A Story: Land and Sea
By
Julie Rosenzweig^*

Like you, little one, I was born in a landlocked place. But I grew up elsewhere. Who knows who I would have become, had I stayed where I was born?

I remember nothing from before we arrived at our city on the sea. We’d left our inland village just as I was reaching the age when first memories form, those fragmentary images that rise later from the depths, unbidden and seemingly random. But there was something about this encounter with the city, and with the sea that gave it its character, that introduced me to myself. As though my entire life before then had been a buzzing in my ear, a mere low unattended hum, and suddenly the hum swelled into a roar, the roar of the waves breaking on the beach. A roar in which I recognized myself.

And just as I recognized myself, I became aware of someone other than me, the boy Binyomin. As though he’d always been standing there on the beach, waiting since the Creation for me to come and play with him. Straddling the line where the waves slap the shore, feet bare, sunk in muddy sand, greeting me with a shy smile. A young prince welcoming me to his kingdom.

In reality it was I who must have welcomed, him the day he reached the city, though I remember nothing of his family’s arrival or of the trip back with them to our pension, the small hotel my parents had recently come to the city to run. It may well be that I accompanied my father to the port to collect Binyomin and his parents. If I try very hard, I can just make out the image of an oddly-dressed, confused-looking European couple descending from a ship with a small boy in tow — quiet, gentlemanlike, and surprisingly at ease in his new surroundings. But I don’t know if this is a real memory, or a manufactured one. I do truly recall a visit to the port with my father; the feelings and impressions that stayed with me had nothing to do with any newly-arrived guests, but rather with the port itself, my father’s explanations, and my sudden flash of insight: people were traveling to our city from different places across the sea. This was a startling realization. We, after all, had come there by land, from the opposite direction.

Papa pointed toward a construction site. They’re expanding the port for us, he said with satisfaction and pride. The French are doing it. The King gave them permission. That made a huge impression on me. I was aware that our king had a special affection for the Jews, and that we loved him back. But now I realized that other people wanted to see him and be near him, and were converging on our city from all over the world for that purpose. And our beloved king was encouraging this movement, even employing a special cadre of workers to make ready for his new guests.

I know, now, that it wasn’t admiration for our king that brought Binyomin’s family to our shores. His parents were simply attracted by the opportunity to teach at the new Alliance school. The pay, I suppose, was adequate, and the living expenses must have been minimal by their standards. That was a calculation not a few of our European guests made in those days. Our pension was always full. My father had good business sense; he’d learned French well enough from his marketing trips to the city before we moved there, and had seen an opportunity to get us out of the village, where things were going badly, and into better circumstances. The Alliance Israélite Universelle was just opening its school, teacher housing hadn’t yet been built, and accommodations were needed for the staff. Our business flourished; our pension was blessed with an atmosphere of comfort and abundance that our future, and often grander, competitors could never quite equal. Jews came, not just Alliance teachers but also merchants, engineers, doctors. The common language was French, though many of our guests — including Binyomin’s parents — weren’t native French speakers. I learned quickly to manage with the diverse accents. Wherever they hailed from, they seemed equally well satisfied with the accommodations. I often heard them marveling over the cleanliness and order, the charming courtyard with its little burbling fountain, and, of course, my mother’s cooking, which for some was quite a culinary adventure.

"They'd been used to gefilte fish, ha-ha."

Perhaps. Though not all of our guests were Ashkenazim, by any means. Many were young Jews from countries throughout the Mediterranean who’d spent several years in Paris, training to become Alliance teachers. Even among the Ashkenazim, there were some whose ways were not too different from ours; while others could have been from another planet. I certainly remember guests who had no conception of mitzvah observance, and who made all sorts of blunders in the common rooms, lighting up cigarettes on Shabbat, bringing non-kosher food in from outside. Sometimes the women dressed quite inappropriately. Maman and Papa pitied them. They knew how to get them to obey the rules without making the rules seem onerous, and without embarrassing them. If someone was about to light a cigarette on Shabbat, Papa would calmly hand him a little bowl of Maman’s magical fruit compote, and the cigarette would be forgotten. And no woman could resist the motherly sweetness with which Maman would drape over her bare shoulders one of the beautiful hand-made shawls she kept around for the use of guests.

