Writing about Israel tends to be pitched on one of two levels—roseate enthusiasm or head-splitting problems. These sketches of life in Israel are a bit different—perhaps because they present the various Jews of Israel as normal human beings, neither heroes nor victims. They are the work of A. A. Davidson, a young writer who spent a year in Israel, mostly working for the government medical service.
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The Lads from Casablanca
Twelve noon to 3 PM in Israel . . . the government offices which opened at nine, and which will close at five (with a half hour from ten to ten-thirty and another one from four to four-thirty for tea and ugot) for the day, are now practically abandoned for the three-hour lunch. If lunch were cut down to an hour, or even an hour and a half, these offices could operate on a five-day week. But suggest it. Just try. You will get a ferocious eye-rolling, brow-lifting, shoulder-shrugging cry of, “But we are a Young Country! Our economy cannot stand a five-day week!”
Twelve to three . . . at this time, all over the country, a multitude of governmental, institutional, political, and other varieties of officials, are entertaining foreign visitors for lunch, and telling them identical stories. Every official remembers when everything between Jaffa and the Gymnasium was sand . . . when everything between the Gymnasium and the Yarkon was sand . . . when everything between the Gymnasium and the sea was sand. . . . “Sand! Sand!” they cry, waving their arms, and looking like people who remember when Wall Street was considered uptown . . . one gets the impression that the Gymnasium stood stark and aloof in the midst of the dunes, like the statue of Ozymandias, and that it was attended only by Bedouins. And not only that. Each official remembers the Old Days, when “we made five piasters a day. Five piasters! And we saved three!” But progress has been made. For the same work, laborers now get 140 piasters, and can’t save anything. And who has done this? Who has put all these buildings up between the Gymnasium and Jaffa (or the Sea—or the Yarkon)? Here fill in the name of the Fund, Office, or Party the official represents.
Twelve to three . . . a few months ago the army in one sector went unpaid because the payroll was stolen. The money was in a safe, under guard, but from twelve to three the guards went to lunch, and someone stole the payroll . . . from twelve to three cows cannot calve, the Arabs cannot attack, Messiah cannot come . . . in short, the crime was not so much that the pay was stolen as that it was stolen between twelve and three.
Twelve to three . . . everything is quiet and peaceful on Ha-Yarkon Street . . . quiet in the Machal club, quiet in the Gachal club . . . in each one, the servicemen and ex-servicemen are drinking gazos and reading their mail. . . . The difference between the two clubs is one of more than distance. “Machal” means, “Mitnadvei Chutz L’Aretz”—Volunteers from Abroad. “Gachal,” in turn, means, “Gius Chutz L’Aretz”—Mobilization from Abroad. Of course, Israel has no authority to mobilize anyone abroad, so both groups are really volunteers. Nu, az ma yesh? The rockbottom difference is that the “Machalniks” came from countries where things are not bad, where one would not mind returning, if one had to. Great Britain, America (North and South), South Africa, France, Switzerland, Benelux, Scandinavia—these are Machal countries. Central and Eastern Europe, the Near East, and most of North Africa—these are Gachal. There are exceptions. Australians and New Zealanders are neither the one nor the other. Algerians, being citizens of Metropolitan France, are Machal.
These differences aside, there are yet differences among the various Gachal groups. The Poilisher Yiden are seldom seen in the Gachal club. Either they have relatives to visit, or landsleit, or jobs, or connections with the ruling parties, or something. The Iraqi Jews are off somewhere else, too, quietly going about their tasks. The Yemenites have not yet adjusted themselves to sitting on chairs—in a club, or elsewhere. Who, then, is to be found in the Gachal club? Moroccans.
I had first made their acquaintance in the transit camp in France, the kind of place the British would call “a beastly hole,” where I grew to like them for their good spirits in adversity (most of them had left Morocco by plane, in the night, with no baggage to speak of), their willingness to work—a willingness not shared in very large part by the European DP’s—and for their amiability and simplicity. In Israel I found a different picture. There the Moroccan was pictured as a sort of wild man, a knife-flourishing Goum. The President of the state had reproved them for (he said) wanting to open little shops. The Histadrut resented their unwillingness to be collectivized. The Orthodox at this time largely ignored them because they studied Zohar instead of Gemara, and ate rice during Passover. Neither did they fit into the European middle-class pattern of the General Zionists and Progressives.
