I wondered why I couldn’t be born to another people, I imagined a perfectly normal place—just like my village, only its inhabitants were not hated or persecuted or killed or incinerated, as in the films shown on Holocaust Memorial Day, or killed in Arab villages on a convoy to Gush Etzyon, lost and helpless.
The tale of the Gush Etzyon convoy belongs to that other Memorial Day, naturally, not to the Holocaust one. But for me they both possess one sense-memory. Not far from my home, some seventy years ago, lived Tuvya Kushnir. He grew up and went to school there, one of my uncontested childhood heroes. Tuvya loved plants (like me) and was “a loyal son to his people, his country, his homeland and village,” as in the lofty lines inscribed on the Bible I received for my Bar Mitzvah from the congregation of the synagogue at my moshav. I too wanted to be a “loyal son to his people.”
Tuvya grew up and became a soldier (like me), and because the Arabs held Jerusalem under siege—literally enclosed it all around with a high fence, a real wall, as they did to the Etzyon bloc as well, so I imagined—those poor people inside had no food or medication or ammunition to defend themselves. Tuvya, my childhood hero, and another thirty-four friends took off on foot carrying food and medication on their shoulders. They couldn’t travel by car because the Arabs who were laying siege to Jerusalem had blocked the roads. That’s why Rabin* and all the others were needed to break through those roads with armored trucks, but that is already another story. As a child, Tuvya would carry two pails of milk hanging from a yoke balanced on his shoulders. When the British soldiers saw him walking like that from the cowshed to the dairy, they probably thought the way I do now about the Indian farmers whom I see passing me by through my train car window. He worked hard as a young boy (like me), and that’s why he was strong and sun-tanned and handsome and ready to carry out the mission to provide food and medication to the poor people under siege. On the way they ran into an Arab shepherd. Since Tuvya and his friends were kind people (they were, after all, sons and brothers of survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, and they didn’t carry on like barbarians), they let the shepherd go, only asking him to please not tell his Arab friends that they were going to Gush Etzyon on a secret mission to bring food and medication and ammunition, just for self-defense, for you know, Mr. Shepherd, what barbaric things your Arab brothers, who are not survivors nor sons of survivors, sometimes do. The shepherd turned out to be a bastard and told his buddies. They killed Tuvya and his friends and probably looted the food and medication—they sure turned out to be barbarians. If they had only learned from Esther, my Bible teacher, that “on the spoil laid they not their hand” … But good luck finding battlefield morals and Bible lore with those savages! Our guys were real heroes, they were few against many, pure against Arab, they fought to the last bullet and died together, loyal, strong, sun-tanned, handsome, pure (like me), and dead—so far not like me—although I yearned with all my heart to grow up and be like them, a loyal son to my people, country, homeland and village. Every year on Memorial Day I would stand and wait to hear Tuvya’s name read among the Fallen of the moshav, and then I would shed a bereaved brother’s tear. We would stand there with everyone else, not with the bereaved families, who were especially honored and had special tears and no one would get cross with their kids even if one of them did “accidentally” trip on a Chinese lantern.
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* One of the siege-breakers in 1948. Almost half a century later, while serving as prime minister, he would be assassinated for seeking a peace treaty with the Palestinians.
In fifth grade I took up the trumpet. In school we were informed of a special fund to help schools in the periphery—that is, in the weaker parts of the country—and that includes us too, not because we’re weak but because we’re far from the center and that’s why we’re entitled. Representatives of this fund came to test our diligence and sense of rhythm by asking us some questions and having us drum on a table. At the end of the test they informed me that I would play the trumpet. I remember this test as something very serious, and yet, when I talked about it at our Sabbath family dinner, my older cousin laughed at me. With one hand he rubbed circles on his belly and with the other, patted his head. When I couldn’t imitate him, he said: “These are at least the skills of a trombone player.” Then he stretched his right hand forward and his left hand back and announced: “Saxophone player.” I joined the general mirth, although it dampened my enthusiasm over the prospect of becoming a trumpet player.
Nonetheless, playing the trumpet started me on a path that would eventually earn me prominence at official ceremonies, which in turn inflated the importance of ceremonies in my mind. There were ceremonies aplenty in our environment—memorial days commemorating the Holocaust, the fallen soldiers, improvised commemorations of Rabin at the public square or at school as one of the “candle kids.”* There were recruiting festivities where the IDF marching song was played in honor of the graduating class leaving the moshav on their way to fulfill their national destiny. Music has the tremendous capacity to amplify feeling, and even when you’re a musician of paltry talent like I was, it’s thrilling to play a part in stirring up the audience.
I distinctly remember the first memorial ceremony where I played the trumpet. It was a total fiasco. IDF Memorial Day is a serious event where not even a snicker is tolerated. So no tomatoes were hurled at me on such a solemn occasion, but still some people bothered to comment: “Something went wrong there when you played.” Or, “Don’t worry, it happened to Ya’ara too when she was just a beginner.” And, indeed, that ceremony signaled the passing of the baton from Ya’ara, the moshav’s ceremonial player—who was well on her way to the army band by then, to play at much larger and more important ceremonies in front of the Knesset or at the President’s residence—to her successor, none other than myself. A few days prior to the ceremony, Ya’ara invited me to her home to choose the songs and practice. When Ya’ara’s name would come up on the playground, kids would mockingly twist their right hand; her right hand was congenitally deformed and she even held the trumpet strangely. But I, six years her junior, was thrilled by her kindness to me and the seriousness with which she undertook the task at hand, as mentor and friend.
We chose “Eli, Eli”* and “Hatikva,”† of course. Most importantly, we practiced the flag-lowering bugle call that would open the ceremony. Ya’ara made up a second part for herself and let me play the lead part so that at the ceremony she could not cover for me. Thus, although she played her second part impeccably, this “Eli, Eli” was outrageous. I squeaked quite a bit through the bugle call, too. At the close of one of our rehearsals, when the ceremony organizer suggested I practice a bit more, Ya’ara told me: “Look, we’re being mocked.” I realized it was only me being mocked. The organizer hinted that I was too small to rise up to the occasion, but Ya’ara really made things easier for me. After the ceremony I felt terrible and didn’t fiddle with any Chinese lanterns. I just wanted my parents to stop chatting with their friends so I could get the hell out of there.
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* Teenagers who lit candles as a mourning ritual following Rabin’s assassination. They were also mourning the passing of the peace process.
* Short poignant invocation of God hailing the simple beauty of creation and expressing one’s yearning for it never to end, written by one of Israel’s pre-State heroes, Hanna Senesh. Senesh was captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis after parachuting behind enemy lines in an attempt to save her Hungarian-Jewish community during the Holocaust.
† The national anthem.
The truth is, my favorite moment in those ceremonies was the announcement that “the ceremony is over,” uttered in a deep official voice, releasing the public from its self-conscious stance at attention for
