White Zion takes readers into the worlds of 19th century Yemen, pre-State Israel, modern Israe,l and modern Canada. You will hear the voices of a young boy marveling at Israel's first air force on his own roof, the cry of a newly married woman helpless to defend herself against her new husband's desires, the anger of the heroine's uncle as he reveals startling secrets about his marriage and the fall-out after generations of war.
Excerpt
“Rivka!”
All three of them jumped at father’s customary bark. Father wears the clothing of his socialist political party, Mapai. Loyal Mapainiks wear khaki from head to toe, Shabbat and weekdays. He always adds his dusty gray hat to this uniform, never a kippah. Assaf thought he had gone to work.
“Do you know what happened to me today?” Father growls. “I was expecting my promotion. Went in early. That promotion was for me. In my hand.”
Three sets of eyes stare down at the cold stone floor. Even at seven, Adi knows better than to look up. His cereal-covered spoon hangs between his fingers. Now the dysa will be cold.
“Do you know what they did? The mamzerim! Do you know what they did? They brought in this Russian Jew, some Ashkenazi from Russia. He doesn’t know the first thing. The first thing he does not know. They gave him the position and then they asked me, me who has been working, no, slaving for a decade and a half for them, an honest to God slave I have been, they asked me to teach him the ropes. Can you believe that?”
Father’s black eyes are exploding like the small pieces of shrapnel bursting on Ben Yehuda Street. Sharp and jagged. He is clean-shaven and he has smooth spotless desk-job hands. He glares at his wife. Finally she looks up.
“Well, that’s your party,” she spits at him in Arabic. “Your party whose behinds, you kiss day and night. What do you think? You’re a token, Avraham. You know? One Kurdi, one Parsi, one Moroccai and one Temani. You went up a little, but no more. You’ll never go up more. That’s your party,” she repeats.
Assaf can see her shoulders tense, and he knows her feet are ready. His own toes twitch inside his shoes.
“Silence!” Avraham snarls and lunges for her at the same time.
But she is too fast for him, too prepared. She dives into the next room and quickly hops onto the balcony; her most common escape route. The brothers hear her pounding feet on the stone path that leads to the green iron gate at the end of the garden. Soon she will be cursing her husband over fresh doughy saluf dipped in hilbeh with her girlfriend, Mazal. Mazal feels sorry for her.
Father returns from the balcony. He is breathing heavily. He is young, healthy and has never smoked, but luckily for his wife he was never a good runner. Tears spill onto the floor and Assaf remembers his little brother, Adi.
“Don’t worry. I will stay here until Ima gets back. I won’t leave you alone. Come Adi, finish the dysa.”
“It’s cold now.”
“I will heat it up for you outside on the fire. Come.”
I knew that in the center of their living room stood a kerosene heater, called a primos. My father told me it had been their only source of heat until they bought an oven, but by then he’d become a soldier. Besides, kerosene was rationed along with all other necessary supplies in Jerusalem.
“He is not alone. He has school now, no time to heat baby food. Get to work. You’ll be late. What will you be later on, the way you are about studies?”
“I don’t want to go anyhow. I hate it. Why do you want me to go so much? You just said the Ashkenazim didn’t give you the job you wanted. Why do you push me toward them?”
“You will learn something there, that’s why. What do the Temanim learn at school? They have nothing. The teachers don’t know much more than the students. Go.”
He said this last word in a tone that made my father understand; if he doesn’t get going his father will simply start barking unstoppably like the wild dog they kept tied outside in the back of the garden to scare the Arabs away. That was before the war, before the Arabs in the near-by villages fled, abandoning their homes seemingly overnight.
Adi grabs his brother’s arm, but Assaf shakes it off gently and goes. It is finally spring, maybe he can start cleaning up people’s yards and save enough money to buy a bicycle.
“Hey Assaf! You’re late, too? I will walk with you until my school. My mother didn’t want to let me go today. She heard too much bombing in the night. It’s quieter now, so I begged her to let me go, otherwise, she’d have me feeding chickens and searching for wild herbs and grasses in the fields all day. I hear on kibbutzim they have real fruits and vegetables, maybe we should go there.”
