LITMIR.BIZ

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cumbersome gas trucks, the primitive extermination technology that preceded the more efficient gas chambers.

      When the refugees reached the Soviet-occupied area, Shulek knew better than to reveal that he was a Communist: Stalin had recently eliminated the leaders of Polish Communism. Instead Shulek crossed the German-Soviet boundary bearing an old-new identity: that of an avowed Jew. At the time, the USSR was the only country willing to accept Jewish refugees, although it sent most of them to its Asian regions. Shulek and his wife were fortunate in being sent to distant Uzbekistan. His sister-in-law, who was educated and spoke several languages, enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to remain in civilized Europe, which, sadly, had not yet been dubbed Judeo-Christian. So it was that in 1941 she fell into the hands of the Nazis and was dispatched to a crematorium.

      In 1945, Shulek and his wife returned to Poland, but even in the absence of the German army the country continued its rejection of the Jews. Once again the Polish Communist was left without a homeland (unless we count Communism, to which, despite all his troubles, he remained loyal). He and his wife and two small children found themselves in a camp for displaced persons in the mountains of Bavaria. There he met one of his brothers, who, unlike Shulek, disliked communism and favored Zionism. History looked on their fates with an ironic smile: the Zionist brother got a visa to emigrate to Montreal, where he remained for the rest of his life, while Shulek and his little family were transferred by the Jewish Agency to Marseilles, whence at the end of 1948 they sailed to Haifa.

      In Israel, Shulek lived for many years as Shaul, though he never became a real Israeli. Even his identity card did not classify him as such. It defined him as Jewish by nationality and religion—since the 1960s, the state had recorded a religion for all citizens, including confirmed unbelievers—but he was always much more of a Communist than a Jew, and more of a Yiddishist than a Pole. Though he learned to communicate in Hebrew, he did not much care for the language, and continued to speak Yiddish with family and friends.

      Shulek was nostalgic for the ‘Yiddishland’ of Eastern Europe and the revolutionary ideas that had seethed and fermented there before the war. In Israel he felt he was stealing other people’s land; though it wasn’t his doing, he continued to regard it as robbery. His obvious alienation was not from the native-born Sabras, who looked down on him, but from the local climate. The hot breath of the Levant was not for him. It only intensified his longing for the heavy snows that blanketed the streets of Lodz, the Polish snow that slowly melted in his memory until his eyes finally closed. At his graveside, his old comrades sang “The Internationale.”

      Bernardo was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, in 1924. Years later he would be called Dov. Bernardo’s mother, like Shulek’s mother, was a religious woman her entire life, although she attended a church rather than a synagogue. His father, however, had early on abandoned any intensive preoccupation with the soul and, like many other metalworkers in rebellious Barcelona, become an anarchist. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the anarcho-syndicalist cooperatives supported the young leftist republic and for a while actually ruled Barcelona. But the right-wing, Francoist forces soon reached the city, and young Bernardo fought alongside his father in the final retreat from its streets.

      Bernardo’s conscription into Franco’s military, a few years after the end of the Civil War, did not soften his feelings about the new regime. As an armed soldier in 1944, he deserted to the Pyrenees, where he helped other opponents of the regime cross the border. Meanwhile he waited eagerly for the American forces to arrive and bring down the cruel ally of Mussolini and Hitler. To his dismay, the democratic liberators did not even try. Bernardo had no choice but to cross the border himself and become a stateless person. He worked as a miner in France, then stowed away on a ship in hope of reaching Mexico. But he was caught in New York and sent back to Europe in shackles.

      Thus in 1948 he, too, was in Marseilles, working in one of the shipyards. One evening in May, he met a group of enthusiastic young men in a dockside café. The young metalworker, still dreaming of the human beauty of Barcelona’s revolutionary cooperatives, became convinced that the kibbutz in the new state of Israel was their natural successor. Without the slightest connection to Judaism or Zionism, he boarded an immigrant ship, arrived in Haifa and was promptly sent to the battlefront in the valley of Latrun. Many of his companions fell during combat, but he survived and immediately joined a kibbutz, just as he had dreamed of doing that spring day in Marseilles. There he met the woman of his life. Along with several other couples, they were married by a rabbi in a speedy ritual. In those days, the rabbis were still happy to provide this service and asked no superfluous questions.

      The Ministry of the Interior soon discovered that a serious error had been made: Bernardo, now known as Dov, was not a Jew. Although the marriage was not annulled, Dov was summoned to a formal meeting to clarify his true identity. In the government office to which he was directed sat an official wearing a large black skullcap. At that time, the religious-Zionist party Mizrahi, which ran the Ministry of the Interior, was cautious and hesitant. It was not yet insistent about “national” territories or the politics of identity exclusion.

      The exchange between the two men went more or less as follows:

      “You are not a Jew, sir,” said the official.

      “I never said I was,” replied Dov.

      “We shall have to change your registration,” the official said casually.

      “No problem,” Dov agreed. “Go right ahead.”

      “What is your nationality?”

      “Israeli?” Dov suggested.

      “There is no such thing,” stated the official.

      “Why?”

      “Because there is no Israeli national identity,” the ministry official said with a sigh. “Where were you born?”

      “In Barcelona.”

      “Then we’ll write ‘nationality: Spanish.’ ”

      “But I’m not Spanish. I’m a Catalan, and I refuse to be categorized as Spanish. That’s what my father and I fought about in the 1930s.”

      The official scratched his head. He knew no history, but he did respect people. “So we’ll put ‘nationality: Catalan.’ ”

      “Very good!” said Dov.

      Thus Israel became the first country in the world to officially recognize the Catalan nationality.

      “Now, sir, what is your religion?”

      “I’m a secular atheist.”

      “I can’t write ‘atheist.’ The State of Israel does not recognize such a category. What was your mother’s religion?”

      “The last time I saw her, she was still a Catholic.”

      “Then I shall write ‘religion: Christian,’ ” the official said, relieved.

      But Dov, normally a calm man, was growing impatient. “I won’t carry an identity card that says I’m a Christian. It’s not only opposed to my principles; it offends the memory of my father, who was an anarchist and set fire to churches in the Civil War.”

      The official scratched his head some more, weighed the options, and found a solution. Dov left the ministry office with a blue identity card that declared both his nationality and his religion to be Catalan.

      Over the years, Dov took pains not to let his national and religious identity adversely affect his daughters. He knew that Israeli schoolteachers often referred to “us Jews,” despite the fact that some of their pupils, or the pupils’ parents, might not be among that group. Since Dov was antireligious, and his wife was opposed to his being circumcised, conversion to Judaism was not on the cards. At some point he searched for some imaginary link to the Marranos (forced converts) of Spain. But when his daughters grew up and assured him that his being a non-Jew did not trouble them, he abandoned the search.

      Fortunately for him, the graveyards of kibbutzim do not bury gentiles outside the fence or in Christian cemeteries,

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