Art Prints: April 2006

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Days of Honey by Irene

Awret - Preview- -----brought to you by Jerusalem Art Prints

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1 - Nabeul

Rabbi Hai synagogue has been closed up for over twenty years now. It closed the day that the last Jew left Bab Salah Street to settle in Israel. No more prayers mount through the pane less skylight in the middle of the vaulted ceiling. Instead, birds flutter in and out, nesting on the oil lamps still suspended in front of the empty Torah shrine. The were hung there in memory of kabbalasits and sages. One small lamp at the end of the row is engraved with the name of my grandfather, Rafael Uzan, the same name as mine. At his knee I learned, along with my grandmother's couscous sieve. He showed me how to dry big, yellow butterflies and how to distinguish harmless snakes from vipers. To me, he was just my kindly shrunken grandfather, the oldest man in the world. But after his death, everybody, even the rabbis, said that he had been a saint.

"You carry his name, Raphael," people liked to remind me. "Don't forget, you are the grandson of a saint."

It was useless. God knows my father did not spare his belt, pushing me with a strong hand to follow in the saintly footsteps. But I was born under a star that led me, however safely, throughout the dirt paths of life. My Tunisian and Israeli papers disagree on the year of my birth, which took place either fifty-seven or fifty-eight years ago in Nabeul, an ancient little town on the coast of Tunisia. There I grew up in a whitewashed house built of field stone and lime, in the one room my parents had rented to found a family. Having given birth to me on a Thursday, my mother always told me to stick to Fridays for important undertakings or decisions. Events bore out that she was right, for anything that started on a Friday would prosper as if by magic. Even on ordinary weekdays I seem to have more luck than foresight, a fact that makes my wife Fortuna envious. Convinced that I have stolen her portion of luck to add to my own, she blames me when most of her little plans and schemes go awry. Fortuna is quite bitter this alleged robbery.

"No wonder that with double the luck there is always money jingling in your pocket," she lashes out. "But here, feel my poor purse- as flat as a flounder!"

Fortuna is very devout. She lights candles on the graves of all the great rabbis buried in Upper Galilee and even went as far as Bethlehem in Judea to measure the tomb of our mother Rachael with a blue thread. Every time she is worried about a grandson, one of our own children, or even about me, she will take a thread out of its tissue-paper wrapping to pray for help, and as she is almost always worried about one of us, the blue thread is much in use. There is nothing Fortuna is more afraid of than desecrating the sanctity of the Sabbath. On that day she will not come near anything with the faintest resemblance to fire. She would not dream of turning on electric lights. One temptation too great to resist, however, is the Egyptian love stories aired on Israeli television on Friday evenings, so so she has me push the buttons on the TV set.

If, in spite of all these precautions, things still don't go her way, she becomes furious, blaming me for having stolen her luck. Never-the less, I was fortunate in marrying Fortuna. At bottom she is very kindhearted, neat and clean, even still good looking in a way. On top of all these qualities, she has been truly blessed as a cook and baker. But there again, as I sniff the delicious smell of steaming couscous and stuffed tripe, I realize that this blessing can be weighed on my side of the scales as well. It is a mystery to me why I am luckier than she is. She tries so hard to please the Almighty, never straying from the narrow path prescribed to Jewish wives and mothers while I am careless; I walk the streets bareheaded, although I keep a cap ready in my pocket in case I run into my old father.

It's not as if I were an unbeliever, God forbid. But never having been a great stickler for the rules, I pray in my own fashion, having at last managed to creep out of the maze of superstition I grew up in. Maybe I would still go to synagogue if today's rabbis were like the hooded figures of my youth who coveted neither honors nor money and averted their eyes whenever they passed a woman. Their memory I worship. From time to time one of them speaks to me in my dreams which is a sure sign that something wonderful is about to happen.
In a shoe box at home I keep their photographs. Their fading stares still cling to the yellow paper-- solemn, bearded faces all topped by the same kind of tarboosh worn at different angles. Stored away with the photographs are souvenirs of the rabbis as tokens of good luck; a shred from Rabbi Moshe's shroud, a filigree button from Rabbi Eliahu's Sabbath bournous, the precious copper spoon with which Rabbi Yitzhak Bishlino used to eat his simple meals. The smallest of the souvenirs are the most valuable, the amulets these holy men once carried in their pockets to ward off the evil eye; tiny charms of hands, silverfish, blue beads and pearly shells.

