Read Online The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gail Hareven
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treat Jordanian civilians as hostages; so tell me why what Israel does is called war and defense, and what Black September does is called terrorism?”
• • •
“It’s a good thing your father isn’t here to hear you talk like that,” my mother said grimly, draining the water from her steamed vegetables into the sink. “If you, Noa, don’t know the answer to that question yourself, it would be better if you kept quiet and didn’t shame yourself by such talk. We know very well who’s influencing you, who’s putting that nonsense into your head.” My mother, unlike me, has never felt the need to try on opinions, and in this she resembles my daughter far more than me. My mother is a dietetic nurse, my daughter is about to become a rabbi, and they both relate with the same degree of seriousness to what goes into the mouth and what comes out of it.
Looking back, even though I agree in general with Osnat’s verdict regarding the group’s male chauvinism, it’s clear to me that the seeds of my feminist views were planted during that period. At the time I didn’t take any notice of the way they behaved towards women, it wasn’t too different from the way my father or any other man I knew behaved, they certainly didn’t count women among oppressed population groups,and neither did it ever occur to me to do so. And nevertheless questions like: “Law and order—that serve whom?” registered in my mind and left an impression, and years later, when I constructed the character of Nira Woolf, I gave her some of Osnat’s gestures, and some of her views regarding the law.
(“When Nira Woolf gives the sex slave her pistol, in order for her to use it, she is actually killing them both with one bullet: the slave trafficker and the oppressed woman. So that after the shot we are left with the body of a man, a dead female slave, and a living woman. She who was previously a slave and who is now a liberated woman.” From my last interview about
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know
?)
Alek, as I said, didn’t talk much, but before I finish with the folklore of those days in Nachlaot, I’ll just mention one outburst of his. The discussion was not particularly lively—about the indifference of the Israeli student, the Sorbonne commune, the occupation, police brutality and the right to violence—and they were rehashing the subject of “the suppression of thought” again when Alek suddenly began to talk about the Prague Spring. I won’t try to recapitulate everything he said, because more than I remember the content, I remember the tone. He sat slightly bowed in his chair and spoke quietly, without looking at any of us, speaking as if he was telling a very personal story, and one sentence kept coming back like a lament: “It was beautiful, the Prague Spring, it was beautiful, and I like a fool actually began to believe that the world was going to let it happen.”
When the story was drawing close to its end, Alek raised his voice, glaring at us suddenly with a strange hostility: “Half a million Russian tanks crushed Czechoslovakia. They trampled the students, theytrampled artists, they destroyed a hope that you’ll never understand. People like you, who talk about repression, have no idea of what kind of freedom people were fighting for there.” He stood up with a distorted face, close to tears or violence, and what happened afterwards was very much like flight.
In the space of ten minutes everyone had left the house, except for me and Hamida-Yoash, who took him to the kitchen and sat there with him until three in the morning emptying a bottle of vodka. The drink silenced Yoash and made Alek talkative and less sparing of gestures. “… It’s the talking … that’s the problem, I can’t stand the talking, not just Menachem’s, the two Menachems, with them it’s relatively easy, because they come right out and call themselves communists. I mean the others, all the others who haven’t got faintest idea of what
• • •
“It’s a good thing your father isn’t here to hear you talk like that,” my mother said grimly, draining the water from her steamed vegetables into the sink. “If you, Noa, don’t know the answer to that question yourself, it would be better if you kept quiet and didn’t shame yourself by such talk. We know very well who’s influencing you, who’s putting that nonsense into your head.” My mother, unlike me, has never felt the need to try on opinions, and in this she resembles my daughter far more than me. My mother is a dietetic nurse, my daughter is about to become a rabbi, and they both relate with the same degree of seriousness to what goes into the mouth and what comes out of it.
Looking back, even though I agree in general with Osnat’s verdict regarding the group’s male chauvinism, it’s clear to me that the seeds of my feminist views were planted during that period. At the time I didn’t take any notice of the way they behaved towards women, it wasn’t too different from the way my father or any other man I knew behaved, they certainly didn’t count women among oppressed population groups,and neither did it ever occur to me to do so. And nevertheless questions like: “Law and order—that serve whom?” registered in my mind and left an impression, and years later, when I constructed the character of Nira Woolf, I gave her some of Osnat’s gestures, and some of her views regarding the law.
(“When Nira Woolf gives the sex slave her pistol, in order for her to use it, she is actually killing them both with one bullet: the slave trafficker and the oppressed woman. So that after the shot we are left with the body of a man, a dead female slave, and a living woman. She who was previously a slave and who is now a liberated woman.” From my last interview about
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know
?)
Alek, as I said, didn’t talk much, but before I finish with the folklore of those days in Nachlaot, I’ll just mention one outburst of his. The discussion was not particularly lively—about the indifference of the Israeli student, the Sorbonne commune, the occupation, police brutality and the right to violence—and they were rehashing the subject of “the suppression of thought” again when Alek suddenly began to talk about the Prague Spring. I won’t try to recapitulate everything he said, because more than I remember the content, I remember the tone. He sat slightly bowed in his chair and spoke quietly, without looking at any of us, speaking as if he was telling a very personal story, and one sentence kept coming back like a lament: “It was beautiful, the Prague Spring, it was beautiful, and I like a fool actually began to believe that the world was going to let it happen.”
When the story was drawing close to its end, Alek raised his voice, glaring at us suddenly with a strange hostility: “Half a million Russian tanks crushed Czechoslovakia. They trampled the students, theytrampled artists, they destroyed a hope that you’ll never understand. People like you, who talk about repression, have no idea of what kind of freedom people were fighting for there.” He stood up with a distorted face, close to tears or violence, and what happened afterwards was very much like flight.
In the space of ten minutes everyone had left the house, except for me and Hamida-Yoash, who took him to the kitchen and sat there with him until three in the morning emptying a bottle of vodka. The drink silenced Yoash and made Alek talkative and less sparing of gestures. “… It’s the talking … that’s the problem, I can’t stand the talking, not just Menachem’s, the two Menachems, with them it’s relatively easy, because they come right out and call themselves communists. I mean the others, all the others who haven’t got faintest idea of what
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