Out of the Shoebox (2 page)

The Italian passenger ship Carnaro

No
sooner had I typed into Google (in Hebrew) the key words Mordechai, Liebman,
Chortkow, than I apparently found Mordechai, right there in the second link
displayed, which was “Meiselman, Getter, Cheled, Arbel, David – Chortkow.” That
was a total surprise. I knew the Meiselmans, who later Hebraicized their name
to Cheled. Asher Meiselman Cheled was a close friend of my parents’. As a
child, after Father’s death, I spent many school vacations at their place in
Yad Eliyahu in south-Tel Aviv.  Their younger daughter, Varda, was my age; she
taught me to fly little kites made of paper and tied with thread. You could say
it was similar to origami, long before that concept made it to Israel. Tel
Avivians called this type of kite “kifka”. In my home town of Haifa the kites
were made of reeds and called by the name “tyara”. Within minutes I realized
that the web page I landed on was set up by Miri Gershoni, to commemorate the
Jewish community of Chortkow.

The
page showed family photos from Asher Meiselman’s albums: his parents and his
brother; my father as the head of Betar  youth movement in Chortkow, surrounded
by his girl troop who were members in the movement; and a photo of my parents
and my sister Ilana, with Asher himself standing next to them in his British soldier’s
uniform.

But
the real surprise was finding the photo of Mordechai Liebman. The bigger
picture was beginning to emerge.

Mordechai Liebman, 1930

They
were friends, apparently; Betar troop members and my father their leader. I
knew that my father was older than the Meiselman brothers: Asher was six years
younger, Shmuel – five, and the other brothers even younger.

My father as Betar Leader in
Chortkow, 1928

When
I was a child Asher told me that, when my father left for Vienna to study
architecture and building engineering, it was he – Asher – who replaced him as
Betar leader. Though the photo of Mordechai next to my father and the Meiselman
brothers attested to the latter’s friendship, it was not sufficient proof of
the connection between Mordechai and my father. I had to provide a document or
some other evidence of their relationship. And so, unexpectedly, I had a photo
of Mordechai from 1930, which I could look at to my heart’s content, but I
still couldn’t talk to him, nor hear his version of the story of the lot.

So
I continued to search memorial books and other Holocaust literature mentioning
Chortkow, but in vain. No sign of Mordechai Liebman, save for the photo in my
hand.

How
am I to track down my father’s address in 1935? Where did he live after his
arrival in Palestine in December 1932?

I
had no knowledge about his first years in the country, so had no choice but to
write down all I knew from family stories I’d heard in childhood, and from my
mother’s memoirs as told to my sister and written down by her some 15 years
ago.

My
father’s address appeared on the love letters he sent to my mother, from Haifa
to Chortkow. In these letters he described his search for work and the tension
between the different Zionist movements, and the way he, as a young revisionist
in “red” Haifa, felt discriminated against. But most of all, these letters were
full of love and longing, and plans for their joint future in their new
homeland. These letters, which I’d read as a youngster, were eventually lost. I
still remember them on the shelf next to the bed in my mother’s bedroom,
stashed in a carved wooden box made by my father, along with photos and
postcards from family members who perished in the Holocaust. Years later, I
arranged the photos in an album, but the letters themselves were gone.

Asher Meiselman, Ilana, my mother,
and my father Haifa, 1940

My
mother said, in her memoirs:

“…
Even before his return to Chortkow to marry me, my husband opened an office in
Palestine with a partner. My husband was an architect while the partner, named
Wolf, was an engineer. They had plenty of work, because Hadar Hacarmel
neighborhood was being built at the time. There was a shortage of housing in
Haifa back then…

We
bought an apartment under construction on Hillel street in Haifa. It was a 2
bedroom apartment, one room of which was always rented out, because no one at
the time enjoyed the luxury of two rooms. We all lived modestly in those days.
Until the building was complete, we lived at Uncle Herman’s on Nordau street. That
was a very difficult period for me, because Herman’s wife, Heidi, was used to
having maids and couldn’t cook at all, while Herman loved such Jewish-Polish
dishes as gefilte fish, stuffed cabbage, etc. So I was their unpaid cook (even
though my family used to have a cook too, I had taken an interest and learned
to cook.) Aunt Heidi started learning Hebrew, which she had been totally
unfamiliar with. She spoke many languages: German, French, English; and decided
to learn Hebrew. When half a year had gone by without her managing to grasp any
Hebrew, she gave up, deciding it simply wasn't for her…”

According
to my mother’s memoirs, my parents’ first apartment upon arriving in Palestine
in 1934 was 6 Nordau St. I know that place well, having spent much time there
in my childhood. The building was designed and built by my father for relatives
who came from Austria. With its Bauhaus design, the building stood out. Most of
the raw materials and interior finishes were imported from Europe, and the
apartments were rented out on a monthly basis or for key-money, constituting a
source of income for my relatives, who kept the property till their dying day.
I therefore knew that during 1934 they lived at 6 Nordau, then moved to Hillel
St., house number unknown. Father, who worked as an architect at the time with
an engineer named Wolf, rented an office at 4 Achad Ha’am St. Later, my parents
moved to that place, where my sister was born and where I was born in 1951. But
as far as I know, they moved there only in 1937.