Some of the good rabbis must be pleading my case in heaven, for there is no doubt in my mind that I am luckier than most people. Though I had learned the trade of shoemaker in Nabeul, here in Safad I became a gardener. I myself was amazed to see how every seed or plant I put into the soil would grow and flower. Along with my green thumb I also discovered that I had fortunate fingertips. Wherever my spade turned the ground I would find something: antique coins, a golden earring, beads that had clasped some neck a thousand years ago; on meager days, a broken glass-bracelet from the times of the Mamelukes or a shard from a carved clay pipe.

I am just as lucky when it comes to business, a fact that has earned me much jealousy besides getting me into trouble with the income-tax people. There are close to a hundred galleries in Safed and as many painters, yet it is to me that buyers cling as flies to flypaper, running after me in the street: " What are you hiding inside that newspaper, Raphael--some new painting?" For the contents of my pockets or the oddest objects to be found in my little flat, people beg me to name a price. Old buttons, seals, and amulets, even the pair of finches I keep in a cage at home. The less anxious I am to sell, the more they are set on buying.

Fortuna has overheard these people calling me a primitive painter. "Primitive? Crazy! she hisses. " Who has ever seen green donkeys and red camels? Spending all your money on paints and brushes instead of buying a bathtub ...."

I answer her tit for tat. " With you everybody who buys my paintings must be crazy. To you the jury that awarded me the first prize must be completely out of their minds. And the Mayor's wife from Tel-Aviv? She must be primitive and crazy to let herself be photographed handing me the check ..." That hits home.

"Of course," she now says in a low, sly voice. " With stolen luck you can trick anybody, mix up heads as you mixed up mine -- other-wise why wold I have married you?" She does not really mean what she says and I show off like that mainly to make her furious. At heart, I am not all that sure what people find in my paintings.

When we first came to Israel and settled in Safed we quarreled very seldom. Times were difficult then with not much luck to quarrel about. Three months after our wedding, I took my bride and two trunks packed with our clothes, prayer books, salt, olive oil,coffee and plenty of dried peppers to return to the land of my fathers. But that was thirty years ago.

Never again have I set eyes on Nabeul, but deep in my memory my town lies glowing in the sun as on the day I left it. I can yet see white and blue houses in the blinding moonlight, hear the trample of goats, sheep and cows running down our sun baked street. Their bells still fill my ears with their metallic clank. I see a fallah passing by, proudly seated on his donkey, his barefoot wife following with a heavy load of firewood on her head. Farther down, alongside narrow plots of corn and vegetables, some camels are grazing. Lush green fields stretch out toward the golden circle of the dunes, in their turn caught up by the moist sapphire blue of the Mediterranean.

I must have been at least ten years old when I became first aware that there exists something called mountains. My world was completely flat, made up of Nabeul, the sand, and the sea. Without even climbing onto my outlook on the roof I could gather the height of the waves by wafts of salty air coming in from the direction of the shore. I can still sniff the rich aroma of freshly baked barley bread escaping from the ovens, the acrid, tangy mixture of charcoal smoke, pepper, spice, and the dung that pervaded Bab Salah Street. My nose will remember it forever.

In summer I would awake before dawn, roused from sleep by a great din, our Arab neighbors chasing swarms of sparrows out of the millet fields. All of a sudden the silence between night and day was broken by a loud shooing, clamoring camel bells and the "thump-thump" of sticks striking empty tin cans as clouds of birds darkened the paling sky. It was the hour when young mothers fed their children and took them down to the beach. On a secluded strip of dunes they got out their ample clothing, clutched their babies tightly to their bodies and ran into the waves after the toddlers who were chasing tiny fish.