Binyomin’s parents were secular, but I don’t remember them making faux pas of those kinds — perhaps they’d read up on our practices beforehand and knew how to avoid giving offense.

Even today it’s not clear to me whether M. Behr was the Alliance school’s headmaster or just one of the teachers. As Binyomin’s father he loomed large in my eyes, so perhaps it was natural for me to assume he was the directeur. Or maybe it was the way he spoke. I remember him as short and balding, not physically impressive but with a distinct and penetrating voice, like a clarinet, that commanded attention. He had decorous manners and fastidious tastes; as a boarder he was somewhat demanding and pedantic — a Napoleonchik who liked his napkins folded a certain way, and so on. I have a feeling that, at the school, his quirks must have generated some ridicule. But on the whole he was a pleasant man, courteous and gentle. He had a great deal of patience, especially with children; if he was aware of any secret tittering, he didn’t let on.

He expected, and received, from everyone, adult or child, the same politeness he himself displayed. His manners indeed differed from ours, but I could also perceive that there was something out of the ordinary about him even among his fellow Europeans — something old-fashioned, antiquated. Something from the previous century, perhaps. A gentilhomme. Despite the demands of his position at the school, whatever it was, he managed to arrange some leisure time for himself. While out on errands with Maman, I’d see him strolling alone, either in the souk, or along the wide boulevards of the new, European, part of the city. He seemed equally at home, and equally foreign, in both. I didn’t at first understand how one could stroll aimlessly, without shopping to do or errands to run. One time I asked him what exactly he was up to. He looked at me for a moment, winked, and said, Je flâne, and then continued on his way, as though no other explanation were necessary.

Not that he always returned to the pension emptyhanded. His random jaunts around the city often yielded finds for what he referred to as his “collections,” which were multiple. He collected postcards, books, and all sorts of objects — from fine china to children’s playthings. I’m not sure, now, that Mme Behr enjoyed the clutter; but for Binyomin and me it was a paradise of interest and stimulation. M. Behr, for his part, saw us children as natural partners in his enthusiasm. He’d march like a general before his jam-packed shelves, pull items down and tell us their history. Sometimes he’d send us out on little missions, to recruit new soldiers for his army of objects.”

“So: a headmaster, and a playmate.”

Both, and neither. On some level he was just a man like other men, trying to eke some pleasure and meaning out of life amid frustrated hopes. It was clear, even to me as a young child, that there had been such hopes. I have a fancy that he’d been a university professor and lost his post. Or perhaps he’d only dreamed of becoming a professor but never earned the necessary qualifications.”

“And Binyomin’s mother?”

Mme Behr also had an air of disappointment. But she had artistic pursuits that, I think, gave her solace. Within the Alliance circle she was more noticeably foreign than M. Behr. She was Russian, or some kind of Slavic: a pale redhead. She spoke French with a thick, almost impenetrable, accent, much stronger than the whisper of German that clung to her husband’s French. I suppose they’d met in Paris, to which she’d fled from whatever pogrom, or war, or revolution, had driven her from her native country. She taught music and art at the Alliance girls’ school. About some things she was as fastidious as M. Behr; she’d complain, for instance, about the out-of-tune piano that stood in the pension lounge — pining, I understood, for the instrument she’d left behind in Paris.

She was always looking for picturesque houses and sites to sketch and paint. She was as attracted, in her way, to the souk as her husband was, and this laid the groundwork for a deeper connection between her and Maman. She had no chance of managing in the souk, with her alienness and her bare head, until Maman took her in hand. She couldn’t cope with the sudden random whistles, the jostlings, the whispers that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. She’d turn around and around and see only an endless flow of people going about their business. She’d wonder whether the whistles and jostlings and whispers had really happened, or whether she’d imagined them. She’d look away from her work for a moment and her paints and canvases would overturn. She’d try to maintain her composure, but one day when Maman was passing by and stopped to greet her, she burst into tears. So Maman took Mme Behr under her wing — or perhaps I should say, under her fins — and taught her to swim in the sea of the souk. She spoke with one of the merchants and persuaded him to allow la pauvre to finish her painting from his stall, under his protection.

So it was that Mme Behr managed to complete a painting at the souk — a single painting, after which she gave up and sought other subjects, in places where a woman could more easily manage alone.

