Village Life in 1940s Israel

I was born in Tel Aviv in 1939. When I was one year and nine months old, my mother passed away. She had been ill with pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there was no medication for it in Israel. My middle sister, Aliya, was then six years old.

My father raised me and Aliya with the help of a succession of nannies. My older sister Naomi was studying at the Mikveh Israel agricultural boarding school. When I was four years old, my father put my sister Aliya on a kibbutz, and placed me with a foster family, Ida and Yaakov and their daughter, Tsippa, on amoshav in the Sharon region.

They welcomed me with love and warmth, and they treated me like a son. Ida would sing me love songs like Meirke mein zun (Meirke my son). The neighbors also liked me, and for the three years I lived there I was very happy. The house had two rooms, a kitchen and an open, covered balcony. The shower and toilet were out in the yard, next to the cowshed.

On summer evenings we would sit on the balcony, under the light of a kerosene lamp that hung from the ceiling in a large glass cage. I was mesmerized by the flying insects that were attracted to the light and tried to get into the glass cage.

Every other weekend my father would come to visit me. One day he took me to the village water tower and dared me to climb up the ladder. I was afraid, so he said, "I'll climb up behind you, and if you fall – I'll catch you." I climbed up, and I was even more afraid to go down. But as we all know, I did come down.

Yaakov and Ida were both Zionists and farmers out of idealism. After they immigrated to Israel, Yaakov became an expert citrus grower. He had a well-organized plant nursery, where he would plant and graft different varieties of citrus. Yaakov would take me with him to his fields, as well as to his citrus orchard, which was very far from home.

Ida raised hens for eggs and a cow for milk. We had a small, very strong donkey. It was hitched to a cart and carried milk and eggs to the collection point and, during the citrus -picking season, boxes of oranges from the orchard to the packing house.

I started going to kindergarten. In the afternoons we used to run and push a hoop, using an iron rod bent in the shape of the letter h. My father brought hoops made of copper for me and my friends. We also played marbles, and a game called gogoyim, which is played with apricot stones. I loved riding a horse that I made from a wooden pole with a rope for the reins.

On the balcony of the house we had a dark brown metal cupboard. Tsippa and her friends were my teachers, and the cupboard door was a blackboard. They taught me arithmetic, reading and writing. One day I surprised the adults by reading the newspaper headlines.

On holidays my father used to take me on the bus to visit our family. From the bus I would read the signs along the way. During the British Mandate all signs were in both Hebrew and English. That's how I began to acquire an English vocabulary, but I didn't always pronounce the words correctly.

Like most families in a moshav at that time, my foster family's life was hard: Yaakov worked in the fields and the orchard, and Ida tended the chickens and the cow. She also did the laundry and the cooking and cleaned the house, all without electricity. We had electric power only for lighting and the radio.

Instead of an electric fridge, people had an ice box. In summer they would buy a block of ice every other day from the moshav cold store, wrap it in a jute bag, and put it in the ice box.

The shower was attached to the cowshed, and it had only cold water. The toilet was behind the cowshed. It was a wooden shack, standing over a large pit. The smell was terrible and the flies feasted there.

Today it's difficult to understand how people who worked in the fields, in the chicken coops and with livestock, managed without hot water in the winter. I was still small, so I bathed in the kitchen sink, with water heated in a kettle on a kerosene stove.

In exchange for the produce from their farms, families received vouchers with which they could buy food, seeds, fertilizers, and other necessities at the co-op store in the moshav.

There was a system of mutual aid for any family in need. When a farmer was sick and needed help with the work on the farm, they were constantly worried that a cow would get sick and die, or that a disease would strike the chickens.

There was one telephone in the moshav, in the secretary's office, and apart from office use it was used only in emergencies.

A peddler would occasionally come to the village with two heavy, brown suitcases. The suitcases contained everything from shoelaces to simple dresses for women, and pants and shirts for children. One could order clothes, sewing thread or a piece of fabric from him, and a few weeks later he would bring it.