My Grandfather’s Leg

Sanaa 1936-1945

My mother was married to her uncle at the age of 10.

He was 18.

In the Jewish quarter of Sanaa, girls often married young, like their Muslim neighbors. Her friend Zivia had been betrothed at 12 to her cousin and had no complaints. But in my mother’s case, the rationale was a business deal gone bad. Her father, Yihye Harif, owed a debt to his brother, and it seemed easiest to pay it off with a girl who was still several years away from becoming a teenager. My mother’s soon-to-be husband lived eight hours away by donkey.

Born in Sanaa around 1936 (birthdays were not recorded), the girl was named Hamame (“dove” in Arabic, the spoken language). She was her parents’ third child after her brother Hayim and sister Bracha, who had died in childhood, a not uncommon event. Hamame was a resilient child, perhaps because she nursed for so long; which secured a meal, precious in a community marked by regular deficiency. In exchange for this nourishment and comfort, Hamame helped her mother, Rumia, avoid an unwanted pregnancy, such being the superstitious convention among Yemenite Jews.

The Jews of Yemen mostly lived in the hilly region, which reached 12,000 feet high. Divided by many valleys, it was a fertile area surrounded by deserts. In the first half of the 20th century, the population of Yemen was 4 million people; 50,000 of them were Jews who were scattered among 1,100 villages. Many villages had several Jewish families only. Only 15% lived in Sanaa.

Sanaa, at 7,500 feet, the highest capital in the Middle East, was itself enclosed, but the Jewish quarter had its own tall walls and a gate that locked at night. This ghetto, known as Qa al Yahud, was home to some 6,000 Jews, a quarter of the city’s population.

Mother and daughter were inseparable. Hamame stretched her part of the deal and nursed vigorously until age 4 when her mother submitted to another pregnancy. It was a boy, Avraham, after whom sister Sara came along, followed by Shoshana.

My mother’s uncle Shmuel, her father’s youngest brother, lived with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters about 20 miles south of Sanaa in a village called Bani Bahloul (which was also the name of the area) and was in the family business of dried fruits and nuts, mostly almonds, raisins, dates, and walnuts. (Yemen’s sunny climate made it easy to dry the produce outdoors on large pieces of fabric.) From an early age, Shmuel and his brothers had trained to join the family business by their father, Aharon, a small-time merchant. Each of the sons and their father would walk alongside a donkey, usually full of produce, from village to village, selling as much of their merchandise as they could before trekking to the next community on their route. Two of the brothers eventually had to drop out: Yusef, who was blinded by smallpox and ended up working as a grinder of henna, the red dye paste, and his older brother, my grandfather Yihye, who suffered an injury and worked only part time at a sandal-making shop.

Hamame knew her family struggled. Rumia not only cleaned the synagogue but worked for other families. She scrubbed their houses, did their laundry, ground their wheat, baked their bread, and went to the well for them. In return, she got money and essentials. During holidays, she came home with flour, potatoes, meat, or clothes so she could dress her children and bury the shame of poverty. There were no social welfare institutions; instead, an informal system developed where wealthier Jews were expected to support the poorest. And then there was the Almighty: As the 17th-century Yemenite Jewish poet Shalom Shabazi famously put it, “Even if the generous lock their gates, God in heaven never will.”

Years later, when my mother devotedly cleaned the homes of Israeli families and brought home their castoffs to brighten our wardrobes, I saw how easily she duplicated that role of her mother. She had witnessed her mother moving from place to place every day with no respite, and now she did the same.

The family’s endless struggle really had one source: her father’s leg. Its origins were mysterious. Around 1930, Yihye married Rumia Witry, who was from the neighboring village Beit Witr, in the Bani Bahloul area. She moved in with his family, and things looked promising for the young couple, given the family business. But one day, not long after their wedding, Yihye was alone on a business trip when something happened. “It was like I was stabbed by a knife,” he told his wife when he returned, pointing to his thigh, inflamed and bleeding. They moved to Sanaa soon after in search of a remedy and income.

