Iris Leal, "My Mom is Moroccan, my Dad was Ashkenazi. It was Clear Which Culture Would Prevail"

[David Shasha]

My Mom is Moroccan, my Dad was Ashkenazi. It was Clear Which Culture Would Prevail

By: Iris Leal

“Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh then the deeper the roots.”

– Tupac Shakur

The newspaper on a bench at the entrance to the Lis Maternity and Women’s Hospital, in Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, caught my eye. I picked it up and opened it to page 2. “Look,” I said to my mother. She blinked for a moment, not understanding. “Ah,” she cried out, surprised, and repeated my name apprehensively, as though its appearance in a newspaper rendered it foreign and she was trying not to mispronounce it. She looked pleased, but that didn’t draw us any closer. On the contrary: The permanent distance we carried with us everywhere like a moveable abyss, forged by an abundance of biographical details, became more concrete.

When we were sitting in the waiting room, I complimented her on the hair that had begun growing back, a black down that was noteworthy because it signaled the body’s return to its former, familiar state. Since she fell ill a year ago, my mother has continually shrunk. When she lost all the hair on her head and started to wear wool hats, she began to resemble her father, who never removed his wool hat, which he wore even at festive events. Maybe it was a head covering he preferred to a kippa, or perhaps it was a habit he had brought with him from the village where he was born, in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and had clung to even in Hatzor Haglilit, the Galilee town where he settled and where in the end he was also buried.

Her eyes shifted to my arm, which was all but glued to hers. “You’re black,” my mother asserted. “Do you go to the beach a lot?” She opened the top of her blouse to show me that she too was acquiring some color and added with satisfaction that we shared a nice shade. When she was carrying me 60 years ago, her mother-in-law Chava – a woman whose will was hard to resist and whom I resemble in my character more than I do that of my mother – fed her large bowls of strawberries with cream. My mother, an adolescent of 17, ate obediently because she wanted to curry favor with my grandmother, who had taken her under her wing.

Chava had arrived from Europe not long before and wore fox fur stoles; her home contained vitrines exhibiting crystal miniatures, and also a chandelier made of polished crystal, which thrilled my mother. When she finished eating the sweet dish to the last drop she would run to throw up, and when she returned, teary and out of breath, my grandmother patted her on the back and said, “It’s not terrible that it came out; the main thing is that something went in.”

My mother thought that this was my grandmother’s way of looking after her health; she didn’t know that behind her back my grandmother boasted that she had fed her strawberries with cream so that I wouldn’t come out black like her.

My mother bore the tension of waiting for the doctor with me with resigned silence. “It is what it is,” she had said to my husband two weeks earlier, when he picked her up from the hospital and took her home following a PET-CT scan. From the moment of the diagnosis a year ago, my mother had treated her disease as a prolonged execution. I was her chief source of comfort. I dealt with the bureaucracy, made clarifications, expedited procedures, and when the coronavirus pandemic made the whole situation even more difficult to cope, I found solutions for that, too. When her distress got the better of her, she would call me and present me with horror scenarios that pounded in her head and gave her no rest. I responded to each of them with a certain confidence, or at least promised to come up with answers. When I got back to her with the response, I was able to translate the medical terminology by evoking familiar images from her life.

The more essential my role in her life became, the greater grew her esteem for me and the more she feared me. My presence affected her like a surprise test: Each time she saw me, I could sense that she experienced a moment of terror. I knew that the difficulty she had feeling maternal warmth pained her, but from that standpoint I was the ideal daughter: The estrangement between us didn’t bother me and I didn’t need her affection. I made do with the right to fulfill my obligation.

I’m certain that for many people, the period in which they looked after an elderly parent was deep and emotionally gratifying. All I wanted was to do the right thing and show up whenever I was needed, without immersing myself in it to the point of suffocation. And my mother bore patiently my company in the waiting rooms to hell, because there was no substitute for me in the doctor’s office. She sat quietly and her daughter asked all the questions, never more than what she herself wanted to know, and it was clear that the doctor respected her.

My mother didn’t imagine that the night before, her businesslike, confidence-inspiring daughter had lain awake in bed, tossing and turning, and that in the waiting room her gut twisted into a knot and that everything – the tests, deciphering them, the results – filled her with a dread she didn’t betray.

