Onward. I have tried for a little local color, so Ill dedicate todays effort to Eitan and Emily. The next class, the two boys whose backpacks had been forcibly removed from the room began aggressively to warn me that the principal, their parents, perhaps the military would wreak vengeance upon me. They would not be treated this way. I told them to leave and never come back, that they would never again be students in any class I taught. They asked, should we go to the library? Do you want to send us to the principal? It was hard to get across to them that I truly did not care where they went as long as it was away, and that they would never be allowed back. I meant it. I was only filling in at the high school and was not going to be fired and did not really care if I was. For the rest of that year, during English class, the two wandered the halls. Whenever I encountered the principal, he smiled strangely at me. At the end of the year I reported failing grades for both of them. There was some sort of faculty meeting to discuss students who had failed. When these two came up, some teachers and the principal objected on the grounds that they came from really good families and the principal reported Bs for each of them. The principal and all or a large majority of the teachers were Ashkenazi. I did not much care. The students I actually taught did well and two I encountered a few years later said that what I had taught them about writing in English class had made them much better writers of Hebrew. On the other hand, once, on a bus in Beer Sheva, a woman, rather official looking, sat down next to me and asked if I were Mr. Codish. When I acknowledged my identity she expressed anger at how I graded papers. It seems she had written a paper for one of my students (she did not identify the student) and I had given her a C. Between work at the high school, non-work for a while at the university prep., and very low rent, we made enough to live reasonably well. Beer Sheva had few places to spend any money. There were some garish houses, very large houses on undersized lots, which were inhabited by building contractors who had gotten rich constructing the no longer existent Bar Lev Line of fortifications along the Suez Canal, and people who operated multi-units of fruit, vegetable and chicken stands in the souk and who paid very little in taxes. The tallest building in Beer Sheva was an eight story apartment house surrounded by empty lots. It was always referred to as “the eight story building.” Neighborhoods were designated by letters. We lived in shikun (neighborhood) gimel. Most of our neighbors, except those in our building, were North Africans or lower class Iraqis. They were noisy and, in public places, dirty. Beer Sheva was not a good place to live. The climate was desert – too hot by day, too cold at night. There was no countryside except rocky desert. It rained a little in winter so that, for a month in spring, the desert was covered beautifully in flowers, yellow chrysanthemums and red poppies, and then dryness and heat killed everything. But the campus was kept green and flower beds abounded. Service jobs at Israeli universities tended to be politically based. The Labor Party got to hire the gardeners, cooks, and janitors at the University of the Negev; at Bar Ilan the National Religious Party divvied up paid work. They all hired lots of people. Beer Sheva had serious crime problems, apparently centered on drug distribution in the lower class, semi-slums. Ironically and almost amusingly, the center of the drug trade was at an intersection of three streets named for the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Downtown centered around old Arab buildings marked with bullet holes from the British conquest (there is a large British military cemetery on the outskirts of the city) and the Israeli conquest. The streets, the gutters, the downtown lots were filthy. Perhaps the most distinctive elements of Beer Sheva were its large open markets. One, the Bedouin souk (pronounced shook) was only held on Thursdays. There one could buy donkeys and camels and Bedouin handicrafts. I bought a few rugs there. The other souk, the Jewish one, was open six days a week. It sold everything, all from hundreds of small market stands. There were few fixed prices; strawberries might start at six liras a kilogram and drop to four if the buyer insisted. Chickens were sold alive. One chose a fat, healthy looking bird, picked it up, ruffled its feathers as if you knew what you were doing, agreed, after a brief haggle, on the price, and left to go buy fruits and vegetables. Then you returned to get your chicken, which had been ritually slaughtered and then plucked. Travel to and from the market was by bus; I had no car until a year or so later. I carried two or three large open plastic market baskets, which could get heavy and, on a bus, unwieldy. Cyndi did not like the souk. I did. It was colorful and somehow authentic. The haggling was good natured and the purest form of capitalism I’d ever seen. I remember the first time I returned with chickens. I plopped them both in the sink. Cyndi looked at them and asked where the hole was for stuffing, and I had to explain that chickens did not come with holes; if they did their insides would fall out. I cleaned the chickens and tossed the guts to Figaro, who was very impressed. The chickens still had to be koshered – soaked and salted – a process performed by butchers in America. Neither of us had ever done this before. There were butchers, meat sellers, in Beer Sheva who would do this for some additional fee, but I preferred the souk and the very freshly killed chickens. Beef was almost all imported, frozen, from South America. It was expensive and, in Beer Sheva in the 1970s, of very low quality. We ate it rarely, and then usually ground or very slowly pot roasted for many hours. The fruits and vegetables were (and still are) seasonal and of a better quality than generally available in America. Good quality fish, in that poor inland city, was not available. After the war, I made friends with a few of the English department members. The Chairwoman from Jerusalem left and was replaced by a local teacher who was a friend of mine. I do not remember the exact process, but I got a position teaching literature at the university, and I was glad to have it. I developed a new course on religion and literature, and taught creative writing and American literature, in addition to basic introduction to literature and freshman composition courses. When Aliza was old enough to attend a relatively good pre-school, Cyndi did take a job teaching English as a foreign language at the university and our economic situation was much improved. My course on literature and religion was a success. I learned a lot putting it together and some of my later interests in religion, in Judaism, stemmed from that course. I had, of course, to teach books of the New Testament, which I had read only cursorily before. Copies of it in English were not generally available, but I found a Christian group dedicated to converting the Jews which was delighted to give r thirty nicely bound Bibles, which I distributed to my students. I don’t think any of them became Christian.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:42:42 +0000
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