When asked what happened to her father, my mother would say, “The genie attacked him,” recounting what she heard from her mother. “Young grooms were not supposed to walk alone in the mountains,” she explained. “Genies roamed freely outside the city because it was an open space with no metal, especially iron.” Genie talk was everywhere, like the story she heard of the two fearful women who were instructed by a genie to leave food. They did and found it burned the following morning. Terrified by what she now understood as supernatural harm, my mother better understood why everyone uttered the prayer, “Please God, protect me from the bad spirits (shedim),” when they felt unsafe, and she said it with greater intention.

For the rest of his life, Yihye walked with one leg that could not bend at the knee because of the wound that would not heal. He tried every treatment, including highly valued lamb meat offered by Arab neighbors for building strength, but especially makwa. Jewish healers would heat up a piece of metal, like a skewer, until it was red and apply it for a few seconds to a specific area on the skin, after which they would apply oil and cover the wound with special leaves thought to have medicinal qualities. It usually left a scar. The idea seemed to be that the burn sent a shock wave through the nervous system to the corresponding area in the brain that generated healing. The pain that resulted from the burn was usually short-lived and bearable. Makwa treated physical as well as emotional pain—from infections to depression.

Whatever the mechanism, Yihye’s wound often went dormant afterward. But then it grew inflamed with pus and blood so painful that he could not go to work at the sandal shack down the road. Years later, after a series of operations in Israel, the wound was stabilized, but his towering self still dragged that right leg.

The one thing that helped sedate his agony was alcohol. On mornings when the wound was inflamed, as my mother remembers it, Yihye would call to his wife to come and bring the bottle of arak—alcohol made from figs, grapes, or dates in Jewish homes, as Islam banned drinking. (Its name, which meant “sweat,” was inspired by the dripping of the liquid as it was being made.) Before exposing his wound, Yihye would stretch his hand out to the bottle and, grabbing it, guzzle its contents as if they were water. Then, he pulled the edges of the typical white male robe to expose the wound. (For their part, women covered themselves from head to toe, leaving only their faces, hands, and often bare feet showing. They wore long, heavy, cotton black dresses and necklaces with colorful embroidered leggings underneath. The gargush, a hooded headdress decorated with silver strings and coins that dropped over their shoulders, framed their faces but did not cover them as comparable garb for the Muslim women did. A close look at a gargush’s elaboration would reveal social standing. Most were scantily adorned.)

As Yihye kept hold of his pants, Rumia would put her hand around the spot and feel its heat, then go outside, gather dirt in a clay bowl, and spread it on the floor under his thigh. Then she’d begin massaging the edges, making sure that the pus dropped onto the sand, and urge him not to move as he screamed and sighed, his body twisting in pain. He spent many days like this, at home in pain and intoxicated.

And so it went for years, the state of the wound dictating the family’s state of security. Droughts were common, raising the price of food, sometimes exorbitantly. When Yihye could work, there was food and relief, and in between, there was the dreadful fear of hunger and having to rely on the generosity of others. Never was there plenty. The family—parents, siblings, uncle, and aunts, so many mouths to feed—would sit on the floor surrounding a big bowl of food in the middle of the room, sinking their fingers in with hope there’d be enough for everyone. At the end of the meal, the bowl was as clean as if it had been washed.

My mother knew not to take too much of what was offered, mindful of others in greater need. “My daughter,” her mother would say, “always split your bread in half and give to the needier.” The many beggars she saw each day made poverty a bit easier to bear, even if it did nothing to alleviate her own hunger.

