Some time ago a reader asked that I tell more about growing up in Israel. I thought about it yesterday, at the annual reunion of three couples - Noach and his wife Joan, Danny and his wife Selma, and Dalia and I.
We met not in Tel Aviv, where the guys grew up, but in central New Jersey, the home of Noach and Joan. He and I met in fourth grade at Tel Nordau elementary school in Tel Aviv. Danny, a year younger than me, was the son of the woman who taught my class English in fifth grade. He also attended Tel Nordau. Dalia and I and Danny and Selma live in suburban Philadelphia, minutes from each other.
The link among us is the past. When we were growing up, Israel had not as yet been founded. The League of Nations handed control or a Mandate of what was then Palestine to the British, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Danny’s mother had lived in Texas for a number of years, so we considered her an American. She taught us American words like “cute.” She was succeeded by an Englishman, who in sixth grade taught us to say, “My name is Mr. Brown. I open the door. I close the door.” I practiced this phrase at home, opening and closing the door to the room which served as the family dining room by day and the bedroom my grandmother and I shared at night.
Noach’s father was an actor in Habima, the Jewish national theater, who came to the Holy Land with his wife from Russia. My family, of course, came from Germany, which, as readers of this blog know, we fled when Hitler rose to power. Danny was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where his parents lived before moving to Tel Aviv.
The three of us attended Tel Nordau, an elementary school named in honor of Max Nordau, a Zionist leader and author. Yet it was called the Royal School Tel Nordau, since the United Kingdom ruled this little land. Royalty had nothing to do with Zionism. We were an average of forty boys and girls in a class. Controlling such a large bunch of kids was often a difficult task. One day a female teacher broke into tears and fled the classroom.
Elementary school consisted of first through eighth grade. You were graduated at age 14, and many students never received further education. This was because tuition was free in the royal public schools. High schools, however, were privately owned for the most part, and charged tuition. My father, who owned a flourishing ladies shoe salon in Berlin, had become a shoe maker in Palestine. He could not afford to send his only child to high school. With high grades, I managed to receive a scholarship.
Moreover, attending school was not mandatory under the British Mandate. Many children worked to help support their families, instead of getting an education. Consider that thousands of families were refugees from warn-torn Europe, others fled from Yemen, at the bottom of the Arab peninsula. Jews around the world, and especially in the United States, had not as yet begun to come to the aid of their brethren. How ironic that the People of the Book living in the Holy Land pre-Israel often lacked education.
We were recalling, Noach, Danny and I, that there was no crime in the Jewish Palestine. Our families never locked the front door of their apartments. The only thing my family and I worried about were Arab bullets. Early on, we lived in an apartment house in northern Tel Aviv. At night we’d hear shots from a nearby Arab village. By day we kids would trace the bullet marks on the outside walls of the concrete building.
There were no school buses, as there are in the U.S. At first we lived across the street from Tel Nordau, and I would wait for the bell, then run like hell. Later we moved to another part of town, and I walked to school a good half-an-hour each way because I refused to transfer to a closer school. The walk to high school was about twenty minutes each way. I love walking till this day.
Many kids were bi-lingual. I spoke German with my family and Hebrew at school and with my friends. My parents used to say that I have a secret language. Many years later, my children, growing up in America, said the same about Dalia and me. Hebrew was our secret language, which Dalia speaks since she was born in Haifa. Growing up in America, she learned English here.
I doubt that Palestinian Arabs learned Hebrew in their high schools, but we had the option of studying Arabic or French. Since I was always fixated on getting good grades, I chose French, which I was already pretty good at, having lived in Paris for two years after we fled from Berlin. I did study Arabic in the summer of 1942, when my mother and I lived in Jerusalem, where we had gone to get away from severe bombing of Tel Aviv by the Italians. It was, after all, World War II. My father would join us for the Sabbath. I can still count in Arabic, but only till seven, and occasional exchange greetings with a Lebanese working in the local supermarket. Some of the words we exchange laughingly don’t belong in a literary publication...
So what were we three fellows doing in America? Dreams. We all had dreams. I left the Holy Land before Israel became a state because I wanted to live here, the land of plenty, with a car in every garage, the land of jazz, milk shakes, Hollywood and Times Square. Noach and Danny came after the state had been established. All three of us went to college here, met our wives here, and enjoyed fulfilling careers. America has been good to us.
And yet each of us travels frequently to the little place where we grew up. Who said you can’t go home again?
