The Last Rain (27 page)

Dori

Mummy wakes me up before anyone else is awake. It’s still dark outside.

I can’t decide whether to take the belt Gilead gave me. I don’t really need a belt but if I don’t take it Gilead will think I don’t like it. In the end I decide to leave it. It’ll be there for me when I come back.

We go outside to where Daddy is waiting with Sara and David and the suitcases. It’s very quiet on Eldar. Everyone is still sleeping.

A car comes to take us away. It brings us to a noisy bus station. It’s morning now and there are people everywhere. Mummy tells David to stay on a bench with me and not move while she goes to clarify something.

There’s an old Arab woman sitting beside us on the bench begging. She makes sad sounds. David has some money in his pocket that Mummy gave him. He says
if I could I’d give her all my money
. I say
yes yes give her all the money!
But David shakes his head and says
I can’t
. He’s right. Mummy gave him the money to take care of.

Then Mummy comes back and we get up and leave.

Ballistic Protections Solutions

Perhaps the most successful kibbutz industry today is Eldar’s ballistic protections solutions. Iraq proved to be a gold mine for the factory as U. S. demand for the product increased. The company now employs more than a thousand workers in Israel and 300 in plants abroad. Its turnover has increased from NIS 1.5 billion last year to 3 billion this year.

—
The International Economist,
2010

Dori

In the evening the plants and bushes have a marvellous smell. The darker it gets the more marvellous the smell gets. The sun is starting to set but it’s not dark yet. Soon the Last Rain will fall. We won’t know for sure it’s the Last Rain until it doesn’t rain again. If it doesn’t rain again we’ll look back and say
that was the Last Rain
.

Notes

1
. Optional in Kindergarten; if the Group was small, free play under supervision of the Minder continued until Transitional First Grade.

2
. An idea of Utopian communal living, first envisioned by socialist European Jews who settled in Ottoman Palestine in the early 1900s.

3
. From Our First Year, a collective diary of Eldar’s first year, written in English; no author.

4
. The literal meaning of “wig” in Hebrew is “foreign (false) hair” (
pe’ah nokhrit
); the word for “foreign” is also used for “non-Jew.” In Modern Hebrew, “non-Jew” is the more common meaning, and the only one Dori has encountered.

5
. In 1961, each window served a single Room. Front terraces and curved railings were added in the 1970s; as the kibbutz prospered, walls between individual Rooms were torn down and units were expanded into larger apartments. Below: early stages of construction, 1950.

6
. From
Between the Motion and the Act
, an autobiographical novel by Naftali Satie (formerly Stavitsky), written in Montreal during a leave from Eldar. “It was supposed to be a four-month leave and I thought at first I could write the book in six months, but I was working full-time and there were the kids and so on, so in the end I needed a year and a half. I was very happy with Vantage Editions. They did an excellent job—they produced a high-quality book, and they sent out review copies and did promotion just like any other publisher. I had a choice: paperback, which falls apart very quickly, or hardback, which lasts forever. I chose hardback. I had to stay in Canada an extra three months after Varda and the kids went back, to earn the $1,200. Paperback would have taken two months—not much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. At the end of December, Varda went back to the kibbutz and I sublet our place on Davaar Street and moved in with my parents. I took a job as a shipper—it involved a lot of lifting and wrecked my back, but it paid well.”

—
Interview with Naftali Satie

7
. Heb.
metapelet (f)
. Unique kibbutz usage; no equivalent in English; refers to the childcare worker in charge of a Group. The word came to mean, in the 1970s, counselling psychologist/psychiatrist—see B’Tipul, the award-winning Israeli TV drama adapted by HBO in the USA as
In Treatment
. In general usage, the root verb means “looking after” and, as in English, has a wide range of connotations, from benevolent to sinister. I’ve always associated the word
metapelet
with refuse drifting on drainage water—orange peels, for example; or with something bloated abandoned in an alleyway; I can’t say the word, can hardly bear to hear it spoken or even see it printed, especially in English transliteration, on a page.

8
.

In kibbutz usage, “Group” (
kvutzah
) refers to a group of boys and girls, close in age, who live together in a Children’s House. Above, Dori’s Group in the Baby House; Dori to the far right. Below, a few months later.

9
. Modern Hebrew for “hoe”; borrowed from Arabic.

10
. Small crouton-like puffs produced by Osem and, as far as I know, unique to Israel; made of flour, oil, and spices. Highly addictive.

11
. Hebrew is an inflected language, and five of the six words that entertain Dori and Lulu rhyme:
sinorim nir’im matzh
_.
ikim al anashim agulim.

12
. Interview with the curator, from John R. Snarey, “Becoming a kibbutz founder: An ethnographic study of the first all-American kibbutz in Israel,”
Jewish Social Studies
46:2 (1984:Spring) © Indiana University Press.