From her early years, Hamame was spunky and a quick learner. She shadowed her mother doing all the housework, gradually taking on more responsibilities, including helping clean the adjacent synagogue. She swept the cement floor that the family was too poor to cover with carpets. She scrubbed laundry on rough stones. She learned to follow dietary laws of separating meat from dairy and salting the meat to make it kosher. (Jewish law forbids consuming the blood of the animal.) She walked with her mother to the well for water, each carrying a tanake, a tin container that, when empty, produced an appealing hollow sound and was used as a drum at celebrations. Her mother would fill it to its brim, and Hamame only halfway. On one of those trips to the well, Hamame was walking with her mother and did not notice a rope attached to cows dragging a big leather bag for carrying water. Looking down as she carried her tanake on her head, she collided with the rope, which, at neck height, clenched her windpipe and threw her on the ground. Her mother threw her tanake down and rushed to her daughter. Seeing the dread on her mother’s face hurt more than her own injury. Hamame, whose injury had extended no further than getting the wind knocked out of her, pulled herself together as quickly as she could. “I am OK, Mother,” she said. Rumia’s panic was not altogether unexpected. In the Jewish quarter, death was ever present, especially among babies and children, mourning a constant. It was not unusual for a woman like my paternal grandmother to give birth to more than a dozen children and see only two or three of them make it to adulthood. My mother remembers one flu season in which a family lost seven members.

Most important of all housework was making pita, the basis of all meals. She squatted next to her mother, their long dresses gathered between their knees, and watched Rumia add water to the pile of freshly ground wheat, sinking her skilled hands in, knuckles first, with an assuredness that slowly transformed the off-white powder into a ball of dough. Her mother then tore pieces from the big ball, flattening and spreading them on the walls of the truncated clay oven known as a taboon. Hamame would eagerly wait for the bread to come out so she could arrange it in the big basket. Her hands became so used to carrying hot things that by the time she was 7, she could take the flatbread straight from the oven.

Throughout my early childhood—before my mother yielded to a more modern kitchen—she made pitas this way in the taboon in our Tel Aviv backyard. For the rest of her cooking, mostly chicken soup with potatoes and carrots, she used a kerosene burner. As a child, just as she had done with her own mother, I watched her effortlessly insert and press the pieces of dough against the walls of the taboon. She was making saluf, a round flatbread that was then dipped into turmeric soups, and hilbe, a paste of fenugreek and cilantro. Feeding others was core to her identity, and she fed everyone in the neighborhood who came to her door, rich and poor. Food was her currency, her childhood trauma and resolution continuously reconstructed.

When her parents were at work, Hamame was left in the care of her aunt Saade, who like her uncle Yusef, had been blinded by smallpox, which scarred their faces and bodies. The oldest known illness to humankind, smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people, mostly children, in the 20th century alone until it was eradicated in the 1970s. Yusef and Saade were among its survivors. (My mother, too, contracted it around age 8 but escaped with a mild case.)

Saade was unique in having her own space: a few stairs up on a different level of the house. For someone who couldn’t see, she had astonishingly good style. “She dressed like a bride all year long and decorated her room with fabrics so beautiful that they would put the king’s palace to shame,” my mother recalled with deep fondness. Saade earned her own money, mainly grinding wheat and washing clothes. When my mother asked her, “Aunt, how can you tell when the garment is clean?” she explained, “I scrub and scrub until I feel the cloth become lighter.”

My mother was the eyes for her aunt and uncle. They put their palms on her shoulders and moved with her in and outside the house. She, too, knew how it felt not to see. She occasionally suffered from a condition where her own lids would not open properly. To treat it, her mother would find fresh cow manure, put it in a piece of cloth, and tie it around her head before sleep, taking advantage of what was later understood to be antibacterial and antifungal qualities of dung. The next morning, she could open her eyes. Later, in Israel, she would be able to take advantage of modern sophisticated treatments, but her eyes remained vulnerable throughout her life.