Having
reached a dead end, I decided to try and contact Hanni Amor at the Custodian
General’s office, figuring that, at worst, she’d refuse to advise me on how to
proceed. I explained that according to my mother’s memoirs my parents lived
first at 6 Nordau and then on Hillel St., number unknown. Hanni confirmed that
the street where my father lived when purchasing the land was indeed Hillel
rather than Nordau, but stressed that I need to provide the house number and
some legal proof that the person who had lived there was indeed my father. She
further repeated the requirement to prove the connection between my father and
one Mordechai Liebman.

How
on earth was I to find that elusive house number? Days went by, and no creative
idea came to me. True, the task now boiled down to locating one certain
building on one street, but said street had some seventy-five houses. I was at
a loss. Based on my mother’s memoirs, the move to Hillel St. occurred after a
short period on Nordau. I knew that the house on Hillel was probably built in
1934, so that my parents must have moved in either late 1934 or early 1935. I
had one more early memory, in which my mother described to me the switch from
the comfortable life in Chortkow to the modest living in Palestine. She’d say:
“At first I was a cook at Herman and Heidi’s place, then we moved to Mayer
Fellmann's place that was very small, and we always rented out a room to
another lodger, and there was no privacy… everyone lived very modestly.” This
was my mother’s way of saying that they lived in deprivation. Did my parents
buy the apartment from this Mayer Fellmann? Was he the owner, or the contractor
who built it? At the time, in the early 1930s, most housing in Hadar Hacarmel
was built for home owners who also owned the land. These people financed the
construction of the building, usually lived in one of the apartments and sold
or rented out the rest. Mayer Fellmann may have been the proprietor from whom
my parents bought their home on Hillel St. I decided that, if push came to shove,
I’d scour City Hall archives for the building permits for all buildings on
Hillel St., until I found one in the name of Mayer Fellmann. I knew the city’s
archives were computerized, which would make the task easier, but thought that,
since I couldn’t trust my memory regarding the landlord’s exact name, I should
postpone this hunt, which took on Sisyphean proportions.

Another
possibility was that my parents had bought an apartment in one of the buildings
designed by my father, who had designed several apartment buildings in Haifa,
including the one at 6 Nordau, and another at 7 Bar Giora St. I began by
looking into the ownership of the house on Bar Giora, in the hope that this
would reveal the same landlord for both buildings, thus leading to the
sought-after address of the flat on Hillel St. Imagine my disappointment when a
search of the computerized city archives showed that my father's design, from
early March 1936, was for a woman named Sara Chana Preminger – no connection to
Mayer Fellmann nor to the address of a house on Hillel St.

I’d
found out about the house at 7 Bar Giora St. thanks to an architecture student
named Uri Zirlin, who’d studied at the Technion over fifteen years ago. Zirlin
called my sister one day to ask if she was the daughter of Shlomo Zvi
Finkelman, who was a Haifa architect in the first half of the 20th century.  He
recounted how, while writing a seminar paper for a course given by architect
Silvina Sosnovsky and historian-cum-Israeli-architecture-researcher Prof
Gilbert Herbert, he had to research a certain unnamed architect who’d designed
a building on Geula St. in Haifa. The building assigned to Zirlin appeared in a
study, commissioned by Haifa municipality, of conservation-worthy buildings.
Zirlin was to locate information about the building's architect and try to find
additional buildings designed by him in order to create a portfolio that would
ultimately be part of the archives of the Technion’s Department of
Architecture. I thought that if I found this student’s paper, I’d find
additional facts about my father and other buildings he designed and built, and
perhaps even hit on my objective, i.e. his places of residence in the ‘30s. I
pondered the strange coincidence that Prof Herbert, my professor at Bezalel,
gave a Technion student the assignment of researching architect Shlomo Zvi
Finkelman and his contribution to architecture in Haifa, unaware that that the
latter was my father.

Ilana
prepared and sent Zirlin a summary of my father’s biography that included:
family background, architecture and engineering studies at Baugenwerbe Schule
in Vienna, Austria; how he came to Palestine to study architecture at the
Technion; info about several buildings he designed; how he worked as an
architect for the British Mandate for two years during WWII; and later for the
Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry in Israel, when he worked on the
planning and building of the Artists’ Colony in Safed. Zirlin promised to send
my sister a copy of his seminar paper, but failed to keep his promise.