Losing Israel (3 page)

None of this birdwatching could compare to the teeming wealth of birds I saw, at ten, in Israel. Israel was, for me, a landscape known first through its birds. The birds, and my excitement over them, my absorption in them, was also a refuge, because during this first visit, and the subsequent one, my mother, rediscovering and revelling in her own language, became a stranger.

It begins in the aeroplane, as we land. We are given sweets for the landing, and when the plane touches down, a drift of voices begins to sing, and my mother sings too, quietly. It is a melancholy, haunting melody I’ve not heard before, and I look at her, shocked: she is wiping her eyes under her glasses. I have never before seen her cry. Later, when I learn it,
HaTikva
–
The Hope
, the Israeli national anthem – and even now if I hear it, it is that moment it evokes: the shock of uncertainty, my mother remote, caught up in feeling something I cannot understand but immediately want to be part of, and my sense of alienation from her, of loss, and yearning.

We walk down the metal stairs and the evening is purple and velvet and warm, and men are kissing the dusty tarmac at the foot of the steps, repeatedly, mumbling, in a kind of passion.

In my grandmother’s seventh-floor apartment in Tel Aviv, I wake up the next day, weeping. In Hebrew, my mother is transformed and unreachable. Unable to understand her, I see her clearly: simultaneously familiar and unknowable, like those around her – people who look like her, black-haired, olive-skinned, who look like me, too, but with whom I cannot talk.

It is my tenth birthday, and I want to be home. My mother’s mother is enormous and loud. She frowns at me as I stand there crying, and asks something about me in Hebrew. She sounds annoyed. I go out on the balcony and look down at the small patch of garden far below. Something is moving there – some brown bird. I can hear the ritual shouts of officers and soldiers being drilled over in a nearby military camp. I hear the long wail of sirens, a different sound from the seesaw of the siren that I know, usually the village constable getting home in a rush through traffic for his lunch. My father has said something about air-raid sirens – the night before he had to explain, patiently, that these were not air-raid sirens but police cars or ambulances.

Seven storeys down, the tiny square of dusty green garden is hemmed in on all sides by the tall apartment buildings, which squat on great concrete legs, and I think I might ask if I can go down to look for birds, but my mother calls me in for breakfast. This is a return of surging un-happiness: breakfast is nothing I recognise as a meal. It is chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, different kinds of white cheese, and yoghurt, and cream cheese, hard-boiled eggs… The milk, poured from a plastic bag, tastes foul, like long-life milk. My grandmother eats with her mouth open, making wet sounds and sucking her teeth.

I meet my grandfather for the first time when we travel a few days later up the coast and inland, onto the Ruler Road and past the prison, past spur-winged plovers and Egyptian vultures, to the kibbutz.

The lenses of my grandfather’s glasses are so thick they give him an amused look, as though his eyes are half-closed in private laughter. We smile at each other a lot but can’t speak: he has no English and I have no Hebrew. There is a great healed scar on his forehead, from when he was attacked and wounded by Arabs. I know it is Arabs who did it, though no one tells me that. His scar fits with everything I have been learning about ‘the Arabs’.

He drives a small tractor with a trailer, and dresses in the dark blue work-shirt and shorts that all the kibbutz members wear, and the
kova tembl
, the fool’s hat, to shield himself from the sun – it is early April and already hot. In the communal dining room where the adults sit for long hours, talking, my sister and brother and I fidget, uneasy and bored. People in their blue work-clothes keep coming over to us; there is a lot of exclaiming and kissing. My father is no longer Daniel, but
Danny
. My mother – it hurts me, what has happened to my mother. In Hebrew, incomprehensible, her eyes bright, talking, with people listening to her, she is transformed. I am used to her quietness, her hesitations, her looking to my father to speak. Now it is for the first time my father who is in the background, my mother who is sought out and addressed and kissed, excitedly. These people talk to me brusquely, and kiss me too, and I can understand nothing. I look to my mother for help, but there is some new quality about her that I can’t bear: she is animated, nearly loud, emphatic. I hate it – I want her back. I hate everything: the loud and crowded communal dining room, the smell of bleach and old wet food where the wheeled orange dish-trays clank along the conveyer belt into the dishwasher, and the hot-bleach smell of the steaming cutlery coming out of the dishwasher. Everyone talks loudly; everyone wears blue shirts and trousers and dark heavy boots. In Hebrew everyone seems angry, even when they are laughing.

