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The Birth of the Israeli State was my
Birthday:
Reliving the Past through a Child's Eye
by
Ruth Tenne
It was a cold and windy evening. I was only a child,
being unaware of the date and time. Yet, I sensed that
it was a special day. The members of our kibbutz - Usha
- assembled on the green lawn in front of the ramshackle
dining hall in which the adults had their meals while we
children ate in our whitestone house. Some heavy and rough
wooden benches were placed on the green lawn where we
celebrated the summer festivals of the kibbutz. But this
was not a summer day, it was a cloudy wintery evening
which came alight by a dandling chain of electric
bulbs, tied up to metal pools put up especially for the
day. I was shivering under my worn-out jumper that had
been handed down to me by one of the older children of the
kibbutz. Looking intently at the glistening raindrops on
the rough grass I was wondering why Menasha -the gardener of
the kibbutz - did not cut the grass as he always
does before a special celebration day. The small light bulbs
started flickering in the wind, but no one seems to worry
about it. I was afraid that one of those bulbs will land on
my head which became quite damp without my old woollen that
was left behind in the children house. I saw the other
children in my group standing at different corners of
the uncut lawn, quietly staring at an old radio which was
taken out of the adults' dining hall and was placed on a big
chair in the middle of the lawn. It looked as if
the old chair was brought in a hurry from one of the wooden
shacks (Tzrifim) in which the young members of the Kibbutz
have been living. I was quite proud that my parents, who
were among the founders of the Kibbutz, have just moved to a
one - room mini "flat" in a newly-built white -washed
house they shared with three other families.
The new house was built on a steep space and had a
small room at the base which was used as the general office
(mazkirot) of our kibbutz . It was stuffed with chunky
files piled up on tall rickety shelves and two big tables
with a black telephone in the centre . My father used to
get there early in the morning stepping carefully on the
stony and uneven stairs which led from my parents' small
room to the gloomy office below. I was told by the adult
members of the Kibbutz that my father holds an
important task as the secretary of the Kibbutz (mazkir
) who also looked also after the book-keeping
records of the whole Kibbutz . He was sitting there peering
over pages full of figures all day long, taking only a short
break for breakfast and lunch. Sometimes when I wanted to
see him after school I went to his "mazkirot office
muttering “Shalom" in a hurry and running back to the
children house without waiting for him to tell me, for the
hundredth time, that he is too busy to talk to me.
Tonight my father gave all his attention to the crackling
radio, watching it intently through his silvery - rimmed
glasses which made him looks like a teacher. He did not take
much notice of me, but I was used to that. He was
always wrapped up with all the nonsense of the Kibbutz and
the endless problems of the adult members. I hated to go
with him anywhere in the Kibbutz as all the time the
grownups used to come up to him, bothering him with their
silly stories and asking his advice on things I did not
much understand. But today no one seemed to bother him with
their never-ending problems. They were all watching Aaron -
the electrician - bashing repeatedly the back of the
clapped -out radio and trying to get some sound out of it
while fiddling with the knobs that move its big red
hand from station to station. Suddenly everyone became
frozen listening to a foreign voice which came out of
the "coughing" radio. Was it English? I could not tell,
but I noted that a leading loud voice was announcing some
names of places, or countries I did not know. That
was immediately followed by one word that sounded like
"ye", or sometimes like” no”. In between faint voices
came out with some other word which its meaning I could
not tell , but I noticed it was longer than Yes, or No .
I was quite upset as no one told me what it is all about
but I noticed that there were more "ye"(s) than "no"(s) and
that the adults were quite excited when the "ye" was
sounded. They were even more thrilled when the "ye" came out
of some strange voices which seemed to be more important
than the others for a reason I could not make out. Suddenly,
the whole crowed burst into songs and shouts of excitements.
They all linked hands together and started to dance the
Hurra in a circle. The bigger children joined the
circle like we all used to do on any big celebration
day. We all sung the song which we learned in school and
knew by heart. It had only one line - the Nation of Israel
is alive" (Am -Israel chai). It must have been something
really special as my mother gripped my hands with great
excitement and then pushed my father into the circle of the
Hurra. My father, who suffered from a very bad heart
condition since he was a child, has never danced in any of
the kibbutz festivals. He used to stand in the corner
and watch us dancing in the adults’ dining room to the
sound of Moshe's accordion. I noticed that my father
struggled to get out of the Hurra circle but "fat" Berrel
- who worked in the Kibbutz cowshed - pulled him right back.
It looked as if all the rules were broken tonight since
everyone in the Kibbutz knew that the special condition of
my father does not allow him to get too excited and his
heart could not stand any special strain. When I was very
small I was told by mother that my father suffers from a
very bad health and he was warned by doctors before he left
Poland that he would not survive more than a year in the
hot weather of Israel - the Hamsin. But tonight, 15 years
later, he looked younger and happier than ever - wiping his
blurry eye with his big cotton handkerchief and making
efforts not to let his tears dripping all over his face. I
never saw my father shedding tears before and I sensed that
something really special happened tonight which made all the
adults in the Kibbutz forgetting themselves and behaving
like children. Even Dov, our strict teacher, seemed to lose
his senses, shouting "we now got our own country" and waving
his hands in the air like we children did when we won a
game.