Summers went on endlessly, with mornings at the beach and afternoons at play, one day melting tranquilly into the next like frothy little waves toppling on each other, dissolving in the sand. Winters were short and so mild that I had never even seen snow before settling in Upper Galilee. Rains, winds an occasional hailstorm would never stay with us for long, yet everyone prepared for them as if for a hard time. Already early in October, when west winds swept the first rainclouds into a sky that had been stark blue for as much as seven months, my father used to come home from his weekly peddling trips with sacks of sorghum, durra, and dried corn for which he had bartered in exchange for lace or satin. Loaded on his donkey were dried fish, salted meat and tin cans gurgling with thick greenish-brown olive oil in addition to its usual bales of cotton, silk and muslin. My parents' bed, an odd assemblage of planks, covered a hole which was deep enough to stow away the earthenware pots, linen bags and canvas stacks with our provisions.

When the winds began to whistle and the rainstorms left puddles on the floor under the pane less lattice window, I had a wonderful time. Our room would fill with visitors, aunts and neighbors passing whole days in our company while I would play games with my little cousins. Our mothers cooked, baked and gossiped, telling each other the hidden meaning of their dreams.

"Mother," I remembered, "I also had a dream last night."

"What was it, what did you dream, n'doralnik, my darling son?"

inquired my mother, who always addressed me in such terms of endearment.

"A big, big man was sitting on my belly; he was so heavy that I couldn't move my arms to push him off. I could not even shout for you."

"Oh, oh, what a pity; why didn't you grab his hat!" all the women cried as one, their voices squeaky with excitement. "That heavy man, he must have been Bootalish. Had you only looked up you would have seen his tall hat, covered with diamonds and precious stones for you to snatch!" My mother begged me very seriously to be more watchful next time Bootalish would appear in my dreams, but though I tried hard to remind myself of my promise to her I could not lift my eyes and even less a hand in dreams where someone heavy was sitting on my chest.

The rains would stop as suddenly as they had come. The moment the sun was out again it would dry our muddy street in a matter of minutes. Then I would shoot marbles with Mahmood, Kasham and Abdel Kader, my little Muslim friends. I'd sometimes swap my "marbles" (apricot pits saved from last spring) for delicately tinted butterflies and tiny colored fish caught by my playmates. On warmer days, I was allowed to run in and out of the houses of our Arab neighbors on the condition that I refuse non kosher food and be back home at sunset. The latter rule I followed very strictly. My mother did not have to call me more than once when dusk was falling. No game could keep me outside after dark.

Fearsome stories were going around about Roola, the black she-devil. Some of my young cousins had told me how they had escaped her clutches by the skin of their teeth. One had had the presence of mind to jingle coins in his hand. Another, big Eli, had made her vanish by lighting a match into her hideous face. (Shishi, the dwarf next door, had once shown me the golden ring he had snatched from Roola when she tried to entice him.) The said she had yellow wolves' eyes peering out from behind black shags of hair. Her sagging breasts were only half hidden by her dirty rags. After dark she would come out, hiding her ugliness in the grey cactus hedges fencing the sheds of our Arab neighbors.

"I am not afraid ... Roola, where are you? Roooola...!" I shouted into the prickly pear hedge as my admiring little friends stood open mouthed at such pluck.

In broad daylight I had been daring. At night things looked different. Lying very quietly on my sheepskin, my eyes would carefully avoid a certain corner--the dark one beside the door. What if she had heard me, lurking over there in the tangle of thorns and leaves in our neighbor Nisria's yard, waiting to sink her fangs into me...

Stretched out flat on my back I'd rather try to make up images from the long shadows the oil lamp was projecting on our bumpy walls. Those walls were the picture books of my childhood. Its pages were filled with unending, ever-changing line of animals, funny profiles and frightening monsters. When I grew up a little and started studying the Bible, my jumping horses, humpbacked camels, rabbits and hedgehogs were taken over by Lot's wife, Jonah's whale, crowned kings and a menacing Moses brandishing the tablets of the Law.

My parents would sit stiffly upright on the stuffed mattress at the far side of the room, cross-legged, facing each other from opposite sides of the big bed. One arm folded around her knees, her delicate face cupped sideways in the other hand, my mother always seemed deep in thought at night.

"What is the matter, Mother?" I would ask a little worriedly.

"Fish soup or bean stew, carrot salad or beets with pickled lemon.... I can't make up my mind over tomorrow's dinner," she would sigh and cup her chin in her other hand.