My sister and I scrape our plates and load our dishes onto the conveyer belt and go downstairs and out from under the ponderous concrete edifice of the central dining room. Even the grass is wrong – thick-bladed, coarse, dry, though it is green. We balance, wobbling, along the narrow wall by the road, our arms spread. Out here passing people stare at us – prolonged stares – but don’t speak. We see pale jays, and hoopoes, and yellow-vented bulbuls, and a small dark bird that might be the tiny, green, iridescent, orange-tufted sunbird.

We spend weeks that spring bird-watching, with my siblings and I competing for the binoculars – the heavy black pair that I can hardly hold, and the lighter brown pair belonging to my mother. My brother is more interested at fifteen in other novelties. My mother, alarmed, smacks his hand down when he looks through binoculars at an army camp. We travel throughout Israel, seeing members of my mother’s and my father’s families, some of whom, on my father’s side, have only recently escaped, with difficulty, from the Soviet Union. We visit sites in the West Bank, which, under Jordanian control, were inaccessible to my parents when they left in 1963. We travel north into the Golan, and to an aunt’s kibbutz in the Huleh valley; we go to see ancient Jericho, and the ruins of Caesarea and Masada. In the Old City in East Jerusalem, we enter the Dome of the Rock, and shuffle forward in a queue to touch the stone, smoothed into cool silkiness. It makes me thirsty, somehow, in the back of my throat. We drive south to Eilat, and into the Sinai Desert – far south along the Red Sea, in what used to be, and subsequently becomes once again, Egypt. The car breaks down several times, or overheats.

Everywhere we go, it is not family, or ruins, or human stories that make the strongest impression on me, but birds. Masada is a bird-of-prey migration, not a site of heroic Jewish resistance to Roman rule: short-toed eagle, spotted eagle, imperial eagle, honey buzzard... The raptors rise on the thermals from the Negev and float past us at eye-level. On the broken walls of Masada there are lines of Tristram’s grackles, large dark birds with orange wing feathers and a haunting cry – Tristram’s grackles, spelled
grakle
in his
Fauna and Flora of Palestine
. Beit Hashita, the kibbutz my mother is from, is Smyrna kingfishers and black-winged stilts with red legs, and hoopoes. The Sinai is wheatears, every species of wheatear, and griffon vultures circling, and perhaps a black vulture – and white beaches, and an occasional Bedouin, and the car overheating, and white branches of hard, dead Red Sea coral, which we collect, illegally, and smuggle home wrapped in clothes in our suitcases.

For my mother, birds were a simple delight, but it was different for my father. When I was a child, my father was the bird authority. He had the collector’s condition, which had begun as a boy, when he’d gone bird-nesting with his twin brother along rural hedgerows, after they were evacuated from London because of the Blitz. But the mark in a book, the addition to a list – those birdwatcher acts of reduction and ownership weren’t important to my mother. When I was very young and my siblings were at school, she and I would take binoculars and walk up alone through the orchard and the field and in among the high deciduous trees of Ashdown Forest. The forest was a bit of wild and ancient Sussex, hiding remnants of charcoal burning and royal boundary markers. Alone, between the two of us, there was a quiet intimacy. That spring we found the downy round nest of a long-tailed tit. For weeks we watched it woven, and occupied, but when we came back from Israel it was empty. And one time, walking under ancient deciduous trees, we heard the unmistakable call of a wood warbler, and then saw it, brilliant yellow-green, flitting through the thin branches of a stand of young oaks. When we told him, my father made a moue of doubt, but we were resolute. My mother’s certainty was the only small rebellion against my father’s confident bird authority that I recall.

We walked throughout the forest, its broad old beeches and oaks, its heaths and firebreaks, and each part of it was marked by birds: the red-legged hobbies in a stand of Scots pine, tiny goldcrests in the cedars, a blackcap in the clearing near the old midden, and the long-tailed tits’ nest we found in the great tangle of brambles growing over a long-ago fallen fir. In the woods and fields, and working in the garden, my mother was at home in herself, and the clench of homesickness and unhappiness on her would lift. Birdwatching with her in those wild wet places was intimate and intensely private. She was so much part of me, I was hardly aware of her. So when I saw her for the first time transformed, alien and inaccessible in her first language, the attachment tore, and I became aware of myself, separate and alone. Israel had always kept part of her from me, but when I was ten, Israel took her back entirely, and I was bereft.

