Iftach Spector - Loud and Clear

This way Nathaniel Tatar, formerly a soldier in the tsar’s army, was conscripted to the service of the Young Turks’ post–Ottoman Empire.

FOR AN ADDITIONAL YEAR and a half Tatar continued to work as a cart driver in the service of the Turkish army. “We drove our carts from Beer-Sheva to the Suez Canal, transporting supplies and rations for the soldiers one way, and coming back loaded with the wounded.

“But,” continued Nathaniel, “at that time we were not paid anymore for the work, and we no longer even got food for the horses, so they began to die one after the other.”

All this time his wife, Bracha, raised her two baby daughters alone in a hut made of eucalyptus branches, its walls covered with towels and sheets, near Petach Tikva. They survived on pita from sorghum flour they baked themselves on an open fire.

At last Tatar decided to desert.

“I ran home on foot, half naked. On the way I got food and shelter from Bedouin and farmers till I reached Petach Tikva. I didn’t enter the settlement, but stayed hidden in the orchards. I was a deserter, and the penalty was death.”

After some time he managed to buy a nefus (Turkish identity card) under a different name, and resumed work as a teamster on the line between Petach Tikva and Jerusalem, hiding all the time from the police.

In 1918, when the British offensive struck from Egypt and pushed the Turks across the Sinai and out of Gaza, the Turks began to expel the Jews from Jaffa and Petach Tikva. They moved them to concentration camps in the North. Their cruelty reached new heights, but Turkish control of Palestine was over. The roads were filled with deserters who offered their rifles for a slice of bread. Eventually, when the army of British field marshal Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem, my Grandfather Nathaniel came out of the cellar he had been hiding in with his cart and horse.

THE TURKS WERE DRIVEN OUT, and British rule was established over Palestine. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, Lord Balfour, made promises of “a homeland for the Jews in Palestine,” and at the same time contradicting promises were given to any Arab who happened to be around. Anyway, a temporary peace prevailed in the country. Nathaniel and his family returned to the mixed city of Jaffa, and he looked for a way to make a living. Initially he continued to drive his cart. He transported rice from Jaffa Harbor up to Nablus in Samaria, and returned with homemade soap. Gradually his cart took him farther away, to Tiberias, and even to Damascus.

For a while he tried to become a businessman. There was a shortage of onions, so he hurried to organize a caravan of camels that returned from the South loaded with onions. But during his journey, a ship arrived from Egypt full of onions, and the price plummeted. His second daughter, Shoshana, five years old, was old enough to remember what happened. During my own childhood she used to regale me before bedtime with her stories about those onions, which rolled around in all the rooms and all about the yard. She acted out for me how the whole family ate onions in the morning, onions for lunch, and onions for supper, and how at the end her sister and she were sliding down from the top of their father’s heap of crumbling hopes, which had begun sprouting and rotting.

AFTER WORLD WAR I ENDED, the economic situation of the family improved for a while. I found proof of that in a photograph from that time; from a yellowing panel, cracked and framed in green, the family Tatar stares. Mr. Tatar sits on a chair, as befits the master of the house, and all the other members of the family stand around him. My grandmother, Bracha, wears a long cotton dress. She stands near him like a soldier at parade rest, her hands joined behind her back. The two girls, in two identical dark dresses with bright white collars, peep over his shoulders. The two small boys are pressed against his knees. The master himself is mummified in a suit, his face serious, mustache well clipped, and his white tie matches his white shoes. By then he was no longer a newcomer from Russia or a cart driver whipped down the roads of Sinai by Turkish soldiers. Before the camera sits a Levantine aristocrat. He runs, in partnership with a “good Arab,” a Jaffa khan (hotel) and a fleet of dilijances (horse carts). The family waits for the flash of the camera. From the center of the picture shine Shosh’s unbelievable, bright, disquieting eyes.

In the bedtime stories she told me I heard about the pogrom of the first of May 1921, when an Arab crowd assisted by policemen began attacking and killing Jews in Jaffa and the outskirts of Tel Aviv and looting stores and shops. The family Tatar was smuggled to Tel Aviv. Her father, Nathaniel, wrote, “I stayed alone in the khan, since many Jews who had stabled their horses and stored their merchandise fled and left everything. I was responsible for all of it. I closed the gate and sat alone inside. There was a high wall, but hundreds of Arabs began to force the gate. I climbed the wall and ran to the saraj—the British police station. I stayed there till night, and then they sent me to Tel Aviv in an armored car.”

Shosh also remembered something from the 1921 “troubles.” “I was six or seven,” she told a reporter on one of the rare occasions she was interviewed. “I went to the school for girls in Nve Zedek (a neighborhood on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv) and on my way I was swept up by a violent demonstration of Arabs on Bostros Street. A hand reached in and pulled me out of the vortex, otherwise I would have been trampled. Our house at Suk El Dar became a field hospital for the wounded.” And she summed up in her dry, curt manner, “These events were burned into my memory, and no doubt they affected my later life.”

The events put an end to Tatar’s economic success, and he gave up on Jaffa. He heard that in Balfuria, in the Izreel Valley, a new Jewish settlement had been established. One of the settlers, an American, sold his farm and left the country, and Nathaniel bought nine hectares and a shed from him, with a pair of mules and six cows.

“I moved to Balfuria at corn planting time, so I managed to sow about five hectares. I began to work in the fields. The children were still in school—the oldest of them twelve—and my wife and I worked almost day and night to get it all done. And still, after picking large crops and selling milk and eggs, we couldn’t make a living since prices were so low.”

They sank into deep poverty.

The children were also put to work and given adult responsibilities. Once Shosh, age fourteen, was sent by her father to Haifa to buy a plow. He hadn’t given her enough money. She didn’t return but stayed for several days in the Arab city, who knows where or how, till she found a workshop to repair an old plow for her to take home.

“No excuses,” she explained to me when she told me that story. “Just results.”

LIFE WAS HARD, AND EVERYONE in the family did his part. The boys stayed in school up to ninth grade and then left home to work as apprentices.

“The girls,” tells Nathaniel apologetically, “saw that the situation in the house was not good, so they left, too. Sara, the older sister, found work in Jerusalem, and the younger Shoshana moved to the youth village in Ben Shemen.” Nathaniel sold the farm and moved to the near town of Afula, where he tried his luck at dairy farming.

Since leaving her parents’ home, Shosh hadn’t had contact with them. On the few occasions when she spoke of them to me, she called their town mockingly “Afulevke.” The youth village of Ben Shemen lies in the hills on the way to Jerusalem. There, instead of a farmer’s poor and narrow vision, the new world of a renascent Israel was opened to her—a “state in the making.”