Read The Pale of Settlement for Free Online Page B

is round. The ship from Trieste pitched forward and fell right off the edge. The gulls wheeled up off the deck and screamed into the wind. Here in Haifa, it is primitive, dusty, dirty, hot. It is the Orient, the Levant, the Near East but not nearly near enough. The road they live on is unpaved. Only cold water from the tap. Lila boils the drinking water, scrubs the fruit and vegetables with soap, makes sure to toast the bread. She pores over the notebook her cook gave her when they left, recipes handwritten in a slanting German scrawl. She cooks in the heat of the afternoon while Josef takes his nap—the kind of food they’re used to, too heavy for this climate—Wiener schnitzel, potato salad, a chocolate roulade. It is just so
uncivilized
, she writes to her sister in a letter she will never read. Everyone wears khaki shirts and shorts—even the girls! You see women squatting by the roadside, breaking paving stones, while Herr Doktor Professor drives a bus. Even Josef has had to take work selling curtains door to door. There are fedayeen and jackals in the hills. At night, the jackals come down into the wadi behind our house; you can hear them howling at the moon.
Lila’s Story
    Everything was so difficult for me then. The boys ran wild; I wasn’t used to doing everything myself. Back home, you understand, Ihad my cook and nanny, my parents and my sister close to me. So I thought I would be happier living on a kibbutz. I would do any work they wanted me to do—picking oranges at dawn, or weeding in the fields—in exchange for the communal kitchen and dining hall, the children’s quarters, the company of friends. We went to visit Deganya and I was so enthusiastic, I couldn’t stop talking about it for days. But your grandfather said no. We are not socialists or Bolsheviks, he said. It is not what we are used to. It is not our way. And, of course, he was right.
Merkaz
    Back in Haifa for the first time since her death, I retrace my grandmother’s steps. I’ve been coming here since I was a child, and it’s a child’s universe I know: the shady playground in the Gan Ha’em; Panorama Street with its picture-postcard view; the shortcut, slippery with dead pine needles, around the back of my grandparents’ old flat. I walk up Hanassi toward the town center, the
merkaz
, the way my grandmother did each day: past the Delek station on the corner, past the soldiers smoking outside the barracks gate, past the Dan Carmel and Panorama hotels, past Goldman’s art gallery, an indoor mall, the entrance to the Carmelit. I pass an ice-cream shop, a pizza parlor, branches of the banks Leumi and Hapoalim. Here at the corner there used to be a handbag shop, dim and pungent with the smell of leather hides. Next door, now gone as well, there was a toy store stacked with dolls in cardboard boxes crinkly with cellophane. Across the street, Mr. Schaeffer’s market is still there, although someone else in a white apron is standing by the door. Here, around the corner, is Steimatsky’s, the English-language bookstore, and here’s the newsstand where my grandmotherbought me treats—I remember the Bazooka bubble gum with Hebrew comic strips, glass bottles of Fanta with paper straws that unraveled when they got wet, the bars of Elite chocolate my grandmother liked best. Further on, up the hill, are more cafés, the concert hall, the tennis club, a shady park. There, I sat on a bench in the late afternoon while my grandmother told stories. An Egged bus pulls away from the light with a black cloud of exhaust. The air smells of diesel fumes, of pine and eucalyptus, of garbage ripening in the sun. Childhood smells. So are these my grandmother’s footsteps or my own?
Palestine 1941
    Lila walks with her three dogs: a spaniel, a terrier, and a little white one of indeterminate breed. Her bunions hurt but she ignores the pain. No, she doesn’t ignore it—the pain is