So the young Moroccans drank lemon gazos in the Gachal club and scrawled, “Vive Menahem Beigin—à bas Ben Gourion” on the walls of the lavatory. But from twelve to three they didn’t even scrawl. Just sat and drank and smoked, and languidly offered to buy or sell their own or one another’s shirts, and talked about the bad old times in the Mellah, ghetto of Casablanca.
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Between the hours of twelve and three one afternoon, a very unorthodox proceeding took place. Two carloads of military police drew up in front of the Gachal club, and the MP’s secured the doors and began to screen the men inside for deserters. They found no deserters, but at last they did find an American without an identity booklet He was an American, one of the Machal, and the MP spoke to him civilly.
“Why haven’t you an identity booklet?”
“Because I don’t want one.”
“Why don’t you want one?”
“Because,” said the American, “I’m an American, and if I don’t want an identity booklet, I don’t have to want one!”
The MP glanced nervously at his associates, but they had no advice to offer. He then asked for a passport; it was shown him, and he professed himself satisfied, and went on to the next table, where he found a Moroccan with no papers at all.
“Stand over there,” the MP ordered. The man remained seated, the MP jerked him to his feet; he threw himself upon the MP, the other MP’s threw themselves upon him, and he was dragged to the street, followed by everyone in the club. In the street he continued to struggle, and struck one of the MP’s. One of them gave him a blow to the jaw which knocked him out completely, and the military tried to make a quick getaway. In his haste and confusion the driver started the car before the unconscious man was completely in it, and his head dragged along the ground for a few feet. When his comrades saw this, they gave a shout of anger, and encompassed the policemen. Someone picked up the man, threw him over his shoulder, and ran away with him. Just like that. The police, utterly disorganized, ran about in little circles, but did not follow.
The Moroccans then began to chant, “Gesta-po! Ge-sta-po!” and one of them attempted to put his fist through the window of the police car. It cracked but did not break; the policemen swooped towards him, but he disdainfully climbed into the car himself, and lit a cigarette.
Meanwhile, another American was taking pictures, and one of the MP’s gestured towards him to the other MP’s, with the face of one about to break into tears. They started towards the photographer on the run, but he regarded their coming with such calmness that they slowed to a walk, and civilly asked him to come along, which he did. The cars then drove away through the crowd, which parted for them, with jeers and boos.
While the Gachal men gathered and talked together in excited French, the Machal men compared accounts of the techniques of the military police of all their respective ex-outfits, with additional comments as to how these things were better handled in South Boston, the Gorbals, or Spadina Street, Toronto. An Old Resident with white hair and a seamed brown face listened to everyone. Then he gave his opinion in slow, careful tones.
“Bismarck said, ‘There is nothing in the world heavier than the hand of a British policeman.’ Shoter angli. Let us be glad our shotrim are not too good at these things.”
At this point, to everyone’s astonishment, the crowd suddenly burst into the “Marseillaise,” and marched away to the French consulate down the street, to the representative of a nation which did not even regard them as citizens. Nobody followed. It lacked half an hour of three o’clock and, after all, from twelve to three it is lunchtime in Israel.
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The Surgeon
“I’m sending you a new assistant,” the doctor said. “He’s taken the first-aid course and you can teach him the pills.” “All right,” I said. By “the pills” I knew the doctor meant such materia medica as the ship’s sick bay included and such knowledge of dispensing it as I possessed. We were well stocked on battle-dressings and my cabinet contained at least six separate kinds of rectal suppositories, but I could never obtain enough antiseptic to last the month out. Currently the ship had no medical officer, and I was thankful we were in port.
The new man was quiet, clean, and intelligent. He listened with respectful attention to everything I told him. I was rather jarred when he said that he had been in the Palmach, the Israeli commandos, had been wounded, and was now in the medical service because the duties were less onerous; it was disconcerting to know that the medical service was looked on as a sort of rest cure, but I said nothing. His name was Shmuel and he was a Polish orphan. I asked him how old he was, and he said he was nineteen. His bearing was open and dignified and he spoke soft, drawling Yiddish.
