Art of a Jewish Woman (8 page)

Peri analyzed how European socialists, once arrived in Palestine, took reactionary social positions, and how European Zionism became something very different in Palestine. The Zionists were no longer inclusive workers’ socialist action movements, but rather became like landlords appropriating property for individuals belonging to one group.

Felice wondered why her father, who had sacrificed so much for her that it even set her mother against him, sent her to this land. There was trouble at home, but there was killing here. She didn’t understand at the time that her father was grasping at straws to keep her from returning to Poland and this was the one he had picked. She didn’t know what life was like at home and how many would die there.

She didn’t know how fragile life had also become in France. Gabriel Peri was
L’Humanité’s
chief foreign correspondent. The Gestapo killed him on December 15, 1941, when they occupied Paris because he had denounced the 1939 Hitler–Stalin peace pact for what it was—a ploy to give Hitler more time to build up his forces so he could invade Russia.

Her job in Jaffa gone, Felice was penniless, her last pay already gone toward her room and board. She didn’t have enough food again and returned to the beach to think about her very personal struggle--learning how to exist with hunger, with little or no money, trying to practice her profession, dealing with men courting her, and still keeping her pride.

“Somehow I could laugh at it. I told myself I had to get acquainted with my reality, dominate it. Today I don’t have anything, I told myself, tomorrow I won’t have anymore, but one day I will have something. I mocked my anger and poverty.”

Then another newspaper posting led to her next position in Haifa, the small city she had passed through on the train from Beirut. Haifa was like a jewel facing the sea; the sky was beautiful. The little houses were like pastels looking down on the water. By then it was Palestine’s main port, built on hills rising from a symmetrical bay. She carried her life with her—her diploma from Nancy, her Polish passport, her British Mandate passport, and her bag of instruments.

A dentist named Eliyahu Katz needed Felice’s French dental surgeon’s diploma. He had a busy practice in Haifa, but like her employer in Jerusalem, he didn’t have a license. He had learned dentistry by apprenticing to his aunt, who had been professionally educated in Moscow. His aunt, however, had fallen in love with a visiting Russian and returned with him to their homeland. Before long, Eliyahu had fallen in love himself, with Felice. He proposed marriage and began his campaign to woo her. He introduced her to his family. His mother found the young doctor a room in the home of a neighbor.

It was Sabbath evening, and she was putting on her high heels with the ankle strap. Then she had to do her makeup. Katz was coming soon to take her to dinner with his mother, as he did most Fridays. Looking at herself in the mirror, straightening her dress so it hung just right, she wondered:
Is my beauty a curse or a blessing for a young woman?
She shrugged. What could she do? She was not going to hide herself. She applied an extra stroke of mascara.

Her wit and spirit made her physical attractiveness all the more powerful. Some weekends Katz took her skiing in the mountains outside Beirut. Although Katz didn’t spare money entertaining her, her salary remained a pitiful five pounds a month, standard in those days for her position.
Perhaps
, she thought,
he is keeping my salary at base level so that I will see marriage as a way of advancement. His proposals are tedious, but the outings are escapes from the political turmoil and violence.

They were Felice’s first real vacations as a young adult. She was very bad at skiing because she had never been on a snow-covered mountain before. No, she was dumb. Yes, dumb and courageous. She never worried about what might happen. She never took a lesson. Once she lost her balance going up a lift that pulled skiers up a track, and fell all the way down the track into the base cabin. Eliyahu was terrified. She got up laughing and just got back on the conveyance and started over. The scent of the cedars in the crisp air on Mt. Hermon was unbelievable to her, yet at the same time she was wondering if her mother, always resentful of the money her father spent on her, would be jealous of how lavishly Eliyahu was treating her.

They spoke mostly French with each other, and more Hebrew—his native tongue—as Felice’s improved. In March 1937, the Passover holiday approaching, he suggested, “Why don’t we book passage to Algeria for a few days?”

On board he toasted, “To our wedding.”

Felice responded, “Eliyahu, you are so kind, but I need more time.”

“It is getting late, dear Felice.”

“Getting late for what.”

“You are twenty-seven years old.”