We sat now, chair by chair in the waiting room, and when one of us said something, she turned to the other and the other turned to her, so we looked like two sunflowers with masks. “What are you afraid of?” I asked her when she jerked up her knees in agitation. We already knew that the test results were quite good, because the partner of her granddaughter, my middle child, is a doctor. That fact instilled in her a blend of dissatisfaction and satisfaction. The Ashkenazi element of my father’s side had already wearied her, but that was somewhat offset by the fact that the doctor was of Ethiopian origin. When I told her that before she met him for the first time, she said “Ah” in a neutral tone and added, “I don’t know what to say.” By that she meant that until she knew my attitude toward that fact, and therefore what was expected of her, she preferred to remain silent – which was a huge improvement over my grandmother’s response when my father “brought her an immigrant woman from Morocco.”

Angel of history

The story in short is this: My father was born in Krasnobrod, a town in the Lublin Province of Poland. When the Gestapo invaded the town at the beginning of World War II, on September 23, 1939, and murdered the Jewish residents and looted their property, he fled eastward with his parents and sister, to Siberia. After three years of grueling wandering, at the end of which his mother died from typhoid fever, my grandfather put my father and his sister on a ship with other refugee children, who eventually made their way to Palestine by way of Iran, thus becoming known as the “Tehran Children.” His solitary aunt took them into her home in Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh. Even when my grandfather immigrated to Israel himself with his new wife, Chava, my father refused to move to the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak with them and remained on the kibbutz. He then joined an agricultural training group at Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov (Meuhad), which is where, to the sound of the beating of the wings of the angel of history, he first saw my mother.

She was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and immigrated to Israel in 1957 with her mother. My mother says that to this day she remembers the moment at which my grandmother, Suleika Nidam, woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to hurry, because the taxi was waiting for them below to take them to the collection point. Hananya, her older brother, immigrated separately with their father. In Israel, they split up: The father went to Hatzor Haglilit, the son settled in Kiryat Gat. Mother and daughter reached Marseille and waited for months in a new-immigrant camp for a ship. After being well-sprayed for lice in the port of Haifa, they were sent to Kibbutz Maoz Haim, clean and disinfected.

My grandfather once told me that he had divorced my grandmother because she beat him. She was the sweetest, most innocent woman I ever met, so I’m skeptical of that account, but he insisted that the whole story was true and then burst into laughter to heighten my confusion. A few months after arriving, my mother went on to Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, alone. There, in the dining room, she first saw my father eyeing her with a gaze consisting, as she learned later, of 35 percent admiration and 65 percent certainty that she would be his wife. I am their only child.

Not long ago I asked her what the word “Ashkenazi” means to her. “An Ashkenazi is educated,” she began hesitantly. “He is sure of himself, he is arrogant, he deserves everything.” She really must have been in a bad way if she omitted the usual addendum this time: “Like you and like your father.” Their marriage lasted two years, but they shaped my mother’s identity and influenced her all her life. She came out of it with good stories, of which her favorite concerned a local revival of “My Fair Lady.”

My father, she related, saw to the education of his own Eliza Doolittle and sent her to the kibbutz library with a reading list that included all the 19th-century classics. It can be said that to some degree at least, my mother learned Hebrew from Yehoshua Koplewitz, the translator of Romain Rolland’s “The Enchanted Soul.” Until she fell ill she never stopped reading; now, she says regretfully, she doesn’t have the head for it.

My mother says that her parents couldn’t read or write. In the 1920s and 1930s, the largest and most important Jewish educational network in Morocco was the Alliance Israélite Universelle. There were also ultra-Orthodox schools, such as those of Otzar Hatorah and Ohalei Yosef Yitzhak. Alliance took pride in the enlightened attitude and the European approach that set it apart from other institutions; the horizon it promised its pupils was to better their chances of being integrated in France. The ultra-Orthodox networks were also agents of European Orthodoxy. Europeans were perceived as civilizing and its natives as cultured.

In this way the Jews of Morocco were torn between the desire to preserve their culture of origin and self-nullification in the face of the culture of the colonial ruler, and became natives in that country. The remnants of that indigenous gratitude can be heard in the way my mother pronounces “Ecole Centrale” with a French accent. That was the name of the school she attended in Casablanca, which did not belong to the Jewish educational frameworks. My grandmother decided that her daughter would bypass the mediator (Alliance) and go immediately to the source – la belle Paris.