Among the several moadonim, or service clubs, in Haifa, there was one that served as a sort of gathering place for the “Anglo-Saxons,” as the men from the English-speaking countries were called. I found it not a little amusing, having been a Semite in the Diaspora, to have to come to Israel in order to be called an Anglo-Saxon. Several times I met at the club an English boy whom I knew slightly, and he always took it upon himself to attach himself to me. I don’t think I am being unjust when I say that he was not particularly bright. His mates had soon found this out, and made a habit of telling him the most fearsome stories, which he always repeated to me, adding—invariably—“But I don’t believe that, do you?” It was always clear that he did believe it.
“Do you see that fellow?” he asked one night, and it was Shmuel he pointed to. “He said he’s a medical, and I asked him what experience he had, and do you know what he told me? He said that in the war they were hiding from the Germans in the woods, you know, in the winter. And there was one fellow whose toes on one foot were frozen and they began to rot. So this chap said he took a pocketknife and cut the fellow’s toes off, and the fellow was afraid to cry out because of the Germans. Cut them right off with a pocketknife, he said; but I don’t believe it, do you?”
That night Shmuel and I got back to the ship almost together, and I got into my “berth” first. He combed his curly black hair and took off his clothes, folding them neatly, while we chatted of this and that. Then he climbed into bed, and I saw, as he rested his left foot for a second on my bed, that the foot had no toes.
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Albert and the Louisiana Purchase
At three o’clock in the afternoon a kibbutz is very quiet. Everyone has long since finished dinner and tea is more than an hour away. The older children are in class and the younger ones are taking naps. The men are almost all in the field or workshops. A visitor at this time has the place to himself, and, if no one appears to give him a conducted tour (as is usual in books and magazine articles), at least no one comes out to bother him or prevent his going where he wishes. Now and then the donkey cart rattles slowly by, or the mule wagon comes ponderously up the slope from the fields, with “Nimrod” and “Chazak” curling their lips at one another, and taking vicious snaps of air with their large yellow teeth. Baruch, the teen-age driver, smooth-faced, in short pants and high boots, sits on the crates of new-dug vegetables. Whenever he thinks discipline is in order, he tugs the reins and shouts, “Hoiss-‘ah!”
This time is a good time to talk to Albert, and Albert is a good man to talk to. About seventy years ago his grandparents moved from Algeria to Southern France. His parents, in turn, went to Turkey, but returned to Marseilles when Albert was a boy. He speaks Spanish and Turkish as well as French and Hebrew, but no English. Nevertheless, he is well informed about American history; his sources are the popular French press and French moving pictures. Over his buckets and brushes (he is the kibbutz painter) he has told me more than one fascinating item.
During the Occupation, Albert found it expedient to leave Marseilles. He does not resemble the popular Nazi caricature of a Jew; he has a pair of very blue eyes, a light complexion, and a nose that turns up just a bit at the end. But he had the handicap of having a carte d’identité which not only showed his last name to be Lévi, but also had stamped on it in large, red letters the word “Juif.” This last piece of forethought on the part of Pétain’s Secretary of State for Jewish Affairs helped many thousands of French Jews along the road to Auschwitz. Albert was luckier; he got away in time and hid in various odd corners of Provence, aided by hundreds of Frenchmen (and Frenchwomen). All this while he had nothing to read, of course, but the fascist-controlled newspapers, and he is a man who believes what he reads. He is convinced, for example, that the late President Roosevelt was a Jew.
“But it’s true,” he assured me, surprised that I was not as proud of it as he was. “Isn’t his son named ‘Elliot,’ same as the Prophet?” I tried to explain the difference between “Elliot” (with a silent “t”) and “Elias” (with a silent “s”), but Albert was not convinced. Surely I would at least admit M. Truman to be of the chosen seed? No? But had I not seen the photograph of President Weizmann giving President Truman a Sefer Torah? And could I imagine that M. Weizmann would give the Holy Scroll to a Gentile, who might not even know how to care for it properly? No—incredible. One day he asked me if I had ever been in La Nouvelle Orléans. Had I seen the house of Jean Lafitte?
“Ah, il était un brave type, Jean Lafitte,” Albert said admiringly. “But for him, Louisiana would not be part of the United States. . . . What, they did not teach you that at school? My poor fellow! Everyone in France knows it. A cause de Josephine,” he explained.
