When I Lived in Modern Times

  Praise for Linda Grant’s

  When I Lived in Modern Times

  “Informed, intelligent…Tel Aviv inspires Grant’s most vital,

  original writing.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Witty and intelligent…Ms. Grant’s fast-paced novel succeeds on many levels. It re-creates the historical era accurately with sophisticated prose and lively jests about the human condition.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “An unsentimental, iconoclastic coming-of-age story of both a country—Israel—and a young immigrant, Grant’s novel both introduces an unusually appealing heroine and provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed from an unsparing point of view.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Grant’s prose is simple and moving, clearly expressing the intensity of a young girl’s quest for herself, and of a young nation seeking to establish its boundaries.”

  —Booklist

  “Written with uncluttered economy, high in quietly astute observation, and underpinned by a rigorously searching investigation of its themes, this is a novel that both stimulates the mind and satisfies the heart.”

  —Scotland on Sunday

  “Full of sharp humor, complex ironies, and an acute eye for cultural clashes, this is a superb coming-of-age novel.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  LINDA GRANT is the author of three previous books, including The Cast Iron Shore (winner of the David Higham Prize for best first novel) and Remind Me Who I Am, Again, her acclaimed account of her mother’s dementia. She lives in London. Visit her website at www.lindagrant.co.uk.

  Also by Linda Grant

  FICTION

  The Cast Iron Shore

  NONFICTION

  Sexing the Millennium

  Remind Me Who I Am, Again

  When I Lived

  in

  Modern Times

  Linda Grant

  A PLUME BOOK

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition. Originally published in

  Great Britain by Granta Books.

  5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Linda Grant, 2000

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:

  Grant, Linda.

  When I lived in modern times / Linda Grant.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56339-7

  1. Jewish women—Fiction. 2. Tel Aviv (Israel)—Fiction.

  3. Palestine—History—1917–1948—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6057.R316 W47 2001

  823′.914—dc21 00-059623

  Original hardcover design by Julian Hamer

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  For Michele and John

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am greatly indebted to A. J. Sherman for his invaluable research on this period. Some of the dialogue given to my colonial characters has come directly from letters, memoirs and diaries from which he quotes in his book Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1997).

  For the portrait of the early years of the kibbutz, I drew on a vivid series of articles by Assaf Inbari published in the Israeli newspaper Ha-Aretz, on the establishment of Kibbutz Afikim.

  Very late in the day in terms of the writing of this novel, Joachim Schlor’s Tel Aviv: From Dream to City (Reaktion Books, 1999) was published. If you want to know more about the history of the city, this is the book.

  My deepest thanks to: in Israel, Yasaf Nachmayas, Lotte Geiger, Jonathan Spyer and Dr. Michael Levin; and in London, to Judah Passow; my editor, Frances Coady; and my agent, Derek Johns.

  They are a people, and they lack the props of a people. They are a disembodied ghost…We ask today: “What are the Poles? What are the French? What are the Swiss?” When that is asked, everyone points to a country, to certain institutions, to parliamentary institutions, and the man in the street will know exactly what it is. He has a passport. If you ask what a Jew is—well, he is a man who has to offer a long explanation for his existence, and any person who has to offer an explanation as to what he is, is always suspect…

  Evidence from Chaim Weizmann

  to the United Nations Special Committee

  on Palestine, July 8, 1947

  When I Lived

  in

  Modern Times

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  WHEN I look back I see myself at twenty. I was at an age when anything seemed possible, at the beginning of times when anything was possible. I was standing on the deck dreaming; across the Mediterranean we sailed, from one end to the other, past Crete and Cyprus to where the East begins. Mare nostrum. Our sea. But I was not in search of antiquity. I was looking for a place without artifice or sentiment, where life was stripped back to its basics, where things were fundamental and serious and above all modern.

  This is my story. Scratch a Jew and you’ve got a story. If you don’t like elaborate picaresques full of unlikely events and tortuous explanations, steer clear of the Jews. If you want things to be straightforward, find someone else to listen to. You might even get to say something yourself. How do we begin a sentence?