A type of triumph

For many years I thought that the fact that my Moroccan grandparents were illiterate and I am a writer was a type of triumph, though I wasn’t sure over what. The triumph of the spirit or of education over ignorance, or something stupid like that. Only recently did I discover that the story is actually a different, dubious victory. Like that of many from North Africa, my mother’s consciousness was shaped from memories, but no less from forgetting. When I asked her why Grandmother didn’t get to attend school if she grew up in Casablanca, she shrugged her shoulders.

My grandmother’s parents came from Ouarzazate, which lies beyond the Atlas Mountains, where the Sahara begins, and somehow that seemed to her a sufficient explanation – “and in your grandpa’s village there was no Jewish school.” But my grandfather attended Friday and Saturday services in the local synagogue, and could read Hebrew in the siddur (prayer book). Even if I wasn’t able to find the name of the village of his birth, I discovered that there was no village with more than 30 Jews that didn’t have a salah, a synagogue where children all learned the language of the prayers. And because my grandmother lived in Casablanca, it’s very likely that she attended school, at least for five years.

The history of my father and his parents’ lives in a small Polish town, the professions they engaged in, their education and their way of life is all documented. Even my mother can relate their history, as she heard it from him. But her desire to dream about and make up her past was stronger than her ability to reconstruct it. Still, why did the stories she wanted to tell herself revolve around primitivity and underdevelopment – not with the beauty and potency of her Imazighen forebears, the “Free People” as they are known their language, also known as Berbers?

It’s hard for me to assess what I lost by being raised on the stories of backwardness that my mother accepted without question and passed on to me, instead of telling me about the myth of Dihya al-Kahina, the brave Jewish Imazighen warrior woman who led an army and possessed a rare ability to foresee the future.

My mother was capricious when it came to cultural suppression, as she was in her opinions about many matters. She was ready to recognize the history of institutional injustice, but only if it suited her mood at that moment. On the one hand, she felt a deep affinity for her years on the kibbutz and for what her husband, a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe, gave her: the normal-ness of an identity after it acquired a Western veneer. It cost her marriage at 16 and motherhood at 17. Even if she never admitted it wholeheartedly, for years she was in her own eyes an Ashkenazi by proxy. With all her love for her parents, she felt culturally superior to them, to her second husband and their children. After all, she had read the entire Western classical corpus.

That superiority persisted until her young son, my half-brother, returned from the Gymnasia Herzliya high school with a snappy demand: “Enough nagging already, you primitive Moroccan.” My mother swallowed the insult with a wan smile, meaning that she didn’t attach much importance to it – a smile that said: “What other primitive Moroccan do you know who has discussed ‘Madame Bovary’ with her daughter?” Although my mother didn’t complete high school at the Alliance, she is an intelligent woman. After leaving my father and placing me in his custody, she understood that she had thus forgone her privileges, her passport to hegemonic Israeli society, for all time. At first she lived in Kiryat Gat with her mother, Suleika, and close to her brother.

There are two family stories about the period after I was at my father’s, when I lived with her and Suleika for a while. In the first, my Ashkenazi grandmother, Chava, found me eating from garbage cans in the street and took me to her home without any fuss and bother, and swore never to return me to my mother (and so it was). From my mother’s side, there’s a story that one day they discovered that I had traded their new broom for a lemon popsicle at the grocery store.

Seemingly these are two separate stories, but I recognize in them the seeds of the battle of the different accounts, centering on an ethnic background that developed in the wake of my parents’ divorce. In version A, the two Frenk women – a derogatory term for Mizrahim (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East) – sat around all day with their legs crossed instead of seeing to the girl’s needs; and in version B, the Polish influence turned her into a greedy Zhydovka – a derogatory Eastern European term for Jewish women – who were making deals already at the age of 3.

In the end my mother moved to Hatzor Haglilit with her new husband in order to be close to her father, brother and half-sister. She wanted a tribe, a communal sense of belonging. Around the same time, my grandmother died of heart failure brought on by diabetes, and my mother remained vulnerable and alone. But my resourceful mother then learned how to drive, became a caregiver for children, directed a day-care center, and sent her husband to renovate the small house in south Tel Aviv that belonged to his parents. When he finished tarring the roof, tiling the courtyard, whitewashing the walls and building a room for his mother, she took their children and moved there.