But what a magnificent painting it was! The Behrs left it behind when they returned to Europe, as a special gift to Maman, and it hung in the pension lounge until we were smuggled out by the Agence Juive in the dead of night, never to return. A Muslim neighbor woman, a friend of Maman’s, sent word to us, sometime after our aliyah, that she’d removed it from the premises and was keeping it for us in her home; it probably hangs there still, but I’ll never set eyes on it again. Perhaps one of you grandchildren will go there, to my city on the sea, and visit that woman’s descendants, and bring the painting here to us.”

“Why bother? I can go to our Bedouin market right here, and take a snapshot for you.”

Ah, my little cynic … Mme Behr’s painting wasn’t some clichéd Middle Eastern market scene; nor was our city’s souk just any souk. It wasn’t like our miserable Be’er-Sheva market, with its smell of desert and desiccation, of barren distances crossed by camels indifferent to their own suffering. The market here smells like dry, listless sand; but there, in our souk, everything sparkled like the sea and carried the sea’s rich, living fragrance. And Mme Behr’s painting captured that glinting richness, the mounds of dried fruits and spices and finely-worked jewelry and opulent fabrics shimmering and hinting at yet greater, but hidden, treasures.

I understood Mme Behr was lonely, longing for things that were far away or that no longer existed. I knew her first name was Hélène, but there were times when M. Behr would address her, in a whisper, as Galina. She didn’t connect with any women other than Maman — not the locals, not the other Alliance teachers, not the wives of the foreign engineers and merchants. It wasn’t snobbery so much as awkwardness, an inability to catch the common tone. It fell to my sweet and good-natured Maman to pity her and show her warmth.

The four of us — Maman and I, Mme Behr and Binyomin — were thick as thieves. I remember us as being always together – sometimes in the pension courtyard, where the fountain drew me and Binyomin like a magnet, but more often on the beach. Always the images are of summer. Hours and hours it seems in my memory, days upon days, though Maman must have had very little time at her own command. Still I see us as in a changeless tableau — the two mothers at a slight distance, Mme Behr painting, Maman sewing or knitting, overseeing me and Binyomin as we play close to the water. We’d draw a line in the sand, try to guess whether the next wave would reach it, erase it. We’d build castles, every day persuading ourselves that we’d gone higher than the day before, and perhaps we were right. Perhaps our castles did grow as we grew that summer — gradually, and then all at once. I remember him, slender, dark — nearly as dark as me — physically unlike his mother, and no partner in her alienness. To me he was a natural feature of the landscape, or rather of the seascape — I felt the wind as a fluttering in his hair, I felt the sand as a tickle between his toes.

Periodically Binyomin and I would leave off our castle-building and run to the mothers, stumbling and laughing and holding out the treasures we’d found — the rich and strange jewels the sea had released from its depths. We’d dance and leap before them like court jesters, pulling faces and treating them to our loudest, most hilarious shrieks and yelps. And we’d observe the progress of Mme Behr’s painting, and of Maman’s embroidery work, curious but unawed by their everyday female magic, their power to spin something out of nothing. Did they spin stories as well? Or were their occupations too dissimilar for a shared rhythm to emerge?

Sometimes Mme Behr would try to repay Maman for her kindness by sitting her down for reading lessons. Maman would simply flush, and laugh. What do I need to read for? she’d say.

I learned to read in due course, at the Alliance School. This wasn’t a self-evident thing; our city had been the last holdout against the Alliance, and even in my day there was some uneasiness regarding the school. Our rabbis had objected to the project and hindered it for decades, due to the secularizing influence it had had elsewhere. They consented only when economic pressures worsened: the French language and the vocational skills the Alliance provided were tickets out of poverty. But the rabbis, at least in my day, kept the school on a short leash — otherwise your great-grandparents would never have sent any of us children there, you can be sure.

“Oh, I’m sure.”

You laugh at those ‘ancients’ and their outmoded ways, but you’ve no idea how brave they were, to move to the city and undertake business serving the foreign element — especially since it involved residing outside the walls of the mellah, the Jewish quarter. We weren’t the only Jews, or even the first, to do this; and indeed our pension was only a few steps from the mellah wall. The king himself, in those days, guaranteed the safety of the Jews who moved outside the mellah, just as he guaranteed the safety of those within. Still it was a risk, in terms of appearances, my parents’ standing in the Jewish community.”