The Empress Josephine, it must be understood, was not a woman cheap to maintain. The clothes, yes? The jewels, yes? These things ran into money. Even the Emperor of the French had to call her attention to the bills. Alors, Josephine had an idea of great brilliance. She went to an American official then in Paris—“Not Benjamin Franklin?” I asked fearfully—But no, M. Franklin was then a very old man; it was not likely he would leave his Philadelphia farm to visit Paris. No, no, the American was a M. Jefferson—one has heard of him?
Well, Josephine simply proposed that M. Jefferson should arrange for the United States to buy Louisiana. The American was dubious, but she convinced him. She knew how to make herself agréable, that one, is it not so? There was, however, one great obstacle: the General Washington. He was no longer a young man, he was stubborn, he did not wish to buy Louisiana. What to do? Regard at this point the importance of Jean Lafitte; a brigand, it is true, but he wished to become sérieux. He journeyed to see the General personally, he made him generous gifts—tiens! The affair arranges itself! Louisiana became American. Of course, there was the matter of the duel between Lafitte and the General Jackson, but happily honor was satisfied without bloodshed: M. Lafitte fired into the air, and Jackson did the same; then they embraced. Naturellement M. Jefferson had to leave Paris, the jealousy of Napoleon being well known.
And when, in the face of such evidence, I remained doubtful, Albert offered me the final argument:
But, my friend, I read it in a journal!” Naturellement!
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A Garden Shut Up
The Bukharan quarter of Jerusalem is in the New City—new by Asiatic standards, that is. Not all the people are from Bukhara; there are Jews from Tashkent, Meshed, Kabul, and Teheran, besides the more prosaic run of Oriental Sephardim in general. The younger people are mostly all sabras and so disdain to wear the picturesque garments of their fathers and grandfathers.
The Frenk, in long robe and cloth-wrapped fez, is a person of dignity, worthy by his manners to be the heir to that Isaac of Baghdad whom Harun-al-Rashid sent as ambassador to Charlemagne. One can picture Isaac coming home, rather weary, to tell his Rebecca. . . . What! All the way to France? Heavens! . . . and of course, Rebecca demands to know what presents Parthia is sending Rome, so Isaac mentions the bales of carpets—soft as down—for the rush-strewn stone floors of the drafty northern palaces, the jewel-studded golden plattery, the crystal flasks of balsam and attar, the Damascene swords, “and of course,” he adds, in what he hopes is a matter-of-fact tone, “and, of course, the elephant.” Shrieks and wails from Rebecca. How will he ever get an elephant to France? Suppose it should die? Suppose—“Never mind, never mind,” says Isaac, resignedly. “We are in galut; it cannot be helped.”
But the young Frenk will not wear the old style of dress; he lounges about in a battered felt hat and a suit of torn khakis, wears—instead of slippers—shoes, but not socks; feels disoriented and discontented, and fancies slights where none are intended.
Bukharim—as it is called—is not much different from the Machneh Yehudah or Meah Sh’arim quarters. There are the same one-and two-story buildings of tawny stone, the same open-fronted little shops, the same herring barrels, spice canisters, and sweets stalls. And, buzzing over everything, the same flies.
There passes a young woman—a girl, rather—tall, slender, in a long dress. Golden wheels dazzle in her ear-lobes and her black hair hangs in two long braids behind, and, wonder of wonders, she balances a water jar on her head. I turn my head just in time to see that she turns hers—but in a flash she turns it again, and slips into a doorway.
The doorway is below street level and over it is a sign announcing a Bukharan synagogue within. Bukhara! My heart leaps. Caravan city on the route to Samarkand and China! City of amirs, caravansaries, and stone synagogues of incredible antiquity! I turn aside and enter, stopping by the door until my eyes accustom themselves to the dim light. The floor of the synagogue is covered with rugs of all colors, overlapping one another, and brightly upholstered divans are along the walls. The walls themselves are tinted with a blue wash. There are no chairs. Here and there is a Cabalistic diagram in a frame, and oil lamps, no two alike, hang from the ceiling. Open on a table is a volume of “The Mighty Hand” of Maimonides.
“Ken, adoni?” A man has come in by a side door and, before I have time to answer, he strides over and gives me his hand. “Vus macht a yid?” he booms. “Fin vanen kimt ihr?” The caravan city vanishes in a flood of Yiddish. . . . The Bukharans, it seems, having other synagogues, have rented this one to a congregation of dispossessed Hasidim.