Self-invention, self-denial

This was the deal: They would look after the old woman and keep her company, and she would allow them to live in her home, which would pass into their hands upon her death. Year after year the old woman sat silently on her armchair. When I came home for periodic visits from my home in London, I would lean over her and ask with an aggrieved heart how she was. Like someone who comes home and sticks his hand into a potted plant to check whether the earth is damp or if the neighbor with the key forgot to water it.

After settling into her new home, my mother set out to find a job. She was hired by the day-care center of the WIZO women’s organization in the lower-class Hatikvah neighborhood and in short order was appointed its director. At long last, after 30 years, she got back the passport to Israeli society that she had forfeited when she left my father and his parents, with their miniatures and chandeliers, and her husband’s sister, who always seemed to feel an impulse to give her a pail and a rag and ask her to do the dusting.

But the ghosts of the past return transfigured. My half-sister, my mother’s beloved daughter, is the housekeeper of one of Israel’s wealthiest families and does the dusting and the small bathrooms and also cooks lunch for the children. But my mother says that they treat her well, that she is just like one of the family and that they all love her so much. Which is true – they do well by my sister – but I see the bitterness in my mother’s eyes when after so many years, fate is once more forcing her to be in awe of Ashkenazim with money.

Something broke off from the foundations of this family and it never healed. It reflected what fell apart in my mother when she severed herself from her home, and came to the kibbutz, and married and gave birth and tried with all her might to adapt to the demands of the cultural environment that had adopted her, and from that moment was caught in the permanent tension of self-invention and self-denial: how to be and how not to be herself, all in a single lesson. And she learned diligently, without questioning, and we her children lived with the consequences. That was the ruinous impact immigration had on her. After the authorities changed her name to one they chose for her with criminal lack of imagination, she only went on growing distant from the culture of her country of origin, going on and on but getting nowhere in the end. My mother was unable to find the way back to the person she was and so remained eternally between the two worlds – where I am stuck together with her.

But it seems to me that lately she has begun to part with all this drama and is passing it on to me in its entirety, to her only child from her marriage to an Ashkenazi. It took a great many years, but the older she became the more she shed the old mannerisms she had picked up on the kibbutz and returned to her Moroccan essence like an emigrée returning to her homeland. Although for many years she spoke only French, little by little she went back to speaking broken Moroccan Arabic, stuffed a photograph of the famous Moroccan rabbi Baba Sali between the frame and glass of an amateurish charcoal drawing, then she started to celebrate the Mimouna – the Moroccan festival of the day after Passover week – in her yard, flitting between the tables wearing a turquoise caftan embroidered with gold thread, holding a tray of traditional mofletta confections.

Her disease brought back something else as well. After decades in which she was known as “Ahuva” to her friends, it turned out that on her ID card she remained registered in the French name her parents gave her, Yvonne. That’s what she was called over the public address system at the hospital; that was the name the doctor’s secretary used in order to announced that she was next in line. When we left Doctor L., after he confirmed that the results of the test were indeed good and that my mother was “clean,” Yvonne kissed the mezuzah on the door of his office, and even though that was a custom she’d adopted long before, immediately after her mother’s death, it never ceases to surprise me.

Unfortunately, no reward accrued to me for locking myself into the Mizrahi identity as a gesture to the 17-year-old girl from Casablanca who bore me, other than the right to be deprived in equal measure of both halves, the white and the black, and at bottom, to be condemned to a feeling of estrangement. And one shouldn’t belittle the importance of estrangement, alienation and loneliness. For writers they’re a genuine gift, like observing the world from behind a wall of stone and a narrow embrasure: Everything is a legitimate target. My mother, for example, thinks mistakenly that I’m rational and level-headed only because I’m distant.

One time, when she was getting an IV, she looked at me as though she were seeing me for the first time and said, “Tell me, Iris, are you worried?” Well, she, of all of people, should have known that proximity to death does not arouse in the various branches of the Nidam family the cry of “Carpe diem!” Or, in its New Age version: We will triumph over the cancer! But sometimes she forgets that I’m a branch.

From Haaretz, April 8, 2021