Have you ever wondered how a Jewish couple felt when they kissed for the first time in Warsaw, on the first day of September 1939? Were the clouds of war tied in the sky of love and managed to overshadow even the most intimate and sweetest moments, or maybe in those seconds the expected German invasion was pushed out of consciousness, the (less expected) hand of the allies running out and the hardships (whose horrifying faces could not be foreseen) that were on the way? What happened to the one who fell in love in the fall of 1939, just before the sky fell on his head? If he had known what was expected of him, would he have chosen differently? Would he have given up that distilled moment of happiness? That is, what would he give up if he could choose: life or its taste?
I’m not comparing, God forbid, not between the circumstances – and certainly not regarding the expected results – but at the same time, in recent days I’ve been surrounded by quite a few people who have stopped consuming news out of a naive belief that ignoring it will allow them to deal with their own. I must admit that to a certain extent I am also one of them, less due to not recognizing the magnitude of the hour, more due to a complete reservation from certain factions on the side that is supposedly “mine”. The problem is that sometimes, when the struggle is led by extremists, there is no chance of replacing them (on both sides) with a moderate leadership that will return keep the business in proportion and don’t rush to turn a legitimate adversary into a demonic enemy, you may be forced to choose a side: not to look left and right, literally, to wonder about the machinations of those standing in the trenches next to you, but to see only the target that is in front of you – and attack it until it is conquered by them whose main strength is in their language.
I wish this scenario is still within reach, not only because of the horror that lies ahead, but mainly because in such a fratricidal war, the only possible victory is a Pyrrhic victory.
Armed with the hope that his mercy will make peace for us and for all of Israel, I will allow myself one more moment of escapism: her 16th birthday is the first I remember.
It was the first time I came to her parents’ house, a boy a little over 14 years old (you won’t believe it, but the difference between us remains the same even today!). She baked borax with her own hands, which really impressed me at the time (to this day she is a gifted baker, although the borax has moved to my jurisdiction: she is only interested in sweets). At the end of that month (March 1984) we started dating, which lasted a little more than “two years and a lifetime”.
Six years later, I am already after Lebanon and Gaza, a proud construction worker on the scaffolding in Sydney, Australia. And suddenly, a letter from her. From the distance of the years it is amazing to remember how the mail was the main means of communication, in an era when a phone call abroad cost almost as much as an apartment (although it should be noted that real estate was cheaper then). In that letter she described in an amusing but sensitive way how a family of new immigrants from Russia settled in the neighbor’s house. That’s how I learned that the wave of immigration from the Soviet Union began.
The letters from her did not stop even when I left Australia behind and continued to move and wander: a letter from her was waiting for me at every central post office in India, Nepal and Thailand, although in retrospect it turned out that I had missed some of them – go trust the postal services in Kathmandu. Either way, I was captivated by her words.
Of the two of us, she is the more talented writer (even if the less experienced). From time to time, when I used the journalistic platforms that were available to me to rant about us, I threatened to speak to the editor so that she would be given the right to comment.
“Write,” I always told her, “I’ll make sure it gets published,” but she never picked up the keyboard, luckily for me – and maybe luckily for her too, because after all, of the two of us, she’s the one who has a more rewarding job today. I won’t bore you with the short history of our relationship, which sometimes seems like a roller coaster ride. I will also refrain from the details for reasons of personal modesty, but perhaps mainly because on Sunday you will be forced to return to work, while if I do, I will perhaps only reach the fifth year out of 39 gross years, of which more than 30 are the religion of Moses and Israel.
That is why I would like my “friend” Jacques Berel to lend me his words, translated by Naomi Shemer and masterfully performed by Yossi Banai, to say: “We knew fire, we knew thunder – and twenty-year-old love. We ran away from each other many times, but we would return.” I remembered that birthday, this week, when I wondered if I should reserve a place in advance at the restaurants we visited at the destination we booked a short vacation to, to mark 39 years to that day (do the math yourself, you’ll never get an explicit number from me!). I have a feeling that with all the longing for the taste of youth, this time we won’t settle for Borax.
So after I was previously helped by the trio Berl, Shemer and Banai to describe, I hope it will not be impudence if I ask them to also summarize for me: “Here nothing is like what has passed, what has escaped, what is going on with us.” There is a continuation of the song, but I am unable to write him without tears.