“So why did they do it, these great-grandparents I’ve been hearing about forever, for whom the traditions and the old ways were so important? Why leave the village where they were born, and take such a risk?”

They were dreadfully, crushingly poor. The Jews in their village had been famous far and wide for their weaving and embroidery— this work my hands are busy with right now, which you and my other granddaughters are too impatient to learn, is an echo of that occupation. But factory textiles killed their livelihood. Papa dealt a bit in leather goods, but it wasn’t enough. Maman and Papa could certainly have tolerated a little poverty; what drove them from the village was death, the deaths of their babies. There were four who died between my sister Miriam and me, and another one after me who didn’t make it; Maman herself almost didn’t survive that last village birth. Papa wanted his wife to live, and not to see any more babies die, and to have a son. They knew the city doctors might have spared them some, or perhaps all, of their losses. They concluded that a live Jewish baby amid the temptations of the city was better than another dead Jewish baby in the village. So they left.

“And the Jews inside the mellah accepted them? They didn’t ostracize them for living outside?”

No. Papa was a risk-taker, but only to a point. He did his homework, and the gamble paid off. He knew the tide was turning in favor of greater openness, greater interaction with non-Jewish society; and then there was the king’s special affection and protection, which held at least for a time. Our pension benefited the residents inside the walls; it generated business for them. Papa was respected and we were welcomed.

And I went to the Alliance school. An arrangement had been reached with the rabbis, mainly involving Torah study, especially for the boys. The arrangement worked rather well, at least for a time. We girls learned to read, unlike many of our mothers, and we gained both more religious and more secular learning than we’d have had otherwise, though not enough to turn our heads and make us, chalila, despise the roles for which we were destined. We mastered the all-important French language, acquired some bookkeeping and typing skills that helped us supplement our family incomes later on, and got a little art and music instruction into the bargain.

But by the time I started at the Alliance school, Binyomin’s parents no longer taught there. They didn’t stick it out for very long on our sun-bleached shore. Perhaps M. Behr got his professorial appointment in the end. I don’t remember our farewells, or watching them board their ship, or anything related to their departure except the word Frankfurt, which I understood to be their destination. Frankfurt is in Germany, but we heard some time later, through the Alliance people, that M. Behr had afterward returned to Paris. This would have been shortly before the war started. Somehow it was implied that he went to Paris alone; that Mme Behr and Binyomin had gone somewhere else. Knowing now what was happening in Europe at the time, I can only hope that my little friend and his mother found their way to a safer place than France proved to be for M. Behr.”

“You mean they were in the Shoah, Savta? But isn’t it possible that they came here?”

Anything's possible, but I have no evidence that they did — and I’ve made inquiries. I pray they didn’t perish in the tofet. As for M. Behr, we heard rumors, much later, after the war, that he’d been killed at the Spanish border, trying to flee the Nazis. Killed, or perhaps took his own life, chas v’shalom. Different versions came down to us.

“You must have missed Binyomin after he left.”

No, not that I recall. In some sense, for me, he never really left. He remained a presence in my life, invisible but tangible in all sorts of places and situations. When we learned the French alphabet at school, I felt he was talking to me through the letters. And when I sat down on the rim of the courtyard fountain and gazed into its little surrounding pool – his reflection gazed back out at me. And of course when I stood on the beach and looked out at the sea — well, the sea itself was Binyomin. I received just one letter from him in the post, after they left. A picture he’d drawn, a kishkush balevush, as you children say here, with his name printed above it, which I decoded by instinct before I could read it. I kept the letter like a treasure, all the years of my childhood. I’d take it out and pore over it — not just the picture but also the envelope, which seemed to bear the imprint of the sea in its wavy postmark.