13
. Possibly this was Shoshana’s chance to nibble choice items. She carried meals from the Kitchen to the Children’s House on a milkmaid’s yoke, three metal containers hanging from either side. We remember the secretiveness and concentration of her turned back at the counter, as she unloaded and distributed the food. In a diary written shortly after my twelfth birthday, I found the following entry:
Shoshana used to go down and come back with food. You had to go down a few steps and walk a great deal from our quarters to the dining room and it must have been pretty hard on Shoshana. But through all her hardships, and probably because of them, she was … —but let us leave that to later.

14
. Written in 1967 by Varda Satie (née Klein); b. 1927, Montreal, Canada. “The main character in the play is single. I was already married on the kibbutz. I met Naftali at the local [Montreal] branch of
Shomer
[Young Guard Youth Movement] when I was fourteen. He was four years older than me and had just volunteered for the army. I had a huge crush on him—he was famous for having Paul Newman eyes, ‘bedroom eyes’ we used to call it. All the girls had a crush on him. I gathered my courage and asked if I could write to him in the army. He said he’d be flattered to receive letters from such a pretty girl, but we only got to know each other later, on his leaves and through letters. He wrote me over a thousand letters from his base. I know because I numbered them. I don’t know where the letters are now; they were lost. He wrote to me just about every day—long, beautiful letters.
*
It was always a thrill, getting those envelopes in the mail. Naftali was lonely in the army, and bored. He asked to go overseas, but they needed him at Gander [in Newfoundland]. All his friends from
Shomer
were overseas, but the army wouldn’t send him. He used to tell me what books to read and what to look for in the books—he was educating me. At first he signed his letters ‘with impending love’—he was always a stickler about language. Then he began leaving out the ‘impending’ and one day he signed ‘your impending husband.’ He applied for leave to get married, but soldiers couldn’t get leave from Newfoundland very easily, it was too far. He had to wait until the war was over.

“Even then he wasn’t released right away, but he was finally given leave in June and we got married. I was seventeen, almost eighteen. I moved in with his parents—I was in teacher’s college by then. He returned to the base for a few more months, and when he came back we began preparing to emigrate to Palestine. We didn’t sail until 1948—I had to finish my studies and then we had to go to the
Shomer
farm in Highstown, New Jersey, to get
hakhshara
[training]. On the ship to Palestine, or Israel as it was by then, we suddenly heard Arabic on the radio, and all the women began to cry. It hit us how far we were from home. On our first night in Haifa we were given a room with straw mattresses on the floor. Martin found a bottle of whiskey in the port and I got quite high. I stood on the table and sang ‘Bei Mir Bist du Schoen.’ No one ever forgot that.”

—
Interview with Varda Satie

* From Nafatli Satie’s unpublished memoir fragments:

In the army I found an enormous amount of free time and to my happy astonishment, well-stocked libraries almost everywhere I was stationed. I first arrived on the mid-Atlantic RCAF station in Newfoundland in late summer 1942. I resumed my prolific correspondence with about a dozen individuals, including my family, Movement friends and, of course, Varda. When I enlisted, my knowledge as journeyman electrician may have saved my life. Try as I might to transfer out to a frontline unit to gain experience that might be useful in Palestine, I was consistently rejected; experienced electricians were in short supply.

One day I received orders to report to the station’s legal officer. I entered Captain Solomon’s office and, as required, saluted. The fair, balding officer looked up from his desk, smiled sweetly and motioned for me to sit down. His motion as much as said, let’s dispense with all these absurd formalities.

“You may be wondering why I asked you here. It’s your letters. You probably realize that the officers here come from diverse backgrounds and some of them react very graphically, I mean orally and very publicly, to some of the contents of your letters. In other words, Leading Aircraftsman Stavitsky, you’ve become quite a celebrity in the officers’ mess.”

I felt the blood rush to my head. But it was a good feeling. I got them to think, I made them uncomfortable.

“So what’s the problem, sir?” I asked.

“Do you mind if give you some advice?” Solomon looked kind and affable.

“Nossir.”

“Well, can you cut down on your, er, romantic terms? Yes, your romantic terms and your political views?” There was a hint of regret in his voice.

“Nossir, I cannot. I don’t see why I should. This war is being fought for the preservation of democracy and freedom, I thought.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Solomon responded quickly. “Those political pronouncements. And Jewish issues. Against the British. It’s embarrassing for me and the two other Jewish officers.”

“I’m sorry about that, sir, but it’s my right and privilege to write what I want.”

Solomon suggested I bring my mail directly to him from then on. That system worked until he was transferred. I again deposited my mail in the regular post office. Two weeks passed and I was required to report to Major Susan Musgrove, Commanding Officer of the Women’s Division. On her desk lay a letter written in Yiddish.

“What language is that, LAC Stavitsky?”

“Yiddish, ma’am.”

“How am I supposed to understand that?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Well, you can’t write in a language that no one can read.”

The deep frown never left her rather handsome middle-aged face.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but what do you think I write to my parents that requires censorship?” I experienced a debilitating sense of frustration.

“I don’t care what you write to your parents as long as it’s in English.”

“What about French?”

“Don’t be snarky, Airman,” she shot back in apparent anger.