“That is just a number. I don’t feel like a number.”

When they returned, Felice went to her sister Hanka’s kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee to talk with her about Eliyahu. After dinner they lingered in the communal dining hall: “What do you think I should do? He won’t give up; he’s devoted to me.”

Hanka, as pretty as her sister though taller and more voluptuous, knew about men. “He’s tall, well built, good looking. He’s decent and well off. You should marry him.”

“Do you marry every man you kiss?”

“Of course not, but think about your situation.”

“There’s something missing. There’s some sense of authority missing in him. He’s not a university graduate.” That’s what her father had always wanted for her.

“He makes as much money as a university graduate; more than most.”

“I’m sick of the word marriage. I’m suffocating in it. I have to escape. And I need to find a way to make more money because every cent I earn goes to my room and board. I have no money for books, for concerts, for the theater, for clothes.”

“Why can’t you be more patient?” Hanka had found Lova, her husband-to-be, by now. They would leave the kibbutz in the not too distant future for Tel Aviv, where Lova would find a job driving a city bus and stay with the same company for the rest of his career, rising to be the director. Their ambition was to have children and build a small home on the outskirts of the city.

But Felice—Fegele, the little bird—was still in flight. She wrote her parents, telling them that she needed a way to earn more money in order to have a fuller life, that Palestine was too impoverished and she wanted more possibilities. In turn her mother, Bela, put aside whatever envy she may have had for the benefit of Felice, as she did for all of her children, and wrote to her brother, Solomon, in New Haven, Connecticut. Looking for a better life, he had left their Polish village of Kolno as a teenager, and now had a successful store that sold general household supplies like their parents’ own store in Kolno. Solomon replied quickly that he and his family would welcome Felice. He enclosed a ticket to America.

Felice announced her decision to Eliyahu: “You are a fine man. I have the greatest respect for you, and deep affection for what you have offered me, but I can’t stay here. My uncle in America is willing to receive me.”

First, however, she wanted to say goodbye to her parents. Eliyahu responded, “I will give you $75 dollars so you can return to Poland to visit your parents before leaving. If you don’t find what you are looking for in America, come back and marry me and you won’t have to return the money to me. If you don’t return to Palestine, send me the money whenever you can.”

Felice was one of 62,000 Jewish arrivals to Palestine in 1935. In the early 1930s it had been a small fraction of that. By 1938 it was back down to 10,000 as the Arabs, fearful of being drowned in the wave of Jewish settlers, persuaded the British to curtail immigration. Hitler was rising to ascendancy, and it was the very moment that European Jews had the greatest need for a place to escape, but the British were closing the gates. Felice was an anomaly. She was one of the few arrivals who did not remain in Palestine.

Felice said, “I could have stayed and been happy in Palestine if it were not for the violence. My Arab women patients and I were happy together. If only the Jewish and Arab leaders had been able to coexist and share with each other. The Middle East should be open to everybody without chauvinistic boundaries. Eliyahu and I would leave on vacations to escape the tension in the cities. I would inhale the clean, fresh cedar aroma in the mountains; then we would come back, and there would be the scent of tear gas in the air. It was impossible.”

Although she was always proud to call herself a Jew and identify with the Jewish people, in Palestine she was more identified with the idea of being a young French woman. She wasn’t a believer in God and scarcely knew the religious holidays. The land didn’t move her spiritually.

She recalled, “The settlers had no idea of co-existence, of becoming friendly and sharing the land. Right away they began with hatred and animosity. You become what your environment makes you, and you can respond to Palestine’s hard dry land with a harsh character. The settlers were a people who had been pushed around and demeaned all their lives. Now they had a little power and they began to push around the people who were already there. It is a natural psychological phenomenon. I wanted a land for all of us. There was no future there.”

PART THREE. POLAND

Felice’s false marriage to Steinberg had allowed her entry into Palestine. A few days after arriving, she had obtained British Mandate Passport #60260, “Issued in Jerusalem to Mrs. Feiga Steinberg born Ozerowitz, a naturalized Palestinian citizen by marriage,” on October 16, 1935. Six months later she obtained a divorce from Steinberg, but the British Mandate passport was still valid and gave her access to a visa to America. On June 2, 1937, the United States consul in Jerusalem stamped immigration visa #690 into it. Eliyahu Katz’s gift of money gave her the means to make a last trip home to her family.