I managed to sneak out of the Hurra circle and quite slowly
came closer to my father. I had to ask him what it is all
about. Why, all of the sudden, at the end of the day, the
members of the Kibbutz started celebrating and going a bit
wild. Were we given a new festival which I had never heard
about before? My father looked at me through his mist-up
glasses, but could not say anything which makes sense." We
got the right to our country. We will have a new state
(medina) soon which will be called the State of Israel ", he
said with excitement. But this did not mean anything to
me. And where do we live now? I asked him. "Now we live in a
Kibbutz which is ours but on a land which is not ours", he
replied. So when are we going to have this State of
Israel?” I asked. "It may take a while,
Ruthie, there are hard times ahead but we are prepared for
it" he said in a faint and shaky voice.
I did not know what my father meant by "hard times". Is he
afraid of the English soldiers who came from time to time to
our kibbutz, driving their green jeeps and looking for
something unknown? We children called the English soldiers
anemones (kalaniot) because of the red berets they always
wore. We were terrified that one day they would start
searching the whole kibbutz, looking for weapons hidden deep
in the ground. We did not know if there are any guns or
other weapons somewhere in the kibbutz but we saw quite
a lot of young people who were not members of our kibbutz
walking around with rifles and shooting at targets
that were located near the fenced borders of the kibbutz. We
were told that they are members of the Palmach unit and they
are there to protect us, although when the English soldiers
came to our Kibbutz they were not there to be seen.
Perhaps my father did not mean the English soldiers when he
spoke of hard times. Maybe he meant the Arabs. There were
two Arab villages near our Kibbutz -Husha and Kasayier.
Husha was the Arabic name for our kibbutz -Usha. We were
told at school that our kibbutz was built on the ruins of
a Talmudic Jewish town by the same name and therefore we
have the right to this land, though the
Arabs insist that the land is theirs. On clear days we could
see the Arab villagers (Fellahim) working on the field with
their donkeys and mules which were carrying behind them
some ancient wooden ploughs. They did not have tractors and
harvester combines like ours and even in a very hot day
the women wore long black robes and were covered from head
to top while the man were wrapped up with red and white
long headscarf called Keffyieh. The hillsides of the
Arab villages were dotted with green patches of
terraced orchards of almond , olive, and plum trees
.Sometimes on Sabbath ,or at the end of the day, just
before the sun sunk behind the hills , we sneaked out to
collect ripe fruits which fell off the trees of those
orchards. On other days the children of my class went
out to a forest near our neighbouring Kibbutz - Ramat
Yohanan -from which most of the children in my class came.
We loved to go to the forest and collect mushrooms which
were buried underneath the pine trees. On one occasion,
which I can never forget, two Arab
women gushed out of a dense patch of pine trees. The
youngest one suddenly grabbed me and started kissing my
face, mumbling words in Arabic which I did not understand.
I stood there shocked and frozen unable to get a sound out
of my mouth. My teacher ,who spoke Arabic, rushed to
comfort me right away telling the class that the Arab
woman ,who clutched me to her belly, is pregnant and
wanted her expected baby to have my blue-green eyes
and curly fair hair. From then on, I was mocked by the
other children of my class, especially by the
boys who were telling everyone that I had been kissed
by an Arab woman who wished to adopt me.
The "hard times" seemed to arrive sooner than I thought.
Trudging through the muddy ground on my way to school I
noticed that Dan and Meyer, who worked in the field,
started digging trenches around the barbed-wire fence
surrounding our Kibbutz. The holes in fence were mended in
places where they were broken by the Kibbutz's horses and
mules which used to bolt out of their stables, trying to
escape into the night. Big sacks of sand arrived from
nowhere and were placed next to the stone wall in front
of our children house (Beit Yeladim). The big shelters, to
which we were carried out trembling when the German's
aeroplanes started to bomb the bay of Haifa in the Second
World War, were re-opened and cleaned out again. Some parts
of the new trenches were dug deeper and wider. They were
filled up with sacks of sands which piled up high and
left some gaps between them for the use of rifles. We were
told that those are observation posts from which the adults
would guard the Kibbutz day and night. I noticed that all
the observation posts were facing the hillside where behind
them the Arab villages were situated. Some of the adults
started to carry guns to the observation posts and the older
children even helped digging up the trenches next to our
children house "Are we going to have a big war with the
Arabs now?” I asked my mother who was also the nurse of our
children house. But she did not take much notice of me and
continued to rush around with out replying to my questions.
The older children, who were reading the newspapers,
knew everything. They started
whispering about some battles with the Arabs that went
on in Haifa, quite near to our Kibbutz, and included many
soldiers of the Haganah. All the adults in the Kibbutz
seemed to be very concerned. I noticed that my father's
face became more and more worried and he lost all the
happiness he showed on the day we were given our
state by the vote of so many foreign countries .
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