It was obvious to Hamame and all children from a very young age that boys and girls had different roles, something she found hard to accept. Her brother Hayim, older by four years, never helped around the house. Most of the day, he was supposed to be in the nearby synagogue, studying with a teacher known by the Arabic title mori. But Hayim was not a natural student, and there were days that he skipped school to play. Once, Hamame, angry that her brother clearly did not appreciate the opportunity she would have taken if allowed, told her father that he had skipped school. Yihye was, predictably, not pleased to hear this, especially as it added to already mounting concerns that his unruly son was hanging around with older kids who were joining the Zionist movement and plotting a move to Palestine, to Jerusalem. (A few years later, as a teenager, he was the first member of the family to leave.)

When his son came home, Yihye grabbed him and beat him with his bare hands to teach him a lesson in obedience. Humiliated and angry, Hayim went looking for his sister to teach her a lesson in loyalty. He dragged her to the courtyard, pushed her onto the cement, and beat her like his father beat him.

Bleeding and crying, she ran to her mother. Rumia was squatting on the floor, grinding hot peppers on a big stone. She had to wash her hands carefully, or the peppers would burn her girl’s eyes. She gathered Hamame into her arms and inspected the damage. A crack opened on Hamame’s nose, nearly exposing the bone. After washing it well, she looked for spider webs, soil, and tobacco ash and stuffed the wound. (If you look closely, you can still see the scar on my mother’s nose. Suffice it to say, Hayim was never punished.)

Because girls weren’t taught to read and write at all, everything outside the home and domestic duties was the domain of men. Girls and women were expected to maintain home life and raise children from age 12 or 13. Girls had a few religious responsibilities. From her mother, Hamame learned the blessings for lighting Shabbat candles, before eating, and the Shema, the centerpiece of every prayer session: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Hamame would recite it again before she went to sleep, and when she was scared, understanding the prayer as a way to unite with God’s power and protection. The only holiday on which my mother went to synagogue was Simchat Torah, when the men celebrated the end of the reading cycle of the five books of the Old Testament. In fact, they only “went to synagogue” in a manner of speaking: Dressed in their best clothes, the girls and women stood outside and watched the men dance with the Torah scroll and drink alcohol.

All of these things Hamame understood, but when word spread that one of the boys of the Siri family up the road was inviting girls to learn how to read and write, she ran to her mother with excitement.

“Siri is telling girls to come to his house to learn,” she said.

'’Yes, I heard,” her mother replied. “Go.”

“Read and write” meant “read and write Hebrew,” not Arabic or another language used in the wider world, but that was more than fine with Hamame. After all, what could be greater than learning how to read the sacred texts? Excited to know what was written in the Torah, she walked to Siri’s place. A few girls were sitting on the floor. Their teacher was a 14-year-old boy. He gave out pieces of chalk and a wooden board and demonstrated how to push hard against the surface to create the Hebrew characters. She attended assiduously over the coming weeks and loved it.

But it didn’t last. Drought set in. The synagogues filled with worshipers asking God for rain. Fear of impending hunger spread. Debates arose over the cause and what could be done. Then the rabbis announced their ruling: God was expressing his displeasure at the teaching of the holy language to girls. The lessons were ordered stopped.

“We don’t yet know how to read and write!” Hamame lamented to her mother. “We just started!” But there was no point in challenging the rabbis. She never went back to Siri’s. In fact, she never learned to read and write.

Shmuel was shrewd and hardworking, with a good head for business. By the time he was a teenager, he had his own donkey and was earning well. So, when Yihye asked for a loan, he agreed, his generosity increasing his own sense of success.

Shmuel had known Hamame all her life. He watched his pretty and charming niece as she obediently helped around the house, seamlessly accommodating everyone’s needs. For her part, Hamame knew him as a distant, handsome uncle but didn’t have many dealings with him because when she visited her grandparents in Bani Bahloul, he was often on the road. When he was between villages, Shmuel often stopped overnight at her house, but he never stayed long.

When visiting her grandparents, Hamame had joined the family in working for the Arab families, who, unlike the Jews, were more often allowed to own land. Together, the Harifs served as hired help during the harvest, and as a child, my mother spent hours holding a tray full of the grain, throwing the mixture into the air so that the wind carried away the chaff while the grain fell for retrieval. She wandered fearlessly with her cousins, rummaging for pieces of wood for the taboon, picking figs from the trees, or hunting for cactuses. The only thing she feared was the dogs that barked loudly, though they were mostly tied up.

