moved away from the vociferous group and past the bemused and bored-looking policeman who’d apparently been assigned to watch them.
This policeman’s face was a familiar sight on the streets between our house and school. As children, we’d surreptitiously watched him polish the shiny brass buttons on his tunic. He would rub with such vigor and concentration that his brimmed hat would inevitably slip down over his eyes, causing him to start and us to flee, laughing. He looked up with vague recognition as we approached.
I nodded in greeting, seeking a measure of empathy from someone so long a fixture of authority in the predominantly Jewish Praga neighborhood where we lived.
He straightened up, adjusted his tunic and hat, and just as we passed spit vigorously in our direction, muttering, “Fucking Jewish rats” under his breath.
I felt the spittle strike the back of my neck, but only lowered my head and urged Samuel on faster. When we arrived home, I said nothing to my father of the incident.
***
That was not an unusual event for any Jew in Poland in those days. So why, I asked myself as I dug my bare feet into the still-warm sand, did it affect my path so dramatically? Others, my father among them, had been able to shrug off incidents like this as mere “undertow.” For me, it had been a fault line that, once crossed that day, left my father and me on separate tectonic plates altogether. I had come to a clear, if not yet conscious, recognition that I had—and would always have—no place in the country of my birth. Indeed, I would never have a place in any country—except one of my own.
My path had diverged irreparably from my father’s, fated never to realign itself.
I turned back to the moon path, which shimmered unperturbed by the adrenaline that still pounded in my temples. I dug my toes deeper into the sand and wondered if Sean’s path and my own would yet cross again.
