our homeland, land of Zion and Jeru-u-u-u-salem”—and then people remain standing for another strange moment, pleasant perhaps but a bit embarrassing, too, until one of the people with the black sheets of paper decorated by yellow Stars-of-David steps gravely up to one of the microphones, inhales deeply, stalls another tiny moment—his moment of power—and says “the ceremony is over.”
My second favorite moment was “Yizkor”*—not the prayer itself but the title. One of the chaps with the black sheets of paper would step up to the microphone. He would wait for a silence that did not always come, for in the back rows people would not have noticed him yet, and some people would still be sitting down, and there would be a kid who had just burnt a Chinese lantern and some mother who crossly, quietly muttered at him, and some dog barking, and again someone would mutter through clenched teeth: “Why do those idiots not tie up their dog? Good God, it’s Holocaust Memorial Day. Even today?” The fellow behind the microphone knew full well that the slightest clearing of his throat would hush the crowd instantly. But usually he does not clear his throat. He would simply say “Yizkor,” strongly emphasizing the “kor,” and then for three or four seconds a deathly silence would fall upon the gathering, even the jackals in the nearby ravine must have realized something important was taking place, and again that “Yizkor,” this time accompanied by “The People of Israel” and so on and so forth. In between “Yizkor” and “The ceremony is over” all sorts of sad, touching texts were recited, snivels were held back, male eyes fogged over, tears flowed down women’s cheeks. In between there were also musical intermezzos meant to move or please the audience.
My trumpet playing made me a vital participant in every single memorial ceremony. Before Ya’ara’s time, however, the flag was lowered on Memorial Days to the sound of the saxophone or even the French horn, and before that, so the legend goes, it was simply lowered to the beat of a drum. Unlike the state flag at the Knesset, the flag at the village was lowered on Memorial Day but not raised again full mast on the morrow, Independence Day, because on Independence Day everyone climbed Mount Gilboa. People used to ascend en masse and play organized games such as tug-of-war, volleyball and dodge ball. There were team games of girls against boys, dairy versus chicken-coop workers, veteran moshav members against new ones. We were the new ones, though I never figured out how this was possible, since I was born there and was already grown up, but apparently a new member remains new for good, and in our parts special honor is due the founding fathers. Eventually, when the social adhesives melted in the heat of the region, and greening-the-wasteland was no longer a noble cause, the communal picnics died out as well. In the spirit of tradition and Independence Day festivities, many still climb up Mount Gilboa to make chicken and beef sacrifices but each family celebrates on its own. These memories of a united community climbing the slope, playing dodge ball and tug-of-war, marching in my mind along with my memory of being stuffed to bursting with grilled meat—I merely mention them here so you might understand how this came about, how we could forget to raise the flag back up on Independence Day. And so our flag always remained at half mast, and still every year we would lower it anew, as if to verify that we still do get very sad. For me this was rather convenient, as the bugle call for lowering the flag was much easier to play than the call for raising it.
The price for not having practiced the bugle call for raising the flag was paid in full years later, in Santiago de Chile, when I was called upon to play during both lowering and raising of the flag. I tried to fake it. The musical director of the ceremony, a respected pianist in the Jewish community, had perfect pitch, and my bad pitch confused her senses. The flag rose slowly, but I didn’t manage to rise in the scale all the way to the high note. It was slightly embarrassing but I didn’t think about it too much, for that Independence Day I was wholly devoted to attempting to lift the skirt of Miriam, one of the Jewish school girls.
Counting Chile (where I spent a nice long time at my uncle’s house), the Czech Republic and Poland (where I went on our high school Holocaust study tour), and Germany (where I went on a youth “friendship mission” from the Gilboa region), I lowered flags and trumpeted the strains of “Hatikvah” in five countries. This was quite a record for someone who did not proceed to enlist in the IDF band. Instead, I put on combat fatigues and become a fighter, moved as I was by the Holocaust Memorial Day and IDF Memorial Day ceremonies. In eleventh grade, when my music teacher told me he had prepared a series of lessons to get me ready for the IDF band auditions and promised that at my present level I would do very well, I sneered: “I want to be a combatant, a fighter. So these preparations are unnecessary.” He tried to persuade me to change my mind. He said that if I chose not to join the band, I had no chance of becoming a musician in the future. “You are giving up everything you have invested in the seven years of your music studies,” he said. “Good,” I answered. “Let’s get on with class.” I enjoyed hearing him declare that this was a significant moment in my life, a moment of decision. It only made me more determined to go running three times a week, six kilometers at a time around the moshav fields, getting ready for the select unit preparatory training.
As an educational activity on Memorial Day, our high school principal invited some lieutenant colonel of the armor corps to speak to us. The lieutenant colonel was a native of nearby moshav Hayogev and an alumnus. The principal’s voice dripped with pride as he introduced the guest, as if he himself had trained the lieutenant colonel to escape anti-tank missiles or had crawled with him up and down sand dunes in basic training. The officer showed us a clip in which a heavy tank stampeded the Negev Desert sands, spitting fire and blasting metal jalopies. At the end of the ride, the tank halted in a cloud of dust and a female soldier emerged from it, taking off her helmet and shaking out her long blonde hair like some shampoo advertisement. This was, as it were, an appeal to the girls, and it was accompanied by an explanation of how they could contribute to the cause as armor corps instructors. But it was also an appeal to us boys, with our hunger for power and sex. What sells better than a slim, tall blonde climbing out of a tank? And not just any tank, but the “world’s best” tank in the “world’s strongest army.” What could be more attractive to an adolescent who could not hear his physics teacher for the sheer flood of nude women performing pornographic dance moves in his mind, filling the space between him and the blackboard?
The lieutenant colonel used allegory to explain our role in the coming years. He described a soldier as a stretcher bearer, nearly collapsing from fatigue but confident that in a few seconds his mate would step up to replace him. Our older friends, now tearing themselves to shreds for three years and bearing the burden of security, were waiting for us to step up as one man and replace them for our allotted time, before getting on with our own lives. I used this romantic allegory myself a few years later to try and motivate my own subordinates. And bidding farewell to my commanders and subordinates, I even made a poem of it, in thanks, for posterity in our company book.
In one of the Holocaust Memorial Day documentary films, someone said that after what had happened in Europe “an armed Jew is sexy.” I don’t recall whose words these were, but they etched themselves in my memory and accompanied me all through my military service. When I was ousted from the pilot-training course, I had some choices to make again. Every “flying cadet” dropped from the course at a late stage is offered a convenient, lucrative home-front assignment. It was easy to relinquish the elitist air force for the sake of becoming an armed Jew. After all, I wanted to be sexy.
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* The “remembrance” prayer.
I began to train for my encounter with you, the girl who stole my Holocaust, when I was ten years old, about your age. Much later my main practice took place in basic and advanced combat training, where I learned to dash from one dugout to another, crawl, aim my gun barrel with a sharp eye and carefully squeeze the trigger, believing in my power and willing to make the greatest of sacrifices. But this was only the final stage of the body and mind training that had started in my early childhood.
In