The thorny cactuses required skill to harvest, and my mother learned it with enthusiasm. She held a long stick with a box on its end and a nail in the middle to trap the prickly fruit. When she came across a bush, she sent her long stick toward the fruit and encapsulated it, twisting and pulling the box until it fell to the ground. Then she rolled it in the sand until the thorns broke off, and she was able to hold it and add it to her basket. All she cared about was bringing those fruits home to help her mother feed the family.

On one of Shmuel’s sales trips, it was getting too late for him to make it home before the start of the Sabbath when travel is forbidden. Realizing this, he headed for Yihye’s house.

The Harifs rented a two-story, sun-dried mudbrick house with a small courtyard. Their landlord, an adjacent synagogue, gave them a discount in exchange for the women cleaning and taking care of its grounds.

The mudbrick style common to Sanaa dates to the eighth century and produced buildings of astonishing beauty and durability, containing not a scrap of metal, yet, in some cases, lasting centuries. In addition, unbaked earth absorbs heat slowly, so the structures offered comfort in a desert climate. Some of the buildings outside of the Jewish quarter towered seven stories, providing a vantage point to watch for enemies in a tribal society afflicted with constant feuds.

Restricting the Jews to a portion of Sanaa was a practice born of horror and need. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, non-Muslims in the Arab Peninsula often faced discrimination for refusing to convert. While Jews and Christians came to be known as “ahl il kitab” (the people of the book), distinguishing them from non-Abrahamic faiths, they were given the status of “ahl al dhimma” (people of the pact) and governed by a set of laws that promised them protection in exchange for a special tax. The purpose and the outcome of these laws, based on Sharia law, Quranic verses, and Islamic traditions, was to place limits on their behavior and emphasize the social superiority of Muslims.

After the emergence of Islam, Yemen quickly became a place of political conflict between the vast majority of Muslims, who are Sunni, and the minority Shia, over who was the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. (The Iranian-backed Houthi rebellion in Yemen of recent years is an echo of this centuries-old conflict.)

The Jews of Sanaa say their ancestors arrived from Jerusalem in the seventh century BCE in response to the Prophet Jeremiah’s warning about impending doom (the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE). It might be more myth than history, but the Yemenite Jews have their own synagogues and traditions unique throughout the Jewish world. While not exiled, for most of the country’s history Jews and Christians lived officially as second-class citizens, so-called dhimmis, or “protected minorities.” They were not permitted political power, but their right to religion and culture was to be protected—at least in theory.

That changed in 1630 when the Zaydis, a fundamentalist branch of Shiism, wrested control of Yemen from the Ottomans. The Jews, who were pro-Ottoman, were increasingly discriminated against. For the next three centuries, Yemen’s leaders considered the Jews who lived under them to be worthy of suspicion and restriction. Perhaps a wealthier and worldlier Jewish community would have migrated to somewhere less oppressive, but poverty and lack of information about the lands outside local borders kept them in place, heads down and trying to escape much notice.

The crisis reached its climax in 1679 when Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad ordered the destruction of synagogues throughout the country, including Sanaa, and gave an ultimatum that the Jews of Yemen convert or face expulsion. Most Jews chose expulsion over conversion and were ordered to leave their homes for Mawza, a barren town near the Red Sea, an 11-day walk. It is estimated that during the journey, some two-thirds of Yemen’s Jews, especially children, the elderly, and the sick, died from starvation, exposure, or robbery. Although little known and largely ignored in Jewish history, it was a massacre equivalent to the Russian pogroms. Also lost were many of their cultural treasures, among them detailed treatises on Jewish law, which were set on fire.