And the maiden with the water jar? Oh, yes. She was married.
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The Socialist
The Polish “motor-ship” (New York, Cannes, Genoa, and Naples) was not a luxury liner; its passenger classes were First, Cabin, and Tourist, and the Tourist cabins contained berths for ten people. Most of the passengers were Italian-born, returning to visit their families in Italy. Some of them had been waiting and saving a long time. There was an old woman with a goitrous neck and no teeth, who always wore black and sat the whole day on a bench below-decks. To anyone who cared to look she showed a manila envelope stuffed with documents and family snapshots. In America for thirty years, she knew no English, and when I asked one of the Italian passengers where she was going, he said that he couldn’t understand her.
“She speaks a dialect,” he said.
The weather was fine as far as Gibraltar, and when, a few nights out, there was a concert given in the Tourist salon, it was well attended. The ship’s band played, several of the passengers sang, and a young man from New York City gave us several Palestinian songs. His instrument was a long wooden flute, called a recorder, and he played quite well. The audience applauded politely and I went over to speak to him. Our acquaintance became rather close and it did not end with the voyage, but continued in France and in Israel. His name was Ben Jacobs and he was a practicing socialist.
I don’t like people who assail me with their opinions. It makes no difference to me if these nudniks· happen to be atheists who ask, “But how can you believe that nonsense?” or if they are of some sect of hairy saints who demand to know why I trim my beard “like a goy.” Jacobs was never like that. He answered all questions put to him, and gave a very good defense of his beliefs if they were attacked, but he preferred to talk about music. He was going out to one of the very left-wing kibbutzim and he had brought eighty albums of phonograph records and a record player with him. They included “everything from Brahms to Bartók,” he said, with such performers as Burl Ives and Wanda Landowska. He was very fond of music; he called it “half my life.”
This was Jacobs’ second trip to Israel; the first time he had gone it was still Palestine and the British had put him in Acre Jail for illegal entry. They had had a short tussle in which he had lost two teeth; later, he was deported.
The political party with which he and his kibbutz were affiliated had the merit of sincerity: they practiced an intense form of socialism themselves instead of just urging it on others. Not only did they have a common purse, they even owned their clothes in common, and no one was allowed to wear any clothes except those bought by the kibbutz through the purchasing cooperative.
“In order to prevent exploitation,” Jacobs explained, “you’ve got to prevent selfishness. As long as one man has nicer clothes than another, you’ve got pride on his part and resentment on the part of the other—class hatred in miniature. We don’t want that. I spent two months at K’far Ananot the last time I was over there. It was wonderful, living in a society without exploitation, without selfishness. The chevra is just like a larger family. I can’t wait to get back. I can just see the place now.” He smiled fondly as he thought of his Land of Heart’s Desire, and I could see the two gaps in his teeth. He had had to fight and to wait in order to achieve his goal, but it had all been worth it.
He brushed a long lock of brown hair off his smooth forehead and took out his recorder and began to play a shepherd’s song.
He was in the kibbutz less than a week when he returned from work one night to find that the record player and records had been moved to the communal culture room and the kibbutz rubber stamp placed on each album. He left the next day with all his things.
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A Small Queen
In Jaffa, just a block or two from the corner of King George Street and the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Road, is a large concrete building called the Bet Chen. Literally, Bet Chen means “House of Grace,” but “Chen” is also a word like Wren or Wave; it stands for choyl nashim, the women soldiers of Israel. The building is typical Tel Aviv-Jaffa architecture. It is concrete, shabby, and ugly, but it cost the Z’va Haganah Le-Yisrael dear before the Arabs were dislodged.
By day and night there burns in the tiny lobby (the door is cut off from light by a tall wartime battlement) a small, naked electric light bulb. Sitting under it at a table is a gray-haired woman with a jaw that could bite the heads off rattlesnakes. She knits away the hours and if so much as the shadow of a man falls on the pitted floor—“Ken, adoni?”—her voice falls like a portcullis between the adon and the staircase. Bronzed, bearded Palmachniks, “up from the Negev,” pause uncertainly and stroke a wing of a mustache to restore self-confidence before they inquire for geveret Sarah, or Zippora, or Zahava. The knitting dragon says one word—“Tekif”—(right away) and one waits. She has no telephone, she sends no messages, but presently, down comes the geveret, greets the adon, and says good night to the watchwoman. The latter is an old pioneeress—one might have known as much—veteran of many battles, ambuscades, and night attacks; and is known to the awe-stricken Arabs as “the Mother of . Ifrits.” An ifrit, I believe, is even fiercer than a djinn.