Winter nights tale

On long winter evenings my father used to ask Yedida, the storyteller, to come over at bedtime. Yedida was one of those women with an unusual trade. There were quite a number of such women in our community. Blind and widowed, she occupied a small room in the courtyard of our synagogue across the street, eking out a living with her stories. Already from a distance I could hear her grope her way to our house and as the tapping of her cane drew close, I would rush to spread out my sheepskin, lying down in happy expectation.

"Shalom Aleichem," her deep voice would greet us from the threshold. Yedida's heavy bulk would squat down on the floor and her voice boom at once into her story: "We all know what happened to us under the hard rule of the Turks," she began, staring at me with unseeing eyes.

During the reign of Hamuda Pasha--may God blot out his name and memory--a long, long time ago, our people had to live inside the ghetto, hem their sleeves and trousers with black ribbon, wear black baboushes to mark them as inferiors. But that was not all. Hamuda Pasha decided that he would show the Jews who was lord in Tunisia and commanded them to bend down and lend their backs to the boots of their Muslim masters whenever an Arab wished to mount his donkey or his horse. His decree did not only hurt the backs of our people but also hurt their pride. Nevertheless, it did not hurt their pockets.

So the Pasha thought of yet another humiliation. He let it be known that the great number of poor among his Muslim subjects were thenceforth permitted to pay the Jews with "orange money." Furnished with round slices of orange peels they could enter any Jewish shop, buy anything they needed, put orange peel coins on the counter and demand the change. what Jew in his right mind would have wanted to leave tranquil Algiers and settle in Nabuel under these circumstances? Nevertheless, there was one.

I will wrangle back from the rich what I lose to the poor who pay with orange money," he said, and opened a shop in the market.

against all odds he prospered and in time he became wealthy and respected--so much so that the day arrived when he dared to refuse the use of his back to a Muslim who wanted to mount his horse. Furious, the Muslim pulled a dead cat out of the gutter, grabbed it by the tail and hit the Jew over the neck with the stinking carcass. The Jew, in turn, struck the Arab in the face. It became a fight. With the intervention of some bystanders the Jew was overpowered, bound and brought before the Pasha. Witnesses testified that he had refused to let the Muslim step onto his back and had struck him in the face on top of it all. The Jew was condemned to hang.

"State your last wish and I will see to it that it is granted," Hamuda Pasha said to the Jew who was about to be led away for execution.

"My wish is simple," said the Jew. "Show me the parchment with the Pasha's decree on back bending."

It was unrolled before him, he began to read and as he came to the part spelling out what kind of punishment was to be administered to disobedient Jews he exclaimed, "Here, here it is written in black and white:'One blow with folded hands on the Jew's neck...' It says nothing about dead cats here!"

Even the hardest Pasha has to stand by his own law. The Jew went free and later the cruel decree was done away with altogether.

On those evenings when my mother found it hard to fall asleep and if Yedida was not available, it was my father who read to us from worn-out storybooks. They were printed in the script of our holy tongue, but the words were Judeo-Arabic, a language only old men still can read today. My father's stories were all fairy tales filled with kings in magic glass castles, innocently slandered queens, princes who were changed into howling dogs and bewitched princesses who hopped about as feathery pigeons.

"There was once a widower king who had an only son..." my father began reading as my mother Meesha was making ready for bed. Night after night she did so in the same fashion. First she would untie the coquettish butterfly knot over the middle of her forehead, take off the striped kerchief hiding her thick, brown hair, then put it on again, this time modestly fastened in the back. Seated cross-legged on her side of the bed she would swing the wooden cradle hung up nearby. How drowsy I became with her low singsong and creaking of the chain!

My father's voice brought me back from the edge of sleep.

His queen had died giving birth to the prince, who was the apple of his father's eye. So afraid was the king for his son that he had him brought up in a chamber of glass that only the wet nurse and himself were allowed to enter. Even after he had grown up the nurse would still mash his vegetables and spoon-feed him, watching over the prince day and night.