As it turned out, Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad’s order had an unexpected result that made the horrors of the Mawza journey even more senseless. The Jews were the main craftsmen of farm implements, and suddenly such essential tools were in short supply. Following widespread complaints from his Muslim subjects, after about a year, the king brought the surviving Jews back. Since their homes had been given to others, in 1680, the imam set aside an area on the city’s outskirts, designated it the Jewish quarter, and called it gha elyahud. It was within this enclosed ghetto that my parents spent the first decades of their lives.

The vast majority of world Jewry (about 15 million today) is divided between Ashkenazim, or Europeans, and Sephardim, or Middle Easterners, who were driven from Spain in the late 15th century and spread across the Ottoman Empire. The Yemenites, while more similar to Sephardim, are remarkably distinct in their unique history and the ways of living they developed in what was essentially not only isolation from the larger expanse of Middle Eastern Jews but modernity itself. Even in 1969, the gap between my parents’ lives in Yemen and those who lived in Israel did not just cover miles but centuries. Coming from a world where donkeys were the means of locomotion and electricity, a source of bewilderment, the world beyond Sanaa’s ghetto was more fantasy than fact. This was all the more so when my mother was a child, both in innovation and custom.

Hamame and her younger brother Avraham remember Shmuel’s fateful visit well. At first, it seemed like a routine stay. He tied his donkey in the animal room on the ground floor and went upstairs where the family lived. Yihye was pleased to see his brother and receive his gift of dried fruits and nuts. The Shabbat meal was special; it was one of the few times the family ate well and wore their finer clothes, and they enjoyed it together.

For both Jews and Muslims, it was the norm for relatives to marry each other. (Since a bride had to be purchased, it was preferable to keep the money within the family.) Sometimes, again like their Muslim neighbors, Jewish men were permitted, although not encouraged, to take up to four wives, especially if one could not produce children. After Shabbat, on Saturday evening, Shmuel—at 18 years old, now restless with his desire for marriage and family—told his brother that he was getting ready to take a bride and needed his loan repaid. Yihye told him his leg wasn’t healed and he didn’t have the money. Shmuel pushed. Yihye pushed back. As Shmuel became more heated, Rumia tried to calm him down. Shmuel, however, would not budge. Finally, Yihye motioned with the back of his hand. “You know what?” he said. “Take the girl.” He proceeded to praise her qualities as an industrious daughter who would be a good wife. “That will settle the debt,” he concluded.

Shmuel liked the idea. Hamame’s mother less so. “She is just a child,” Rumia protested nervously to her husband. “She is not yet a woman.”

“He will have to sign an agreement,” Yihye reassured her. “He will vow not to touch her until she becomes a woman.” Rumia’s opposition was short-lived. She knew that her husband decided on such matters that women had no say in.

By the end of a tense day, Shmuel agreed and signed a document ratifying the agreement to forgive his brother’s debt in exchange for the girl. Hamame was told she was going to live with Shmuel at her grandparents in Bani Bahloul, and that she would be like a sister to him until she became a woman. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she had an idea. As she put it to me years later, “I was not stupid. I understood.” The consummation of the marriage would have to wait, but her fate had been decided and signed.

Still, in her naivety, she was not altogether disappointed. In fact, she was excited. Weddings in the Yemenite Jewish community were lengthy, joyous and extravagant celebrations, and as people began showing up at the house to congratulate the family, Shmuel made it clear that he wanted a big party. Now, it would be her turn to be the center of attention for weeks—a new experience for her in itself, and she would be so beautifully dressed and ornamented, a queen among the crowd.

At the weddings she’d been to, Hamame had admired the beautiful gowns and paid special attention to the brides’ royal stillness, sitting high up with their legs resting on a stool while women danced in front of them. She loved dancing, too, and would join the women whenever she could.

Weddings were taken so seriously that several adjacent houses’ walls would be knocked down to create a space big enough to include all the guests. Poverty meant eating meat was a cherished event. Following a biblical tradition of a feast (referenced to Jacob’s marriage to his beloved Rachel), a cow (and sometimes two) would be slaughtered, as opposed to buying portions in the market, a precelebration ritual that generously provided the invited guests a moment of abundance so absent in their daily lives.

