Israel: Young Blood and Old October 1949 1/2

[Dennis L. Fiddle]

[Atlantic Unbound]

October 1949

Return to Flashback: The State of Israel

Israel: Young Blood and Old

by George Biddle

A ranking American artist who has had over fifty one-man
exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, Rome, and America, GEORGE BIDDLE
went to Israel six months ago to watch and to draw the new state
in action. Prior to that, he had been at Nuremberg following the
trials and filling a portfolio with portraits of the leading
figures; and prior to that, he had been a combat artist with our
armies in Africa and Italy. But his visit to Israel was one of the
most deeply stirring experiences of his life, and these pages from
his diary tell why.

Tel Aviv, April 21, 1949.--The modernistic, stuccoed, matchbox,
balconied buildings: the tropical shrubs and trees: the crowds
thronging the Sir Herbert Samuel Square on the shore of the
Mediterranean. A vital, energetic, up-to-date, youthful, and
enthusiastic crowd. The faces might come from any city where type,
color, and dress are not too rigidly stressed; from Geneva or
Lausanne, from the French towns of the Mediterranean, from North
Italy or Barcelona. Nothing particular to mark them; youth, a high
proportion of physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good
nature. Many young soldiers in English uniform: boys and girls,
single and in groups. A look of "belonging," which one had not
associated with an all-Jewish population.

One sees comparatively few marked Semitic types; and fewer still
of the East Side, bearded, skullcapped, moth-eaten,
grease-spotted, parchment-dry rabbis. One hears much German and
Yiddish, but in the main Hebrew. The better-educated all speak
English perfectly; a lesser number, largely from Algiers or
Tunisia, French.

It is impossible to get rooms anywhere. Much building is going on.
All in brick and stucco on steel girders. It continually reminds
me of Rio: the heavy-ladened, tropical-odored sea air; the modern
balconied architecture and the mingling of the occasionally
exotic, dark-skinned, sensuous slant-eyed women and strikingly
handsome boys.

Little dark-skinned Jews from the Yemen, with Arab caps, wind in
and out among the cafe tables, selling papers. Against the
completely contemporary and highly intelligent background of Tel
Aviv, they seem as alien and anachronistic as the little bearded
rabbis, who look as if they changed their ideas as infrequently as
their underwear--once every thousand years or so.

Lewis Brown in his history of the Jews points out that, in order
to survive as a nation and retain their national identity they
walled themselves in by a tremendous and successful effort to
return to the past, to the womb of their greatness. This is to me
the unique and tragic fact in Jewish history: the need to
perpetuate their identity, which became possible only by the
renunciation of the stream of contemporary thought and life. Now
for the first time in two thousand years they can retain their
identity and also live in the present and the future. Looking at
the young people, one senses an almost immediate and complete
physical transfiguration.

I called on the Polanys, to whom Wellesley Aron had given me a
letter. Asaph Goor, a Palestinian-born Israeli of Russian
parentage, a graduate of the University of California and a
government employee in aforestation, joined us.

They tell me that there are no Arabs left in Tel Aviv. They fled
one and all on the outbreak of hostilities. Why? They were on
comparatively friendly terms with the Jews for many years. The
Jews rarely employed them, it is true, on account of the highly
unionized labor conditions in Tel Aviv. But the Arabs sold
vegetables and eggs. Was their departure due to cowardice or to
orders from the Mufti? Probably a little of both, but mostly the
latter.

Walking home with Asaph, I asked him how large a proportion of the
inhabitants were refugees from Hitler's Europe. Perhaps 40,000 or
50,000, a quarter of the entire population. "Listen to this group
of boys. They are talking Hungarian. Perhaps not here many days
longer than you."

"I had supposed, having known the DP camps, that anyone who had
been submerged in that hideous atmosphere for five to ten years
would be stamped a neurotic all his life."

"No. Nine tenths of them are cured human beings. We have given
them a belief in themselves; a home; a future."

"And the Irgun? I was told that it was mostly composed of DP boys
whose life in the Lager had turned them into gangsters."

"That is English propaganda. The Irgun was fascist, if you want;
but its leaders were patriotic and they had their own mistaken
ideology. The wreck of the Altalena, whose hull is being salvaged
for scrap iron, is the symbol of the end of their political power
in Israel. The followers and hangers-on of the Irgun were toughs
and gangsters. But not DP boys."