Having never been in touch with the outside world the young man lived quite happily in his glass chamber, but when he reached the age of eighteen, the old nurse died and another woman took her place. This one was careless enough to serve him a hard-boiled egg unpeeled and the prince, in a rage, flung it at the transparent wall. The glass broke and the egg landed in the honey fountain in the middle of his father's courtyard, smashing an old woman's honey jar. The poor of the country were allowed to scoop up honey from the king's fountain after sundown and the old woman had just scraped together the last of it when the egg hit her jar.

"Clumsy fool!" she shouted at the prince behind the broken glass wall. "Who do you think you are?Sandra, princess of the Romans?"

"And who is Sandra, princess of the Romans?" asked the astonished young man who had never heard of princesses.

Throughout my father's reading my mother had not changed her upright position on the mattress, but now her head sank slowly forward, nodding lower and lower until she finally lay down. My own eyes were closing and I remember the rest of the story as if bottled up in a thick mist.... How the poor prince became sick with longing for beautiful Sandra who was kept prisoner by the cruel demon Obeita in a cave behind the Land of Winds, of Fire and of Water .... How the king wept when his only son took leave to go and search for the princess.... Having overcome terrible dangers, the prince arrived at last in the demon's realm and just as Obeita nibbled of one after another of the royal horse's legs, I would fall asleep.

I barely noticed how the lamp was blown out or how the red curtain that separated me from my parents' bed was drawn shut.

"Days of Honey [captures] the personalities, traditions and textures of Jewish-Tunisian culture. Story after vivid story, a treasury of folklore, humor and captivating, universal humanness."

---Carole Malkin

The once teeming communities of North Africa have been emptied of their Jewish inhabitants; famous synagogues have become shelters for goats and sheep. Few writers have tried to recreate the world of North African Jewry, brusquely uprooted from surroundings they had been part of for two thousand years.

Days of Honey is the story of Rafael Uzan, a native of Nabeul- a small town on the coast of Tunisia- a former shoemaker, pensioned gardener and today a successful primitive artist living in Israel. Like a picaresque novel, this charming memoir recaptures the splendor of North African Jewish life.

Born inti an Orthodox family in a poor Arab-Jewish neighborhood, Rafael grows up in a colorful community filled with tradition, history and superstitions. Aside from the assistance of their Rabbis, the Jewish community of Nabeul is helped along by the crowd of miracle workers, healers, exorcists, charm writers and fortune tellers. In this exotic milieu, the irrepressible Rafael inches his way toward maturity.

Rafael is still in his teens when the Germans and Italians overrun Tunisia and he becomes a prisoner in a forced labor camp. The occupation forces are finally thrown out by British and American forces, but harm has already been done. After the war, Jews find themselves caught between Muslim aspirations to self rule and the French authorities. Rafael takes a bride and leaves for the land of Israel as the entire Jewish community flees Tunisia en mass. In one of the ironies of history, Rafael moves into an abandoned Arab house in Safed just as his ancestral home in Nabeul is taken over by Arabs. Eventually, longing for the culture of his youth prompts him to take up the artist's palette.

Irene awret, one of the founders of the Safed Artists' colony, is a painter, ceramist, and writer. Born in Berlin, Awret emigrated to Israel in 1949 where she met and befriended Rafael Uzan. Uzan's stories of his youth and his enchanting paintings of Nabeul inspired her to write his story.

She lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with her husband, Azriel awret.

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They'll Have to Catch Me first by Irene Awret --- Preview - brought to you by Jerusalem art prints

