With the compensation money he received following a work accident in which his hand got stuck in a kneading machine at a bakery, my father bought a plot of land in Ramat Chen on which my parents built a house. It was in 1963, and at the cost of one finger and a ruined palm, we moved from a small apartment on Modi’in Street in Ramat Gan to a house in the suburbs with a prestigious image. I was in the third grade and I don’t know how this transition affected the arc of my life. I have no idea.
There are movies where the hero returns to visit his childhood home. In these screenplays, the pregnant woman opens to the viewer a window into a past relevant to the narrative that would otherwise be hidden from it. Sometimes the hero stands outside and looks at the house, full of wonder that after so many years the house remains as it was; If he is a president or George Colney, the residents of the house let him in, walk around the rooms that have been emptied of personal content and look for the bottom of the shelf on which he has carved his name with a penknife.
Time has not touched the house my parents built 60 years ago; It is one of the houses in Ramat Chen that stands out for the fact that it was not renovated, it was not destroyed and a new one was built under it. The same square fort with a thick, flat concrete roof, brick walls, pebbled driveway and covered parking that my mother added. Even the key in the shape of a lion’s head remained on the door. It seems that over the years the house has sunk into the ground; It looks like the top of the bunkers the Germans built in Normandy before the Invasion, if I remember The Longest Day. In my mind alone, a battle is going on between the sad memories and the good moments. These are sad days that shape my feelings, but I am proud that my parents built a special house that survived.
My father died too young, and the shock and longing for him always overshadowed my mother’s personality, work, dedication and fine taste. It was unfair to her, and it would be good if we got out of this trap sooner. My father put his hand and my mother’s soul into the house. Besides, as men of his generation were wont to do, he was too busy going into the details. He must have participated in the decision to let two young architects at the beginning of their career design the house.
It is important to know: the lots in Ramat Chen are small; Maximum utilization of building percentages leaves a narrow strip of grass surrounding them and the fence kisses the neighbor’s bathroom window. There were sometimes arguments about this too. On the other hand, on the narrow strip of grass behind the house, in the summer of 1977 we put up a canopy and got married under it. On the grass that faced the sidewalk, members of the Palmach generation sat and sang with Gil Aldama on the accordion; in the back, friends from the core drank tequila that I brought from America and smoked. The corks popped, and Levana’s catering stood cold in the ovens until my father pulled a cable from the neighbors.
The architectural concept was revolutionary: the thick concrete ceiling remained exposed and gray even inside the house. It did not lie on the walls and sealed them from heat and cold, but was placed on high beams; Between the walls and the ceiling there was a space of a centimeter that was supposed to be for ventilation. One of the rooms is called an inner courtyard; A barred gate was built instead of an outer wall. There were beds of earth for flowers on the floor and thick slits were cut in the ceiling that let in daylight.
It was avant-garde, but in the bathroom you sat with the walls touching your shoulders and you could hold the door closed with your foot. The kitchen cabinets were blue (or burgundy), there was a dining table for four and it betrayed my mother’s special touch with smart shelves, art details and well-kept collections. My parents insisted on a fireplace in the living room, with a huge copper hood and a small chimney that didn’t draw smoke and upset my father. My parents turned it on about ten times. The furniture was Danish, with wooden handles and legs and light brown corduroy cushions. Today it would be considered a desirable retro. Everyone slept on Gumavir mattresses. All this in the year Kennedy was assassinated.
It was revolutionary but impractical. One night we woke up because my father was standing on a ladder, pushing sponges in the gap between the ceiling and the walls and cursing. A wind whistled in the house, rain came in and he was fed up. It is not pleasant that a concept collapses. Sometime after my time in the house, the inner courtyard was enclosed by a wall, my parents paved the beds and plugged the slits in the ceiling. A TV room makes more sense. We also learned that you can’t sleep under a bare concrete ceiling, which was like looking into a black hole in the universe. The ceiling was in our faces, until they did the right thing and whitewashed it.