April 29.--After lunch I walked to Jaffa, one of the most ancient
cities in the world. The former Arab section was completely and
systematically destroyed by Hebrew bombing during the war. Yet--by
intent--only one mosque was damaged. I have seen no city in Europe
more ruthlessly demolished. Entire blocks were heaps of rubble,
the height sometimes of a two-story building.

I continued along King George V. Avenue, down King Feisal Avenue
around the old fortress overlooking the port, whose arrogantly
solid masonry dates from the days of Suleiman and the Crusaders.
All this section of old Jaffa encompasses slums as miserable as
any I have seen in San Antonio, Mexico, or Algiers. Heaps of swill
and rubbish lay piled by the houses. The sewage trickled down the
middle of the unpaved streets. Snotty, half-naked babies and
slatternly women in filthy rags crawled in and out of the dark
stinking alleys and among the wreckage left by the bombing.

For in Jaffa are still living many Arabs who remind me of the
untouchables of Algiers; foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and
pullulating with vermin and corruption, slinking about the
streets, flat-footed, with loose, dribbling lower lip; carrying
with them their sacks of refuse, orange rinds, scraps of bread and
meat; begging a coin or a half-smoked cigarette.

Yet through all this misery is filtering great activity. Beams are
salvaged from the rubble. Walls are replastered. Stores with
furniture, clothes and food are opening up in half-demolished
buildings. I am told that the rehabilitation of Jaffa with its
hybrid population, squalor, and filth is a serious headache for
the government.

All over the town, buildings, streets, and sometimes entire
sections are closed off with wire entanglements. But even in Tel
Aviv many of the passages and doorways, as at 3 Yeshurun where I
lodge, are walled up with sandbags.

April 30.--Lunched at the Tel Aviv Museum, where I met Dr. Haim
Gamzu, the Director, and saw a very fine retrospective exhibition
of Hanna Orloff. At times her work approximates arts and crafts
and is pretty weak in design, and some of her portraits are frank
caricatures, and mediocre. Others of her portraits are exceedingly
sensitive and sculpturesque.

The galleries were packed with young people, eager, vivacious,
alert. It suggested to me what might have been the enthusiasm of
the Italian youths during the High Renaissance. Often I think,
too, of the same mental eagerness, democratic simplicity, pride,
and prophetic sense of fulfilling a world mission that shine
through the writings of Americans at the birth of our
country--particularly Jefferson and the Adamses.

Three teen-aged girls chattered in front of a piece of sculpture,
following through the movement of the design with animated and
caressing gestures. I caught their eyes and smiled. They grinned
with a delicious look of guilty happiness as if proud of being
caught stealing forbidden fruit.

In the evening I went with Ed and Itzhak Norman to hear Paul Paray
conduct the Tel Aviv orchestra with Richepin at the piano.
Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Packed crowds; wild enthusiasm;
ovations. Afterwards refreshments were served with cakes, wine,
and the native cognac.

2.

Jerusalem, May 1.--Where Tel Aviv is all modern--but tawdry and
completely lacking in architectural distinction--Jerusalem is a
jumble of many styles, brought, however, into some sort of fusion
by the warm color, austerity, and fine solidity of the almost
universal cut stone. I was immensely impressed by the Jewish
Agency Building, wrecked during the war, but already completely
restored. John Ratner, a Jerusalem architect, designed it. The
Yeshurun Synagogue by Rubin is also very fine. The Anglo-Palestine
Bank by Eric Mendelsohn and the post Office by an English
architect, Harrison, who also did the Rockefeller Museum in the
old city and the Government House, have great style. All these
buildings have individual distinction and are a sober and
intelligent adaptation of the modern.

I never saw so many rabbis. Most of them, of course, with
sweat-stained broad-brimmed black felt hats, grease-spotted and
dust-stained coats, and dull, resigned, kindly, gray-skinned
faces. A few of the younger exhibit, however, a pardonable touch
of vanity. Great calflike eyes; a cream and pink complexion;
pouting lips and coquettishly combed side curls.

After lunch we walked to the National Museum of Bezalel. Dr.
Schiff showed us his archaelogical treasures; some Bakst drawings,
and a really fine exhibition of prints: Rembrandt, Jean Calot,
Delacroix, and French modernists.