  “Listen…”

  A sailor pointed out to me a little ship on the horizon, one whose role as a ship was suppose
d to be finished, which had reached the end of its life but had fallen into the hands of those who wanted it to sail one last time. “Do you know what that is?” he asked me.

  I knew but I didn’t tell him.

  “It isn’t going to land,” he said. “The authorities will catch them.”

  “Are you in sympathy with those people?”

  “Yes, I’m sympathetic. Who wouldn’t be? But they can’t go where they want to go. It’s just not on. They’ll have to find somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “No idea. That’s not our problem, is it?”

  “So you don’t think the Zionist state is inevitable?”

  “Oh, they’ll manage somewhere or other. They always have done in the past.”

  This time it’s different, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. Like the people on the horizon, I was determined that I was going home, though in my case it was not out of necessity but conviction.

  Then I saw it, the coast of Palestine. The harbor of Haifa assumed its shape, the cypress and olive and pine-clad slopes of Mount Carmel ascended from the port. I didn’t know then that they were cypresses and olives and pines. I didn’t recognize a single thing. I had no idea at all what I was looking at. I had come from a city where a few unnamed trees grew out of asphalt pavements, ignored, unseen. I could identify dandelions and daisies and florists’ roses but that was all, that was the extent of my excursions into the kingdom of the natural world. And what kind of English girl doesn’t look at a tree and know what type it is, by its bark or its leaves? How could I be English, despite what was written on my papers?

  On deck, beside me, some passengers were crossing themselves and murmuring, “The Holy Land,” and I copied them but we were each of us seeing something entirely different.

  I know that people regarded me in those days as many things: a bare-faced liar; an enigma; or a kind of Displaced Person like the ones in the camps. But what I felt like was a chrysalis, neither bug nor butterfly, something in between, closed, secretive, and inside some great transformation under way as the world itself—in that strangest of eras just after the war was over—was metamorphosing into something else, which was neither the war nor a return to what had gone before.

  It was April 1946. The Mediterranean was packed with traffic. Victory hung like a veil in the air, disguising where we might be headed next. Fifty years later it’s so easy, with hindsight, to understand what was happening but you were part of it then. History was no theme park. It was what you lived. You were affected, whether you liked it or not.

  We didn’t know that a bitter winter was coming, the coldest in living memory in the closing months of 1946 and the new year of 1947. America would be frozen. Northern Europe would freeze. You could watch on the Pathé newsreel women scavenging for coal in the streets of the East End of London. I had already seen in the pages of Life magazine what was left of Berlin—a combination of grandeur and devastation, fragments of what looked like an old, dead civilization, the wreckage that was left in the degradation of defeat. I had seen people selling crumbs of what had once been part of a civilized life. A starving woman held out a single red, high-heeled shoe. A man tried to exchange a small bell for a piece of bread. A boy offered a soldier of the Red Army his sister’s doll.

  All across the northern hemisphere would be the same bitter winter. The cold that killed them in Germany would kill us everywhere. But winter was months away and I was on deck in balmy spring weather, holding the green-painted rail of the ship, watching the coast of Palestine assemble itself out of the fragrant morning air and assume a definite shape and dimension.

  In the Book of Lamentations I had once read these words: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine. The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feast: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.

  But all that was about to change. We were going to force an alteration in our own future. We were going to drive the strangers out, bury the blackened dead, destroy the immigration posts and forget our bitterness. There would be no more books of lamenting. Nothing like that was going to happen to us again. We had guns now, and underground armies, guerrilla fighters, hand grenades, nail bombs, a comprehensive knowledge of dynamite and TNT. We had spies in the enemies’ ranks and we knew what to do with collaborators.

  I was a daughter of the new Zion and I felt the ship shudder as the gangplank crashed on to the dock. I put on my hat and white cotton gloves and, preparing my face, waited to go ashore at the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.

  WHO was Evelyn? Who took a train through France and boarded a ship at Marseilles?

  Just a work-in-progress, not even that; a preliminary sketch for a person. I was only twenty and what does twenty know?

  Listen, to start with I never met my father, so fifty percent of me was blank. My mother said he was an American, from San Francisco. She had a picture of the two of them standing in Trafalgar Square in 1923, taken by a street photographer. I can’t see his face properly because the brim of his hat casts a shadow. His name was Arthur Bergson and he returned to America promising that he would be back four months later, to marry her. She never saw him again and I suppose he never knew that he had a daughter somewhere in the world.