After my father’s death, my mother stayed at home. In the evenings when we came to sit with her and watch Channel 1, the house was dark, like a dimmed beam of light; She looked small in her armchair. The roots of the tree raised the cobblestones in front of the house, there was a wave of burglaries in the street and the loneliness oppressed. My mother sold the house and moved to the heart of Tel Aviv.
Once a decade I pass the house and wonder if it is still there, as my mother left it. It is still special but no longer betrays the adventurous nature of those who built it. The house was my mother’s kingdom. She liked the man who brought us eggs home. The children called him “Eggs!” in a coat and imitated the way he used to announce himself when he pushed his tricycle down the street, loaded with egg trays to bursting. Rarely and only on the plains, he would climb onto the leather saddle and pedal with what seemed to be his remaining strength, moving his body from side to side, hamsin or storm. He always wore many layers of clothes, all thick and wintery, a knitted woolen scarf around his neck and a loose casket on his head.
The skin of his face was red and shiny, like an armchair that had seen better days; His blue eyes had a clear watery look, like a wave that doesn’t reach the shore. His hands were large, rough and grooved. I have never seen anything more delicate than “eggs” under the strict supervision of my mother, picking a mold for her, the best eggs from the many trays with which he entered the kitchen from the side door.
I didn’t understand eggs and I wasn’t a connoisseur either, what’s more, an egg was never served alone. But they were big, white and some of them had sticks of straw from the chicken coop stuck to them. In retrospect, I realized that there was no stamp of tnuva on them, which made me terribly happy and intensified the feeling of conquered rebellion. We were desperados under the trees.
My mother and “eggs” spoke Polish, which is not a happy language; Everything was halting, jumpy and puzzling. The foreign sentences that they exchanged could be seen floating in the kitchen back and forth and connecting to a collective kind that only generations with a Holocaust behind them understood. My mother was a strict woman in every field and matter, but she had a warm corner in her heart for “eggs”. She offered him something cold to drink in the summer and hot in the winter.
Sometimes “Eggs” would overcome his sense of persecution, relax his neck, sit on the edge of a chair, look nervously at the open door and speak in his rustic Polish. My mother chose her best sighs of identification and sometimes looked around as if she was looking for the architects of the final solution to get rid of them. “Eggs” never skipped ruffling my hair, pulling my chin and saying something in Polish that sounded full of compassion. He left the kitchen with his heavy steps, like someone walking in neck-deep water. My mother told me that I knew nothing and that I would never know what it was like to be “eggs”. When I asked her, she replied that maybe it’s better that way.
In the summer, many years before the extended family on my father’s side began to disintegrate due to a severe blood feud and disappeared through the cracks, I was sometimes invited during the holidays to Aunt Bracha. It’s hard to believe, but a few meters from Borochov Street in Givatayim, there were still chicken coops and barns. Bracha woke me up early in the morning and sent me to the coop with a straw basket to collect eggs. Behind the initiative was my father, who insisted that I work in the summer so that I would see “that money doesn’t grow on trees.” There are not many things more exciting than collecting warm eggs in the coop. I hate that hairy and ugly testicles are called eggs.
Meir Shalev once described an omelet burnt at the edges that he used to make and how delicious and dear to his heart it was. Writers fake verbal orgasms without meaning to. For those who have eaten eggs in all forms of preparation and all over the world, there is a complete match between an egg as it should be and the image it seeks to project. Grandma Hana knew how to make two omelets from one egg, in margarine. For years I tried to convince her to increase the amount for me, especially during the days of my sudden growth in height, but she had strict instructions from my father who told me calories and did not trust his mother not to exceed. “Don’t touch!” Grandma shouted when someone innocent and well-fed entered the balcony in the morning and looked at the table, “This is Ronel’s omelette.”
There isn’t a morning when I wake up and don’t plan how I’m going to make myself a soft-boiled egg, place it in one of the special egg stands I’ve collected over the years, cut off its narrow head with special scissors, dip the tip of toast into it like any of the British actors who played Churchill, and convince myself that life Worth the extra effort. Coddled egg, an egg that is cooked in a special porcelain dish with a stainless steel screw lid and delicate flower paintings, I made once. It was less than I expected, perhaps because the water in which the dish was cooked seeped into it. But I am convinced that one day I will have a regular egg.