Yet however entwined Binyomin’s invisible presence was in the fabric of my life, throughout the years of my girlhood — however patiently I awaited him and however devoutly I believed in his eventual return — it must be said that, after he left and I started school, I entered a stage of life in which he could have played no meaningful role even had he remained. I’ve always called this stage, in my heart, the ‘stage of the girls.’ Suddenly, everything was girls. Girls in the schoolroom, girls in the play-yard, girls in the after-school hours; girls in the women’s section of the beit knesset. Even at the beach, I was surrounded by girls. Whether there was an enforced physical separation I don’t know, but I’m sure we wouldn’t have noticed any boys had they been present, so wrapped up in each other were we girls. All our play was girls’ play, doll play — mother-and-baby games, princess-in-castle games. Now we built sandcastles not to see how high they would go, but so that we could put our improvised maidens in them and stage abductions, rescues, poisonings, enchanted slumbers and awakenings. Always someone would be under the influence of a potion, only to be recalled to life by her destined prince, whom she would recognize as such without ever having seen him before. How did she know it was him?

And at home: girls’ work. No longer was I the spoiled youngest child. My sister Miriam joined us in the city, married in due course and began having babies, and my own Maman was blessed, finally, with several more children who survived, and I became the chief helper of both.

The earlier ‘Binyomin’ stage wasn’t entirely forgotten; it remained within the ‘girl’ stage like a kernel. My friends and I were like a cast of characters for each other’s personal dramas, which were really the same drama with endless permutations. For me this drama was the fairy tale at whose end I’d awaken from prolonged slumber and find myself back on the beach with Binyomin. I suppose, now, that each of us girls had her own Binyomin, real or imagined. My Binyomin indeed was both real and imagined.

When I was in my early teens, there was an event that briefly, for the space of an evening, made an interlude in all this girlishness.

It was the festive meal after the conclusion of Pesach. I was helping Maman prepare the food, together with my sister Miriam and other local women, friends and neighbors who'd gathered with their families at the pension, to celebrate with us. Long tables were set up in the courtyard, on either side of the fountain, making an informal but effective partition between the men and the women.

On motza'ei Pesach we'd scatter gold coins and jewelry on the tables and along the stone rim of the fountain, symbols of luck and abundance. The tables were laden with all good things, the things we still enjoy every year – fried dough dripping with oil, sweets dripping with honey. You know it's our custom on that night to have whole fish on the table, another symbol – but our courtyard fountain already teemed with live, moving, gleaming fish.

Maman and I brought a fresh set of steaming, fragrant platters to the tables. The men talked amongst themselves on their side of the courtyard – of the king, the French, the works in the city, the port that was nearing completion at long last. To me it was an indistinct buzz of no interest; I preferred the women's chatter. I was turning back to the kitchen when Maman suddenly tapped my arm, and with her eyes directed my attention toward a slender young man who stood near the fountain, partly obscured by it. My eye caught his and we held each other's gaze for a moment, until his shyness, and my own, broke the connection. Still I could perceive a gentle smile playing on his lips. Maman whispered: The son of Ohana, the jeweler.

And from that moment I knew what was to be, and rejoiced in it. From time to time, across the bustle and din that divided us that night, we glimpsed each other again, exchanged shy but serene smiles. Separated yet connected by a fine thread of vision, like two people bidding each other farewell as one of them sails away.

"You fell in love with him because your mother told you he was a good match."

Why not?

“And that was that.”

Much could have happened – much did happen – between that night and the next time we met. But, as it turned out – that was that.

Still, the next morning I awoke once more into my everyday reality — or perhaps it’s just as correct to say that I sank once more into the slumber of girlhood. My prince really did embark on a journey, some sort of business apprenticeship with a distant branch of his family, while I returned to my girlish routine: school, chores, caring for my little siblings and nieces and nephews, chit-chat with my schoolmates, girlish laughter, princess games. And little sorties into the city. The merchants in the souk knew us by sight and by name, smiled benevolently and handed out small treats to us — a date, a fig. And the European part of the city tempted us with its wide avenues and its modern shops and its ladies, beautifully coiffed and elegantly shod, gleaming black pumps over sleek hosiery. The city continued to grow up and out; trade flourished and businesses thrived; French became ever more widely spoken; foreigners thronged to our shores in ever-greater numbers with their music, their art, their alphabet, until we no longer knew, at times, what language we were speaking. And all this multiplicity of tongues, of customs, of cultures, created an atmosphere of great wealth, and great excitement, a rich stew building to a boil.

Amid all this roiling intensity, Maman gave birth to three more babies who lived and thrived; I was like a second mother to them. And the king whose beneficence had enveloped us for so long died, and was succeeded by his son, and we thought: How wonderful that we have a king, how wonderful that we have a king.