In Tel Aviv, Hanka put her arms around her sister’s neck, and she put her arms around Hanka. They cried and kissed each other. “Remember me when it is good for you in America and you have success.”

“I will,” Felice replied.

In August 1937, she traveled by boat from Haifa to Istanbul and by train through Bulgaria, and then by way of Belgrade, Budapest and Prague to Warsaw. Purposeful and with only a transit visa, she made no stops along the way. From Warsaw another train took her northeast for two hours to Bialystock and finally a local line went to Grajewo. From there, the eight-miles stretch to Szczuczyn was in a horse-drawn buggy. It was flat and rolling farming country, dotted with small lakes and ponds and cut by streams, formed much like Minnesota in America by the retreat of glaciers in an ancient era. The journey ran along fields of wheat, oats, barley and rye beginning to be harvested; and plots of potatoes and tobacco. There were a few cattle and huts with three or four hogs outside. Every once in a while Felice saw pheasants, a swan, ducks, and geese. Willows grew near water, and birch and pine forests began where the planting ended. The buggy clattered onto cobblestones when it arrived in Szczuczyn and took her to the Market Square in the heart of the town. Her home was on the corner of Market Square and Church Street, which sloped down two blocks from a small rise. At the top of the rise stood the large Catholic church, cream and pale blue plaster over a wooden frame. The fields began behind it. The houses were plain and small, mostly one story but a few, like Felice’s, had a second story to provide extra bedrooms under the dormers. Since it wasn’t a market day, the village was quiet, the tranquility belying the disaster descending on its inhabitants.

Her parents’ letters hadn’t prepared her for what she saw when she walked through the door of her home. They hadn’t wanted to frighten her. Her mother, father, nineteen year-old-sister Miriam, and thirteen-year-old brother Berci were crowded into one room. Once comfortably off, they had been forced to take in boarders who like them had been dispossessed of their livelihood. Moses Ozerovicz had once been mayor of the town and organized the charity fund for the poor; now the communal relief workers stopped by with donations of little plates of food for the Ozerovicz family.

Felice’s small town was starving before her eyes. She knew things had changed from the news she received in France and Palestine, but she had no idea it was this bad. The Poles didn’t use mechanization to make a systematic extermination of the Jews. They didn’t use social scientists and construct buildings for the purpose like the Germans. The government just took people’s homes and businesses away from them and proceeded to make them penniless, to exterminate them with starvation.

“It was a catastrophe. It was not a foreboding of the future; they were already a dying people. Part of me started dying with them. When I took a walk in the square, I saw the tubercular shoulders and ribs of the people. I thought I would die of horror.” She would never forget it. They were starving. She would look into the Jewish shops and see a nail for sale here, a nail there, a piece of food here, a piece of food there, and she would think, how do they sell it? The Poles had put signs over the doors that said, Entrance for Dogs. “How do they live on that? How do they eat? How do they live like that? The questions tormented me,” she later recounted.

From the twenty-odd dollars that remained of Eliyahu’s gift and her last paycheck she gave $10 to her family and kept $10 for the voyage to America. The ticket that her uncle in New Haven had sent could be used on the
MS Pilsudsky
departing in two weeks from Gydynia, Poland’s new port on the Baltic. During those last days at home she retraced familiar paths that formed the borders between town and fields. She walked along the Bug River (pronounced Boog) and walked to the granary that had been confiscated from her father under the anti-Semitic racial laws. At the grain mill she watched the plodding horses walk the grindstone around and around in a circle. She escaped the afternoon heat under a tree in the square or in the room in the house that remained for her family. As always she escaped into books—popular novels and philosophy. She had never had more than three or four close friends in the village because so much of her life had been spent at boarding school, and all except one had left for Warsaw, Palestine, Mexico, and New Zealand. Her remaining friend, Abraham Nissenovicz, her former mathematics tutor, was getting ready to leave for America on the same boat as she.