hill where the village is now located and pitched their first tents just before the Hanukka holidays.
But the date itself was not sanctified and the moshav festivities were eventually combined with the celebration of Shavuot. This was done because Shavuot draws the energies of farmers past and present and of the community at large to hail the changing seasons, the bounty of the earth, and—perhaps not quite consciously—the granting of the Torah, whether or not the last of these actually took place. Doubtless its power has preserved this special date through two thousand years of exile.
The community hall was also where we celebrated simpler holidays. The youth movement used it to celebrate Hanukka, Purim and Tu Bishvat. The hall had a loft called “The Members’ Club” that was shrouded in mystery. Nowadays, with our culture so Americanized, we Israelis are somewhat amused to recall that the word chaver* had socialist or even communist undertones—“member of the moshav association.” As a child, I took it quite literally. However, the shouts that emanated from that club, the curses and profanities voiced by people coming out and passing by “The Stone,” did not resemble any kind of camaraderie I knew. These shouts came from the moshav members, all of whom would periodically gather in the club. This was called the “moshav assembly” and it had supreme authority, even more than the central committee.
By the entrance to the community hall was a large basalt rock that everyone called “The Stone.” This was our hangout, just as in other places youngsters used to sit on metal sidewalk railings or around the neighborhood playground. It was there I had my first smoke and used my first swearword. On The Stone I eyed with envy older kids who had motor scooters and mini-tractors; after a wild ride they would stop there with a screech of the brakes to parade for the gaping admirers. On The Stone I sat with my best friends, who over the following two decades would distance themselves from me and from each other, each off on his own orbit, and nothing would ever repair those friendships. But on The Stone we chatted and laughed and got bored together and looked for thrills. Some would break into the grocery shop and steal things, while others would sneak into the swimming pool on summer nights. Sometimes we would go out on “skirmishes” at the Home, a boarding school for needy children in the center of the village. We called them “the homers” and they called us “the villagers.” In the battles held at recess in our joint school, the homers usually had the upper hand, because our gangs were no match for their sixth graders. But during evenings in the moshav, the tables turned. We had older brothers we could summon from The Stone.
To break the tedium, some of my friends would throw pomegranates that they picked from trees at the home of an elderly couple, the Frankels. Unfortunately for the Frankels, they lived very close to The Stone. We also exploded detonators and firecrackers, and set fire to potassium from the fertilizer storeroom to watch its blue flame. One time we burned magnesium from an illumination bomb, which we stole from one of our fathers’ ammunition caches. It was unforgettable. For days afterward we all saw black and blue circles every time we closed our eyes, reminding us of the glare.
So everything revolved around The Stone. But on Holocaust Memorial Day—and to be exact, on Yom Hazikaron (a day commemorating Israel’s fallen soldiers)—The Stone stood abandoned. Chinese lanterns, giving off a soft light, decorated both sides of the street from the parking lot to the community hall; these were really just brown paper bags half-filled with sand and a candle. They added a festive aura to the events of the day, and left The Stone bereft of its usual sitters. Although Holocaust Memorial Day was no time for pranks, some of my friends would “accidentally” brush the Chinese lanterns with their feet—not enough to overturn the lanterns, but enough to cause the paper bag to heat up so that in a matter of seconds, as the tripper walked away, it would completely burn out. But that really wasn’t me, only perhaps some bad kid deep inside me. For on Holocaust Memorial Day, the general atmosphere simply wouldn’t allow anything that wasn’t all gravity and tears and awe. The adults didn’t even yell when a kid was caught tampering with a lantern. They wouldn’t scold, only mutter crossly through pursed lips: “You’ve performed sacrilege today, but because of the sanctity of the occasion I can’t be properly cross with you.”
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* A community of farmers.
† From the prayer opening the ceremony.
* Traditionally, the day celebrating both the first harvest of the summer and the Jewish people’s receiving the Torah.
* Meaning member, comrade, or friend.
I acutely remember the unbearable feeling I experienced during one of those ceremonies. For years afterward it would flood back, filling me to bursting whenever I watched Holocaust Memorial Day films, black and white with horrible camera work. They showed naked, emaciated human beings piled on top of each other or stuffed into train cars, or standing in endless lines waiting to be incinerated, shot dead or just plain humiliated. It was in those Holocaust films that I was first exposed to the phenomenon of rape, for they often showed Nazi officers fattening up some scrawny Jewesses in order to turn them into soft, pleasant women. And I couldn’t figure out how the hatred that led to such horrendous abuse and slaughter could exist alongside the love for which the women would be fed and groomed. Sex and the male sex drive were still unfamiliar to me then, so I resolved the contradiction by embracing the explanation I received from my parents and other authority figures: that the perpetrators were Nazis, were absolute evil, and such evil did not make sense the way normal people’s actions did—and if there was no sense, naturally everything was possible.
But that unbearable feeling which I vividly recall from one of those ceremonies—which, perhaps, commemorated the Fallen Soldiers rather than the Holocaust—was as much about me as it was about the gruesome images in those films. It was the tormenting insight that I belong to this one miserable people. Why me? The question gnawed. Why was I born to this fucked-up people? A nation killed and slaughtered and raped as “the whole world kept silent,” as Amiel, our legendary principal with his accordion and moustache and deep sonorous voice, would say at every ceremony in elementary school—and I would always wait patiently for these words, so overpowering, so frightening.
Why do I not belong to another people, any people? Why? I did not yet know, back then, that one could be born an Indian child in a village where drinking water is contaminated by human and cattle waste and the chances of reaching age five are slim. And I certainly couldn’t imagine my mother trying to cure me, her baby, of diarrhea by depriving me of water to dry up the illness, as many Asian women do; in their attempt to stop the watery flow of feces, these women sometimes accidentally dehydrate their children to death. When I wondered why I couldn’t be born to another people, I imagined a perfectly normal place—just like my village, only its inhabitants were not hated or persecuted or killed or incinerated, as in the films shown on Holocaust Memorial Day, or killed in Arab villages on a convoy to Gush Etzyon, lost and helpless.
The tale of the Gush Etzyon convoy belongs to that other Memorial Day, naturally, not to the Holocaust one. But for me they both possess one sense-memory. Not far from my home, some seventy years ago, lived Tuvya Kushnir. He grew up and went to school there, one of my uncontested childhood heroes. Tuvya loved plants (like me) and was “a loyal son to his people, his country, his homeland and village,” as in the lofty lines inscribed on the Bible I received for my Bar Mitzvah from the congregation of the synagogue at my moshav. I too wanted to be a “loyal son to his people.”
Tuvya grew up and became a soldier (like me), and because the Arabs held Jerusalem under siege—literally enclosed it all around with a high fence, a real wall, as they did to the Etzyon bloc as well, so I imagined—those poor people inside had no food or medication or ammunition to defend themselves. Tuvya, my childhood hero, and another thirty-four friends took off on foot carrying food and medication on their shoulders. They couldn’t travel by car because the Arabs who were laying siege to Jerusalem had blocked the roads. That’s why Rabin* and all the others were needed to break through those roads with armored trucks, but that is already another story. As a child, Tuvya