One

In The Beginning my story is quite ordinary. A normal birth, normal weight, and my mother who tied the dark fuzz on my head in a little pink bow. After the childless rift of World War 1, which my father had spent in the trenches of France, I was welcomed warmly as a bonus of the great inflation.
My entire family, down to the last great-cousin, a bachelor who kept guinea pigs in his bathtub, lived in Berlin, all staunch German citizens of the Mosaic faith, as we were called by the authorities. With Jewish temperament and Prussian discipline rubbing like tectonic plates against each other, slight neuroses were inevitable. On the whole the prognosis for my future looked normal: an existence in the lap of the family, winding through holidays, weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs along the Spree River. Maybe with time I could have made a modest name for myself as an artist, a painter of the Spree perhaps, for already as a small child I was fascinated by the glittering lights that trembled on her murky waters.
Things were to turn out differently. Born on a Sunday I was told I would have luck in life, a prediction which in some ways was to prove correct for otherwise my biography would have ended fifty years ago. My birthday fell on Sunday, the thirtieth of January, 1921, twelve years to the day before Hitler came to power. Part of my family would perish in the death camps, the rest would be dispersed over four continents by the brutal fist of Nazism - my only relative left in Berlin is a half -Jewish niece. But who at the time was paying attention to the hysterical drivel of an anti-Semitic corporal from Austria? One had other things to worry about.
Careful with the butter, Grandma," my father shouted at dinner into my great-grandmother's ear. "This morning we paid thirteen million marks for half-a-pound. By now the cost may be up to a billion."
"Is this so? Well, then the Almighty will forgive us if we eat lard," the old woman was said to have answered.
Germany had been brought to its knees, vanquished, impoverished. The newborn Weimar Republic lay as helplessly kicking on its back as I did in my baby carriage. While the bellies of his former subjects rumbled and the German currency was so worthless that banknotes were used to paper walls, the Kaiser was away in Holland chopping wood. Whoever had not yet had enough of war, mostly extremists of the left or right, continued their battles in the streets of Berlin.
One morning on her way to a walk in the Tiergarten, a large park in the center of Berlin, my mother had been caught up in such a battle. Holding my sister and brother each by a hand, and pregnant with me, she was hurrying to reach the relative security of a side street when she noticed that in the excitement she had lost the paper bag with her children's lunch. So irreplaceable were the sandwiches, she left the children alone and returned through the line of fire to retrieve them.
During the war without my father by her side, she learned to fend for herself and had become strong and self-sufficient.
Apart from a few books, documents and a clothes brush, I have only yellowed photographs to show for my eighteen German years. One of these, well preserved in spite of Papa having carried it for a long time in the breast pocket of his uniform, shows my sister and brother praying for him. Two handsome Jewish children with upturned eyes and piously folded hands in the manner of Christians at prayer, beseeching the ceiling of the most fashionable photographic studio of Alt-Moabit in the center of Berlin. Had my father not volunteered at the outbreak of the war, someone in his situation with two small children might have been spared the trenches. As an obvious patriot he was put into the First Prussian Guard Grenadier Regiment Alexander where, even after being shot through both thighs, he would return to the thick of things. Was it the indisputable love of his country that prompted him to follow the Kaiser's call to arms so quickly, or did the vulture of bankruptcy have something to do with it? After seven years of comfortable married life, the ugly bird was already pecking at our window, timidly at first. By the time I saw the light of this world, inflation had firmly nested in our midst.
Even though Papa was sick of war, he would have licked to continue seeing his chronic money troubles in the purer light of patriotism.
"While I was stuck in mud up to my hips at the battle of the Marne, my brothers-in-law at home transferred their capital safely to Switzerland," he said. " At Verdum I had to drink from a puddle with a dead cat in it, and in the meantime Max built up his cigar import business."
Notwithstanding the Fatherland-loving circumstances, my mother felt swamped by the burden of growing debts. She was able to put up with street fights, though not with increasingly tighter household money and a cuckoo under our dining table. (The cuckoo bird is Berlin slang for the Prussian eagle on the bailiff's seal.) This was not what she expected from a love-match. She and her younger sister, Aunt Toote, listened mainly to their beating hearts in the choice of two young merchants from respectable Jewish families who were pursuing them. On the other hand, their older sister, Aunt Hanna, had hesitated before giving her hand to a man who, though a doctor, was neither young nor dashing. Putting their dark heads together, the three sisters agreed to leave the decision to their lapdog Puppchen who had a keen flair for character. Afterwards, when Uncle Albert asked Aunt Hanna in marriage, the little dog was said to have jumped up at him, licked his hand and barked "Yes!" with enthusiasm. These are some of the family stories I grew up with.