In this unlikely place lived a queen. Her name was Malka. Malka means “queen.” The word “petite” has a special connotation in English that it does not have in French, so let me say that Malka was petite. She was an ex-Chen and she wore her unruly black hair trimmed short. I do not know how old she was; she could not have been very old, but she had been in Haganah before it became the Army of the State, before there was a state, and she had had her share of death and fighting.
It was fashionable at one time to laugh at the Chens’ appearance, to say that they never combed their hair, that their uniforms were surplus from the Chinese Eighth Route Army, and that they had better mustaches than the Palmach had. There were (and are) some determined viragoes who thought it as reprehensible for a woman to be feminine as for a man to be effeminate; just as there were others who got lipstick all over the rifle stocks. Malka never wore lipstick or rouge, but there was no face more glowing in Israel than hers.
She spoke English effectively but not perfectly, and when she felt herself short of words, or was excited, she broke into French, and then, what animation! She received letters from France and Belgium and often spoke of having lived in Switzerland, so I was surprised when she told me that she had been born in Frankfort on the Main. She emphasized, proudly, that her parents were Polish Jews, and that she was never legally German, and felt no regrets. I was glad. The German Jews make solid and substantial citizens; their daughters, it is true, tend to be rather solid and substantial too, but there are no better housewives. However, they can never forget past glories, they all come from excellent families the like of which are nowhere else, and one is not allowed to forget it.
So, before the debacle, Malka and her mother and sister got to Switzerland, and later to France and Belgium. Almost half her life had been spent among French-speaking peoples, and it was in that language she felt most at home. She had had an excellent French education, too, for part of the war years she spent concealed in a French convent.
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“The sisters were so kind to us, so sweet.” Malka made this point again and again. “How loving they were to us Jewish children. ‘Mes enfants,’ they would say, how terrible that you should suffer. But here you are safe. No one can hurt you here.’ And a young priest came to teach us, and he brought us little gifts. Such a kind, handsome young priest! We idolized him, we looked on him and listened like to a—how should I say?—to a god. We held on to his hands and sat in his lap, and he would talk to us. To tell us what? That why we suffered, all the Jews, why? only because we were so stubborn and not accept Jesus. And he told us verses from the Bible, and from here, and from there. Who could answer him? What did we know, we children?
“So the girls began at last to ask one another, ‘Perhaps it is so, as he says. Perhaps it is true.’ We heard only the priest and the sisters; our parents were dead, or we didn’t know where; and it is so easy to forget I used to cry to myself at night. I knew I am a Jew, I must remain a Jew. Before also, in the old days, Jews suffered, and then it was easy to escape by becoming a Christian. But then there were great men, wise, who knew more than we about it, and they said, ‘Rather to suffer and to keep our religion.’ But I am only a child myself—how can I teach other children?
“But I always tried to remember my prayers as my father taught me. My poor father! Every morning he wanted my brother to say his prayers, and he didn’t want to. Such quarrels, and where are they now, my poor brother and father? I don’t know. Oh, the sisters, they were so troubled with me. One day I went to my room to say my prayers—my Jewish prayers—and I hung my handkerchief over the crucifix so that I could pretend I was home again. And then the sister came into my room. I was so frightened, and she saw the handkerchief—oh, do not ask!
“So then they sent me to another place, because they knew they could do nothing with me, and I think they were afraid for the other girls. And soon the war was over.”
“What happened to the other girls?” I asked, as we walked through the dimly lit streets of Jaffa’s Old City.
“Some became Catholics, one girl is a nun now. And some say they do not want to do with any religion.” Then, as we came to the section on Ajami Street where the French religious orders have their houses, hospitals, and schools, Malka pointed out to me a building.
“There is where one of the priests is now, who was in that place in France. I come sometimes to see him.”
“You come to see him?” I was surprised.
“Oh, yes,” said Malka. “He was very kind. And it was not his fault, he was not a wicked man. He wanted only to help me, but I was a bad child—oh, such a bad child—and I would not be helped!” and Malka’s happy laughter rang out in the dark street between the convent and the church.
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