A charming little drawing of Klee, done in 1911. It had an easy
spontaneity; it seemed the natural idiom of this much overrated
petit-maitre. How often does the personal gesture or expression of
the artist become institutionalized into the cold empty shell
which no longer houses a living, growing organism.

I showed Dr. Schiff and the others my drawings of the Nuremberg
trials and of the Dachau and Landsberg DP concentration camps. I
think they were really touched when I said I wished to present
them to the museum. He asked me how I could do this. I said that I
had always realized they had a very real historical significance,
apart from any artistic value; that I had kept this collection
together, feeling that it should go to the Library of Congress or
some Palestinian institution; and that I was glad it would be
housed with him.

May 3.--I went sketching to Ein Karem, the birthplace of John the
Baptist, with Nancy-Norman, a Dutch photographer, William Van Der
Poll, and a German writer, Hilda Kristeller. She told me that she
had spent two and a half years in German concentration camps:
Westerbork, Teresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen, Belsen, and Kleine
Festung. She had worked for the underground, passing may women and
children into Holland. She was caught carrying arms for the
underground. I said to her, "There are few, indeed, who went to
Auschwitz and received a subsequent transfer. You were lucky." She
answered me: "My husband was killed at Dachau three days before
the American liberation." Subsequently I learned that she was made
an honorary citizen of Holland for her work.

I sketched in the olive groves below Ein Karem. The grass is
jeweled with poppies, Queen Anne's lace, wild geranium, and a
great variety of other flowers. The air, clean and fresh. Bands of
boys and girls walked by singing.

In the village I heard a number of charming little boys talking
Spanish together. I asked them where they had learned it, for they
spoke a pure Castilian. They were Sephardic Jews from Turkey and
Jugoslavia, where their ancestors had been living for four hundred
or more years, since their expulsion from Spain by Ferdinand and
Isabella.

May 4.--From my window I can see the low ridge of mount Scopus,
the Mount of Olives, the cedars behind the English Cemetery, and
the Hebrew University. The windowpanes of my room have many small
holes in them, pierced by spent shrapnel.

I watched the liberation day parade from the wooden grandstands on
the Jaffa Road. For an hour the troops marched by. They looked as
tough and seasoned as the soldiers from the English Eighth Army or
our own best divisions which I had seen in Africa or Italy; yet
different. During the hour-long parade--with two exceptions, a
driver and a wounded man--no soldier smiled at the crowd that
cheered and clapped continually. Pride, exultation, tension, a
tremendous overflow of physical vitality. But it was not the
haughty overbearing pride of Russian and German troops. It was the
almost mystical look of dedication, sublimation, of the young boy
approaching confirmation. The men were occasionally out of step,
but as they passed the reviewing stand, their muscles knotted and
stiffened as they saluted; their shoulders twisted back and their
eyes stared out in rapture.

Mr. Samuels, my guide, said to me, "When the Arabs attacked us in
the old city we had one Bren gun, which we fired from window to
window. The Soldiers were armed with sticks. With our present
equipment we could have been in Bagdad or Bokara. The Arabs were
well officered, but cowards, and ran at the least excuse."

3.

May 7.--To the Rebareles Yeshiva, an advanced or fanatical Hasidic
synagogue. The holy scholars and rabbis draped in their black and
white woolen or silken tallithim--which reminded me of a painting
of Chagall's--stood or sat, shouting, wailing, or chanting their
prayers. Some beat the desks and tables with their heads; others
jerked forward in frenzy, as if in the act of copulation. Most of
them wore the long familiar gray or black caftans, with wide
lapels. Some had velvet coats, crimson, yellow, or plum-colored.
Usually they hung their fur hats on nails and placed on their
heads the little black skullcaps--the yarmulka. These fur hats or
streiml originated in Poland during the Middle Ages. At first, as
a mock crown of thorns, they were intended to ridicule the Jews.
Now they are made of thirteen skunk tails, as emblems of the
thirteen Jewish articles of faith.

Later we went to a Rumanian Yeshiva where the behavior was more
orthodox. The music seemed Gregorian.