Rosa, the great seamstress in the floral dress and the chronic allergy, came to see my mother twice a year. My mother bought fabrics in south Tel Aviv; Sometimes it seems that the fabrics were intended for curtains, due to their thickness and weight, which is not an insinuation that my mother had bad taste, God forbid. She had the good taste of a Polish noblewoman who came to Israel as a teenager and assimilated the local garnet aspect of the appearance and the summer climate. While waiting for Rosa, my mother made sketches and took notes on how to explain to the mythical seamstress where she was going fashion-wise.
Years later I realized who Rosa—last name never said—reminded me; Julia Child, who brought French cooking to America. A tall, gaunt woman, with a voice that ranged between chirping octaves and swallowed by irregular breathing, who walked with scattered limbs and challenged coordination. A force of nature that was hard to resist.
The day before Rosa’s arrival, a tense silence fell on the house where my mother’s desperate flipping through the pages of “Borda” could be heard like whiplash. Rosa was Lola Bar of the petty bourgeoisie. A sewing bar for the mining circle of the painter Reuven Rubin and his wife; Rosa sewed for those who saw Reuven’s works at an exhibition or had a father whose paintings hung in his gallery. Getting a rosacea a day every six months was rarer than an appointment for open heart surgery at Danny Gore’s.
If, God forbid, the sewing was prolonged, the overtime rate brought families to the brink of starvation. I once dared to remark to my mother that if she had deducted from Rosa’s working day the time she devoted to sewing her nose to the cheers of a wounded elephant, she would have saved the extra hours. My father, who got up at four in the morning for work, tried to take a nap during the afternoon, and Rosa’s blows did not help his sleep disorder, from which he woke up screaming and feeling suffocated. My mother sent me to my room to delve into “Skyscraper Jets” by Emmanuel Ben-Gurion.
It was in the 1960s at the height of the practical era in the nation’s fashion development. Not a single inch of fabric was lost. Rosa made dresses from curtains and curtains from dresses. Half a meter of expensive excess fabric, became a hat that no one wore. I don’t know much about women’s fashion, but to me the whole wardrobe that Rosa sewed for us reminded me of what Maria and the girls wore in “The Sound of Music” from 1965. There, too, they sewed dresses from curtains, so they all looked like Steve Martin disguised as Taft in “The Pink Panther 2”.
Rosa’s style was “unfulfilled pregnancy”. The dresses she sewed looked immediately ready for pregnancy, in terms of size and cut. Because my mother had a fixation on sewing her and my sister matching dresses, sometimes the discussion degenerated into arguments that Rosa watched from the sidelines with a thin smile of someone who knows how it will end.
Unlike my father who hid in the bedroom, my fate did not improve. Rosa and my mother represented a great obsession with lanterns – the tendency in those days to tighten men’s shirts so that they were stretched like a second skin – and the wet look shirts or other patterned freaks my mother bought me. A whole hour was dedicated to making shirts. To know how much to put in, Rosa insisted on her duty to measure me. She had a more accurate record than a “drop of milk” of my development; It was a moment of personal victory when she untied the meter of fabric from my waist and declared that I had lost 4 cm and together with my mother patted my flat stomach. As mentioned, my mother was a woman with distinct aesthetic and design tendencies and we were all projects.
Until I was about 16, my mother insisted on dragging me to the “Roman” clothing store on Bialik Street in Ramat Gan. Heavy because there was a lot of trillin and school uniforms and conservative clothes that represented the spirit of the time. My head was already elsewhere, but there is only one mother and I went with her. These are not days and clothes I am proud of, but up to a certain age I was a good boy in the obedient sense and my mother was a force of nature. Since then I haven’t worn Trilin and I haven’t worn skirted shoes.
I miss my parents, who fade in my memories as I try to hold on to them. We usually remember how they looked and behaved at the end; The big moments, the greatest hits, become a blur. They regain their full responsibility and authority over me in rare moments and break my heart. I left the house in Ramat Chen in 1972 and haven’t lived in it since. The dear people are gone, but the house still stands there as an architectural challenge. I have no doubt that he is sinking.