Aunt Hanna's wedding, which followed soon afterwards, was one of those made in heaven, something one could hardly say of Aunt Toote's or my parents' union. True, Aunt Toote's husband quickly became rich, but it was rumored that he spent his money more easily on pretty secretaries than on his wife, while my father, loyal husband, hardworking and keeper of orderly accounts, oversaw the disappearance of my mother's dowry. Although his wedding gift to my mother was a series of music books bound in green leather with gold lettering, he would fall asleep at the opera even during the most passionate arias. Whoever might have come into possession of those song books after our flight from Germany must have wondered about a Margarete Spicker whose name shone under those of Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann. During her pregnancy with me, my mother's moods were so blue that they led to the third of my given names, Dolorosa, the sorrowful Mother of God - me of all people.
For the nine months before my birth, my mother visited all the museums in Berlin - in those days, many pregnant women believed that absorption in great works of art could in some mysterious way transmit their beauty to the unborn. Apparently during her school years, my mother had never been accused by her classmates of being responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, at least not to her face, for she fell so in love with the painting of a Spanish Madonna, that she bought a framed reproduction. My father, brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, must have been quite shocked, though in light of my mother's delicate condition he could not protest to loudly. Later he must have grown accustomed to the stranger in the bedroom, for I remember well the Mater Dolorosa on my mother's toilette table, the tears rolling over olive-green cheeks down to her pointed little chin, and I kept trying to wipe them off from under the glass.
With prewar social conventions, a married woman such as my mother could only dream of a career as a singer or performer, and so she transferred her hopes to me. I would become a tragic actress, a new Pavlova or a bosomy Wagener heroine. With the exception of the bosom I did not fulfill any of those hopes; even the pompous name Dolorosa did not stick, though a few of my uncles and cousins would occasionally call me "Dolle Rosa" (Mad Rose).I always liked the name Irene. A post-war child, I liked to identify with the Greek goddess of peace, and during my later wanderings "Irene " let itself adapt to foreign languages with only minor changes. My second name, Paula, in Yiddish Feigle, which is a translation from the Hebrew. Zipporah, meaning bird, was one of my father's sisters who died at an early age. As if Dolorosa was not sufficient for a theatrical finale, the Nazis later forced me to add a Hebrew name, Sara, making me Irene Paula Dolorosa Sara - and so I entered the world with names of a Greek goddess, a deceased aunt from Krojanke in Posen, a Spanish Madonna and a biblical Mother of Mothers.
First scene: a family idyll, Sunday in the Grunewald, a general name for the forests surrounding Berlin. To the basket full of mushrooms which my older siblings collected, I proudly added lustrous dung-beetles. "Blueberries," I babbled, running in my Sunday dress and white shoes straight into a lake. In the meantime my wet nurse, wearing the Slavic costume, wide skirts and the winged bonnet of the Spreewald region, a marshy area east of Berlin, was off in the background kissing some young man - until my father chased everyone off stage. Milk from an immoral source could in later years have a bad influence on me, he feared, and so he fired one after another of my nurses. In the end my parents understood that the good old prewar days were gone, that even in the Spreewald only the famous pickles were still untouched by rot, and that their youngest had to drink from a bottle.
My mother was always open to new ideas flooding Berlin at the beginning of the twenties and supplemented my nutrition with vegetables, much to my father's horror. So swallowing a good portion of Prussian discipline together with North German carrots and the milk of Brandenburgian cows, I grew into an easy child who asked few questions, ate fast and did as she was told. Even when fed spinach I would obediently open my mouth, spitting it out again only after my plate was clean.
Thriving on this regimen my days were passing in orderly fashion. I spent a good part of my time on walks in the Tiergarten looking for "little people" among the tree-roots. On Friday evenings our family would go to services at the synagogue on Levetzow Street; on Sundays we went by train into the woods, in winter sleigh-riding, in summer mushroom picking. One of my first memories is an Easter Sunday in the forest carrying a little back-basket and seeking the chocolate eggs the easter Bunny had laid for me. I found no end of them, for the treasures I stowed away in the basket behind me were being hidden again and again in the bushes in front of me. But Jewish holidays were the most important. One week before Easter we celebrated Passover with matza and a roast goose. To pass the time during the long Seder, I made use of the rotating illustrations in my children's' Haggadah to let Pharaoh and the Egyptians drown in its cardboard waves.