The port was completed at long last and we went, with our fellow citizens, to see it dedicated by our new, young, and winsome king. How we loved him, how we shrieked our joy. He welcomes us warmly, and his golden robes ripple in the breeze like waves, flash in the sun like the sea that spreads before us. How proud we are! Finally we have our port, for the glory of our king, may his greatness be ever amplified. And here he has come to speak to us and be with us. And the women’s ululations and the men’s cheers blend with the roaring of the waves until they become indistinguishable, they are one.

Yet amid the joyous din another noise rises, disrupting the oneness, distinguishing itself; a moment’s boom but we perceived it in slow motion, intensifying gradually, barely noticed until it was over and then we screamed and wrung our hands: how had we missed it, how had we missed it? As though we’d known what was about to happen but had been kept by some kind of accursed paralysis from taking action.

The king survived the attentat and was rushed away; he took refuge in another city, secluding himself in his palace there and risking no more revelations on the sea. We never saw him more. The crowd that day dispersed, each to his business and his community, if not to his routine. We girls felt the change. The next day, the merchants in the souk didn’t smile at us as before. The one with the gold tooth who offered the plumpest fruits suddenly turned his head away, unwilling to see us. And the fat, jokey one who used to fling out a few candies indiscriminately for us to catch now made a point of noticing us individually, eyeing up our figures, calling each by name to take her treat directly from his hand. We were shocked, and frightened, and fled.

Even the beach became a place of tension for us. The harassments to which we were now subject were mirrored by a kind of inner disquiet. No longer did we frolic or build sandcastles; we sat, limbs askew, like marionettes on slackened strings. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves; we absorbed the sun and heat and waited. Finally we gave up on the sea and sought our pleasure on the broad thoroughfares of the modern city, with its glittering shops and its magical display windows.

We stood before those smooth, tranquil glass surfaces and scrutinized the jewels, the cosmetics, the scarves, and all the other exquisite adornments that hovered behind them like colorful fish in enchanted ponds. We formed and exchanged our opinions about these treasures, defended and refuted them, reached our conclusions. But always we’d end by standing silently before our reflections, each princess asking her own question and seeking her own answer.

And one day I’m peering with the girls at an exceptionally splendid display — bracelets of luxuriant massiveness, delicate filigree necklaces, jewelled rings. Wherever your eye falls, there’s another shimmering, precious bauble and you don’t know how you’ve lived without it all your life. And now you identify the one that’s truly meant for you, the magic fish that glints for you alone, teasingly present yet unattainable, and you want to throw a coin at it and see how it will grant your wish, what shape it will take.

And I grow bold, start to tease the fish myself, make my own magic. My gaze flicks back and forth from the shiny bauble to my own reflected face; I catch the fish and hold it forcibly at the surface, then let it sink back below as I focus again on my own flat, silent image.

Eventually I try to hold both images with my gaze — the jewel and my reflection, the fish and the princess; but it’s hard, the moment cannot contain both. It must be one or the other. And then, just as I despair of uniting both images, just as I reconcile myself to having to choose between them … just then, as though born of my own despair, yet another form materializes behind the watery glass, gazing out at me: him!”

“Him?”

The self-same. Back from his journey, back from over the sea, closer than ever and with no barrier between us except the glass, his gentle smile superimposed on my own lips. We entered the shop, I and my coterie of girls, and led him outside with ululations and clapping, stumbling over ourselves laughing. Only then did I realize what girls are for — to escort you as you bring your beloved to your home, to your mother, and then on the appointed day to accompany you to the chuppah.

Within a month we were married, and the girls dispersed, each one dropping out of the group as I had, each proceeding to her own destiny. They’d fulfilled their function, and moved on. As had I.”

“You were still so young. Fifteen! Ima told me that. You hadn’t even finished school, and Saba was already a grown man who’d travelled, a businessman.”

Yes. He was lovely.

“Didn’t you feel that he’d already had … experiences? That he’d lived, and you hadn’t?”

Externalities, little one. Trivialities.

“And what of Binyomin? You forgot him, in the end.”

Mah pitom. I never forgot Binyomin. How could I? After all these years in the desert, do you think I’ve ever forgotten the sea? There are things that belong to the land, and things that belong to the sea … Binyomin is of the sea.”

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