Two years on, and it was not birds but boys who came into focus. In Israel for another month-long visit, I noticed for the first time young Israeli men, and soldiers. I was twelve, and I watched them intently. Dusty, in uniform, an M16 or an Uzi slung over one shoulder, they lounged in bus-stops, like film-stars smoking harsh cigarettes down to the burning filter which they held turned into their cupped hands. Dark, unshaven and rough, most importantly they were romantic-ally tragic, subject to extreme experience and damaged by warfare. I was sharply jealous of my brother, who, unlike me – and lazily uncaring about it – was a
sabra
, a Jew born in the land of Israel. Sabra, the native prickly pear cactus, is the image of the New Jew, the tough Israeli, prickly and rough on the outside, but sweet on the inside. After 1967 this became the image of the ethical, emotionally sensitive Israeli soldier who shoots and cries.

How I longed for that erotic combination of brusque rudeness and sweet tenderness. Spending months in Israel at twelve, and without my parents or siblings at fourteen, and fifteen, I, too, wanted desperately to be a sabra; I wanted to belong, to be what my mother was, to be whole. The green quiet of Sussex, the birds of Ashdown Forest – all of it faded into dullness before the passion of exile and return that I discovered. England had been nothing but a temporary resting place, I decided; in an adolescent embrace of the idea of homeland, I believed I had never really been part of anywhere but Israel.

I did not know yet that
sabra
meant something very different, too; that it was an Arabic word, and its place in the landscape, green and spiked and sprawling, was not wild and accidental, but meaningful, the sign of another story, half-erased but still visible – if you knew to look. As a child and a teenager I was given no hint of that other story, hidden and contradictory. Instead the woundedness of the Israeli soldier enthralled me. I wanted not only to be a sabra, but to be wounded, too, to be damaged and tender and resolute.

The national story is simple, full of dusty guns, of hopeless courage and miraculous delivery, of connection to soil and to deep history. Israel offered the possibility of being cleansed of all that was suddenly wrong about being Jewish – because according to this story I was being told, the Jews in the Diaspora, in exile, were homeless and helpless, persecuted for their ethnic and religious differences wherever they went, wherever they lived. Unlike the cowed, weak, pale, nationless, hand-rubbing, demeaned Jew of the Diaspora, victim of antisemitism, speaking Yiddish and wearing sagging braces (the Yiddish and the braces twin shuddering horrors for my mother), the New Jew in Zion was tall, straight, muscular, tough, and above all, proud – a worker of the land, wielding gun and pitchfork and red flag, and singing bright, heroic songs. This was what I might do, too; this could be me, if I chose – because, though surrounded by powerful enemies intent on their destruction, and fighting alone for survival, the New Jew had prevailed and was redeeming the land, creating a just, democratic, benevolent and
moral
society for all citizens, and for all Jews worldwide.

This was my mother’s heritage and I understood it to be my own heritage, too. The kibbutznik was the ideal – not an effete intellectual, nor a mean usurer, but a noble, enlightened peasant, once again rooted in native soil. According to the kibbutz version of the Zionist story, the return of Jews to this mostly empty land to redeem and restore the waste and desert to their former glory as fertile fields, was heroic in a socialist rather than biblical sense. My grandfather, peasant-kibbutznik, became for me its embodiment: he too had wielded flag and pitchfork and gun; he too had worked with his whole body, his whole being to create a new society, to realise a dream. He was a worker of the land, weathered by harsh sun, idealism and labour.

At twelve, I learned and embraced this national story, Leon Uris’s
Exodus
version of it. From that stirring romantic novel, from the places we visited, from family, from newspapers and, later, from film, I absorbed the simple, compelling Zionist account of the past and present, and of my past and present. This was the version, not much more sophisticated, which was reinforced when, at seventeen, I thought I might move to Israel permanently, and came under the formal influence of the Jewish Agency.