Once the celebration was scheduled, Hamame went with her mother to the dressmaker. It took hours to fit the rented costume to her tiny body, and the girl found it difficult to stay still. With silver and gold coins draped around her neck and arms, she laughed and played with the fabric and jewelry like precious toys.

My mother had always loved pretty things, Sometimes, when her mother was at work, she wandered to the Zadok family, neighbors who were jewelers. She sat on a stool for hours, watching the men’s fingers as they maneuvered small tools and looked through their monocles, delicately placing the tiny pieces of silver, gold, or copper on the earrings, necklaces, or rings. She was so eager to have earrings that one time when the girls from her street gathered to do traditional embroidery (something for which she had little interest or patience), they dared each other to punch a hole in their ear. Hamame was the first to grab oil and rub it on her earlobe until it became red, and with a needle, proceeded to puncture it to the sound of the girls screaming she was crazy. Proud of her fearlessness, she walked around, showing everyone her pricked ear. “Look what I have done. Now I can have earrings.” The Zadok family rewarded her with silver earrings. She was elated.

Adorning herself was not limited to jewelry. She also loved how her palms and ankles looked when she decorated them with hennaed geometric shapes and patterns. Once, she sneaked into the courtyard to take some henna from where her blind uncle Yusef was grinding it. Yusef caught her. “Is that you, my niece?” he said. “Don’t steal. Ask me, and I will give it to you.”

Hamame felt ashamed and asked how he knew she was there.

“I see with my heart,” Yusef said and gave her a cup of the coveted powder.

A few days before the wedding ceremony, it was time to go to the mikvah for the purification ritual required of women before marriage and at the end of every menstrual period. A 15-minute walk from the Harif home, the mikvah was a hole in the ground at the hammam, the bathhouse, a clay structure heated by burning cow manure. Sometimes, Hamame joined her mother in the hammam on her days of purification (once a month after menstruation). Hamame loved the warm water but never went into the pool, as it was mainly for married women. Her mother mostly scrubbed her body in the open space with warm water supplied.

But this was different. A few girlfriends, already married, came along. By the dim light of a kerosene lamp, my mother took off her dress and head covering and stood naked in front of an older woman, surrendering her body for inspection. It was hairless, thin, and flat, her skin fresh and toned with no signs of budding breasts. After cutting her nails with a small set of scissors, the older woman said a prayer and motioned for her to move into the water. Hamame walked slowly down the steps into the steamy bath. She looked up to smile at the married girls and her mother, and as she did so, she missed a step and slipped. Hamame was already swallowing water when she felt a hand pulling her to the surface. When she emerged, the girls burst out laughing. It took Hamame a few seconds to overcome her fear and embarrassment. Soon, the woman instructed her to immerse her head three times while she said a prayer. And then the pleasure came to an end.

In the early afternoon of her wedding day, my mother returned to the dressmaker’s with my grandmother. The gown, which had golden threads woven through it, took hours to fit into her body. There was also a conical hat a foot and a half tall, shaped so that it came down halfway along the sides of her face. Necklaces of silver and gold hung to her waist, and matching bracelets coated her arms. The costume and jewelry were heavy, and the hat locked her head in an uncomfortable, fixed position. When she was ready, she was surrounded by women who gathered in a procession, ululating, dancing, singing, and drumming. On their heads were bowls filled with henna paste with burning candles planted in their midst. For more than an hour, my mother walked very slowly back to her home. The woman who presided over the ceremony rubbed the orange-red dye drawn on the palm of her hands as signs of fertility, abundance, and good luck. A “shadab” plant (Ruta chalepensis) was hung around her neck with cloves of garlic against the evil eye.