Still another memory glimmers through the mist of my early childhood, my mother singing a sad song about a flower that is in love with the moon but is afraid of the sun. "Of lo-ove and lo-over's pain ," the song goes. Her chin cupped in one hand, her elbow resting on the keys, my mother is sitting there staring at the piano as if she were able to see through it.
"Please, Mama, let me see them once more,please, just once more." With blurred contours softened by time the figure rises slowly, takes my hand and draws me with her up the three flights of steps to our attic in the apartment house on Tiele Wardenberg Street. It is gloomy under the rafters. By and by my eyes get used to the twilight, and from a dust covered jumble of discarded furniture and knick-knacks a trunk emerges covered in faded fabric, the magic trunk. The lid creaks, I smell mothballs, then six pairs of glass-eyes with painted lashes stare up into the dim attic light. A peasant woman in Alsatian costume and a German soldier with his nurse lie beside elegantly clad Trude, Herta and Lotte, my big sister's old fashioned dolls, all in an orderly row resting here undisturbed. A wave that welled up from a faraway country called "Before the War" had swept them into our attic. Before my birth, when my family still had money, there had been this other world where little girls with long, open hair and lace dresses with sashes sipped lemonade from great-grandmother Treumann's crystal glasses, where my brother Werner wore a soldier's cap and boots with a long row of buttons. I had come too late to remember this. Only up here in the attic was it still possible to catch a corner of Before the War.
For my birthday I wished for a big garlic sausage. No more sausage ends on my plate, no more. " Here Irene, the end is for you because you are the youngest." A four-year old was due a whole sausage for herself. When the great day dawned I found no sausage - instead I found the doll named Lotte sitting in an armchair in the living room, who in order to serve as my birthday present had given up her world in the enchanted trunk. I almost did not recognize her in that sobering new dress. Also in place of garlic sausage, my mother had ordered ballet shoes made to measure for me, not the pink ones I had dreamed of, but practical black ones that do not soil easily. I can only add here that black ballet shoes did not kindle the kind of enthusiasm in me that is indispensable to a life on the stage.
In any event, my lessons with Papa Gronsky, a White -Russian ballet master of Bulow Street, were soon interrupted when I fell sick with double pneumonia. I owe the continuation of my story to the devoted care of my parents and to the experience and common sense of Doctor Kalmus, our family doctor. I still see the green silk scarf shielding my feverish eyes from the glare of the electric lamp on the night table. They are so hot, they keep on burning even after I have been plunged into a cool bath to bring down my fever. Kerchiefs and linen steeped in turpentine drip from the railing of my bed. Doctor Kalmus arrives in the middle of the night, and in the triple mirror over my mother's toilet table I can see myself in his lap in my long flannel nightshirt, fighting for breath. All around I see me sitting in the wings of the mirror gasping for air; then Doctor Kalmus presses something glittering and hard so deep down my throat that vomit and mucus bespatter the image of the Mater Dolorosa.
Feeling weak and tired can be a very pleasant experience. Especially when I am served consomme, veal brains, roasted pigeon and lady fingers in bed, when brand-new storybooks are read to me, and when my aunts come with big sheets of paper dolls and their wardrobe to be cut out. In order to bring back my hearty appetite my mother plied me so successfully with "biomalt" and cod-liver-oil that by then I already disliked stepping onto a scale. To regain a figure, I had to wait until the second World War - the only period in my life when I had a waist was my year-and-a-half in the Gestapo camp in Mechelen, Belgium.
As a four year old, however, I obediently swallowed tablespoons of cod-liver baited with candy swimming in the middle. Twice a week my mother would again bring me to Papa Gronsky's ballet studio. It was the time between the great inflation and the great depression, a period of feverish activity in the arts and sciences. In Berlin's coffee-houses intellectuals sat discussing literature and politics, people queued up for blocks to see the newest avant garde play or some futuristic silent movie, and heated controversies arose over expressionistic art shows, Bauhaus architecture and atonal music. "Hindermith, her damit, weg damit" (Hindermith, here with it, away with it), sneered my father, as my mother saved money from her small household allowance to take me to the theater or the ballet, still hoping her youngest would conquer the stage.

They'll Have to Catch Me first by Irene Awret --- Preview - brought to you by Jerusalem art prints

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