It was Moshiko, his best friend. He was half skipping half flying down the narrow sidewalk, with a worn-out siddur under one arm and a small piece of newspaper stuffed into his front pocket. Inside was flat brown pita stuffed with hard-boiled egg. Assaf notices it and realizes that he has nothing for lunch again.
“B’emet? You beg to go to school. I wish I could go to your school. I swear if that teacher twists my ear today I will grow up to burn his house down.”
“Misken you are. To gehenom with those white Jews, worse than the Arabs. Don’t worry. Next year you will be bar mitzvah, after that you can leave that awful place and come with the rest of us to school. Your father won’t be able to control you after thirteen. Besides, we’re going to make money. I’m learning how to fix engines. Motorcycles, cars, anything. I’ll teach you.”
“You’ll teach me,” Assaf repeats. “Baseder, my friend.”
My grandmother had probably returned from Mazal’s tiny kitchen. Perhaps she’d be putting on her cleaning-lady clothes, a dreadfully patched blue skirt and matching top.
A bomb exploded, but Moshiko and Assaf walked on. It wasn’t close enough to stop and look for cover. The ground did not jump beneath their feet. Not yet.
“Hey? There’s one of our small planes. Do you think they will let me practice on the engines a little? Use their tools?” Moshiko asked.
“We can ask them. My house has become the new Jewish border of Jerusalem,” Assaf answers. He does not try to disguise his pride.
“Your father, he doesn’t care about the airport?”
“They promised to pay him after the war. You should have seen how they leveled the field. Chik chak. Nothing for them. They share everything with us. Come over later and see.”
They arrive at the corner where Moshiko turns off; for Assaf there is another kilometer and a half to go.
Father does not return home that night. Although it has never happened before, no one glances at the heavy iron gate or mentions his name.
“Go up to the roof and give some fresh eggs to the soldiers.”
That’s all Mother says the entire evening while she boils wild grass in the week’s water ration. They will use whatever water is left in the pot for the dirty dishes, which they assemble and clean in one bucket and the remaining drops for the toilet.
Assaf does not go up to the roof until Moshiko arrives. A red-headed soldier shows the boys an airplane engine. The cigarette smoke fills the air and coffee flows on the roof endlessly, like the British soldiers on their Sunday marches under the Occupation.
“Hey, your eyes are red, ata baseder?” Chaim asks Assaf. He is one of the soldiers in charge of the airport.
“It’s just the smoke,” he answers, half grinning.
“Here, have a piece of chocolate.”
His hand was warm. Assaf feels him slip a square of chocolate into the pocket of his tight faded jacket. Moshiko’s head was buried in an airplane engine, but Assaf promised himself he would share the rare treat with him later.
As dawn breaks, the chickens wake the boys as usual and Assaf is the first to force himself out of bed and head for the washroom. They are the only ones on the street with an indoor toilet and bath. The rest of the crowded road uses outhouses and the public bathhouse once a week.
Another day passes with no sign of Father. Mother’s face relaxes a little. Maybe he has disappeared like the British patrols and their vicious dogs that never drooled on their polished black boots.
After school, the boys help Mother. They slice hard prickly sabras, the only fruit growing wild in Jerusalem. There is a knock at the iron gate.
“A policeman came. It’s your father. He’s in the hospital,” Mother tells them when she returns down the stone path. The only hospital is run by nuns.
“His leg is broken; shrapnel from a bomb. He was so furious when he left here about the promotion. He probably just galloped off to work like a donkey and thought himself invisible in the center of town, in the middle of a war.”
Mother could have been discussing the squashed juke she found on the bottom of her shapeless shoe in the morning, or the time Mazal accidentally tore the wedding dress she had preserved all the way from Yemen for her seven daughters. She could never be sentimental about a wedding dress, even one that was not her own.
An explosion erupts in Assaf’s mind and he remembers the bomb that exploded the day before on his way to school.
“You have to go to the hospital to visit him after school tomorrow,” she continues quietly.
The sound of the bomb is still in-between the boy’s ears. It had not seemed threateningly close. Sometimes only one landed and then there was time before another one. Time enough to get to a bomb shelter. Sometimes many landed one after the other and there wasn’t much time. The friends had dug their hands deeper into their pockets and suddenly their shoulders were touching, but they kept on walking. Assaf wondered if he should save money for a bicycle, which would lengthen the life of his shoes or if he should buy shoes he could run fast in.
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