  She grew up in Whitechapel in the East End of London. Her parents came from Latvia on the Baltic coast and they spoke no English. She was the youngest of seven, a wild, disobedient girl, the only one of all her brothers and sisters to be born in England.

  I used to sit on her knee at bedtime while she reminisced about her own childhood, her brown eyes seeing things I had never seen, which did not seem right when we had nothing but each other and for each other we were everything. “You know, we lived in a big dirty house,” she told me, “or at least it seemed big to me, and we all slept in feather beds and my mother and father would sit up all night playing cards, talking together in Yiddish about the old country and the town they had come from and a man who had done a crooked deal over the sale of a cow or a cheder teacher who had beaten my father or the wind blowing through their wooden houses.

  “We kept a barrel with herrings in it at the end of the yard, Evelyn, and there were chickens in a little wooden pen and my mother would go out in her slippers on Friday mornings and with her big red hands she would take one of the hens and wring its neck and I would be in the house with my hands over my ears because I couldn’t bear to hear the other hens squawking. My brother Hymie would laugh at me and run around the room imitating a hen—he was a horrible boy Hymie, spiteful, but he came home from the war with a wound in his head that wouldn’t heal and then he died of the flu, my sister Gittel, too. She was sixteen and lying in bed and on the fifth day her lungs were full of blood. My mother would come in from the hens and with a cleaver she would cut the bird’s head off and the kitchen smelled of dark blood. It was horrible, Evelyn, horrible. Everything was horrible to me. Everything.

  “The lavatory was at the end of the yard too and in the winter the water in the pan froze. We used the Yiddish papers, cut in pieces, to wipe ourselves with, and when I sat there in the dark listening to the hens scratching I used to dream of another life, a pretty life where things smelled nice and there was no unpleasantness.”

  I sat on her lap with my hair curled in twists of paper and she undid one to see if there was a proper corkscrew yet.

  “They called the pennies and shillings and sixpences kopecks and this made me angry. They were here in London but they behaved as if they had never left Latvia. They used to curse the tsar and they danced in the yard when they heard he had been murdered—and all his children with him.

  “When I was fourteen they sent me to Cable Street to get a job in a factory that made ribbon but I didn’t want to go. I walked down our street and when I got to the end I took a tram all the way to the West End and went to a picture house and saw a fi
lm with Mary Pickford and from that time on I tried to make myself look like her and wanted the other girls to call me Mary. Mary! My God, was ever there such a name for a Jewish girl?

  “Well, my father thrashed me when I got home and he made me go back to the ribbon factory the next day but he couldn’t stop me going to the picture houses. I met your father on the Edgware Road one day, when I was seventeen, and when I heard his American accent, of course I agreed at once to go with him for a cup of tea, especially when I found out that he was from California, the home of the film stars. You know I thought then that England was a halfway house, only part of the way toward the New World, and with Arthur I was going to finish the journey that my mother and father had started but not completed because of my father’s stupidity, because he did not understand the writing on the ticket, and brought us passage here instead of to America.”

  This was the story of my mother and of the life she had spent without me. I heard these tales until they were almost worn through and transparent. Then she would rush forward to my birth in a home for wayward women of the Jewish faith. They don’t like to talk about the fact that such institutions existed, but they did, supplying the contents of the cots at the Norwood orphanage. She said it had a number of wealthy benefactors, some of whom took a keen personal interest in the future welfare of the girls that passed through, and my mother came to the attention of one of them, who set her up in a hairdresser’s shop on Regent Street around the time that bobbed hair and the Marcel wave were all the rage. His name was Joe Hertz. Uncle Joe, to me. In the register her name was Miriam Chernovsky but she put the past behind her and became Marguerite. The surname she chose for both of us was Sert, because, she said, it was brief and it did not seem to come from anywhere.

  “Tell me about my father,” I would beg her. But all she would say was this: “Oh, he was a good-looking man. He wore his hat with the brim down, shading his face, and he smoked cork-tipped cigarettes.” And that was all. I had a Jewish father with the shortest story in the world.