In a Hungarian Yeshiva the Kohanim, or those of the priestly
caste, in the ceremony of Duchaning, were blessing the community;
the tallithim spread over their heads; their hands extended in
front of them. This is only done by the Cohens, the aristocracy of
the descendants of Aaron, of the tribe of Levi.

In the street Mr. Samuels said, "See this lovely creature
approaching us. She is a Hungarian. That charming coiffure is a
wig. For she was of course a virgin when she married; and she
shaved her head to make herself palatable and acceptable to her
husband. She wears that wig, the shaytel, only on the Shabat, or
on other holidays."

At the Cafe Wien I tallied with Gershon Agronsky, the editor of
the Palestine Post. "There are four strata of people in Israel,"
he said. "The young generation, who were born here and fought in
the war; who grew up with Hebrew as their language; who 'belong.'
They are at the core of those impulses which will mold the coming
type in Israel, as they will mold its history. Then there are the
foreign intellectuals and professionals; Germans, Americans,
English, who bring with them the culture and background of their
native lands. Such are the scholars, Dr. Schiff, Moshe Gordon, and
Dr. Haim Gamzu. They cling to their language and traditions, since
these are part of their personal identity. Thirdly, there are the
immigrants and DPs, whom one can sometimes recognize by the
persistent look of tension in the eye, the wasted or bloated
frame, the yellow skin. Lastly there is the remnant of medievalist
and the Orient: the Hasidic scholars, the Yemenites, Algerians,
Persians, and Kurds. This element is largely concentrated in
Jerusalem, which is perhaps--with Nazareth and Beersheba, both
Arab towns--the most picturesque and least typical city in Israel.
The first three will quickly fuse; perhaps in a generation: for
they pull toward a common goal, united Israel."

I asked him, too, how the enlightened Jew feels about the orthodox
and religious zealots.

"The government need take no steps to liquidate or even modify
these elements," he answered. "They are fast disappearing. Perhaps
as rapidly as in New York. Fifty years ago they were the dominant
element in Jerusalem, socially and politically. The government
will hasten the process of disintegration by cleaning up the
unsanitary quarters; and eventually by new housing and the hopes
of a better life. For my own part, I look upon their gradual
disappearance with nostalgia and regret. They may be counted as
the few idealists and mystics in a material world. They want
nothing of the world's goods; and if the meditation, study, and
prayer of a lifetime will result in the correct transposition of a
comma in the Talmud, their work on earth has been to them fruitful
and justified."

"I have nothing of the mystic in me," I replied. "Like all
Americans, my approach is pragmatic. When I think, however, of
Raphael Soyer, Max Weber, or of the many Jewish artists and
intellectuals whose fathers were rabbis, I cannot feel that
retrogressive religious mysticism is the only answer to
materialism and mammon. In his search for salvation, does not the
Jewish mystic shut out the world--much as did the medieval
Christian hermit--as a necessary evil? He looks only inward to
find his God and happiness. Retrogression has been occasionally a
historical necessity. But creative vision will always be seen
through eyes that are focused on the future."

4.

May 10.--I reached the Nvey Eitan Kibbutz about six o'clock in the
evening, on the bus from Afula. The Khamsin had been blowing for
two days from the desert. The temperature touched 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. Rachel Kolin Langsam met me and led me to her "home."
She and her husband are one of four families, each owning a single
room in the small, low, tin-roofed cottage.

In the little white-plastered room were a narrow bed, two chairs,
a table, and a combination bureau and wardrobe, with a few bits of
glass on the shelves. There were a few snapshots of their three
small children, pinned to the walls; and a graphophone, plugged
into a corner. On the porch outside were stacked two or three
canvas-backed chairs. There were electric lights but no running
water.

The children sleep and attend their classes in separate
dormitories and study rooms. Rachel took me to the men's showers
and somewhat rudimentary toilets in an outbuilding. When I had
washed, she introduced me to her husband and brought in supper
from the communal dining room.

We ate black bread and fresh butter, canned sardines and canned
herring, cream cheesy jam, stewed apples, and tea. Later we sat
out on the mosquito-infested lawn with friends of the family, and
chatted in broken German and Hebrew until eleven o'clock. Rachel
served hot tea and cognac. I was drugged with fatigue. Too tired
to sleep.

--
dfi...@mn.uswest.net (Dennis L. Fiddle)
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