The whole thing left her dazed. All she knew at that moment was how good it felt to be adorned and adored. Over the past weeks, everyone had orbited her—changing her outfits, bathing her, dying her hands and feet, blessing her, dancing for her, and making sure she was fed and happy. For a girl whose existence was dedicated to serving others, it had been a remarkably nourishing and cherished period.

The groom had spent hours participating in his own elaborate, men-only events. After a week of not being allowed to see each other, Shmuel and Hamame met at the wedding ceremony under the huppah. After Shmuel pronounced the words of commitment—“Harei at mekudeshet li”—You are hereby consecrated to me—they went into a small room for a “yihud,” when, away from the festivities, newly married couples spend their first moments together alone.

In that room, a big copper plate filled with dried fruits and nuts awaited them. Shmuel and Hamame sat a few feet from each other as the custom required. Shmuel held a small prayer book and silently moved his lips and body along with the recitation. A knock on the door made him lift his head. “Go open the door,” he told her. She got up slowly and dragged herself with the weight of the gown. Shimon Salah, a neighbor, came to check if they needed anything. “Why did you let her open the door?” Shimon scolded the young groom. “She could have fallen.” Then, one by one, women and girls, friends of the bride and her mother, began arriving to accept a palmful of the dry fruits and nuts from her small hand—raisins, dates, almonds, walnuts, figs, apricots, and prunes. It was a gesture of blessing for abundance and good luck bestowed by the holy bride.

After the weeks of festivities, my mother and Shmuel left Sanaa on a donkey and moved in with his parents (her grandparents) in Bani Bahloul. Like most of Yemen, Bani Bahloul was rural and dusty, dotted with nondescript houses. “The road was rocky and hilly,” she remembered. “Sometimes, even the donkeys refused to move.” There were no paved roads, cars, railways, electricity, or running water. In the villages and countryside, Jews and Muslims lived together, unlike in Sanaa where the Jews were restricted to their quarter. Fields of crops extended behind the houses, often on an incline to use gravity for irrigation. Herds of sheep, goats, and cows roamed, sometimes shepherded by a child.

Hamame had only ever known the Jewish quarter. But that said, her paternal grandparents’ house was not a strange place given the times she’d visited to help with the harvest. Still, while there was a familiarity, Hamame never made peace with being away from her Rumia. Even though she had a secure, parental-like place next to her grandmother, she was restless and unhappy and kept saying, “I want to go back to my mother.”

At first, Shmuel tried to be nice. He bought her a new dress. He brought her fruits that she liked. He did not force himself on Hamame. But he wanted to prepare her for sleeping with him. “When you get married,” he said to her, “the husband and wife have to take their clothes off. This is how they’re going to have children and have a family. That is what God says.” She would not hear of it. It frightened her.

As time went by, Shmuel became impatient and expected to be obeyed. When Hamame refused to do something asked of her, he grew threatening. Sometimes, out of fear that his threats might turn to violence, she ran to the street or to other hiding places in the house, like the dark grinding room, or to her grandmother, who ultimately grew impatient with her, too. All the while, Shmuel would be searching for her, calling aloud, “Has anyone seen my wife?” When he caught her, he hit her. She would cry and run away, but there was no true escape to be had. All she could do was hope that he’d hit fewer times and with less force next time.

Feeling under siege, her protests to her grandmother grew louder and more insistent, yet nothing changed. Then Shmuel went too far. One time, his donkey fled to the neighboring Arab family’s property and was eating their crops, a troubling situation, to say the least. Shmuel commanded Hamame to retrieve it. However, the Arab family had two big dogs, and when she heard them barking, she refused. Even Shmuel’s brother Hayim told him he shouldn’t let her go because of the dogs. Instead of carrying out the task, she escaped to her maternal grandparents in the neighboring village a mile away. They were supportive, and when she returned at the end of the day, it was with a determination to find a way out of the marriage.

So, when her husband left on one of his sales trips soon after, she saw Yehuda Alshagi, the merchant who lived close to her parents in Sanaa, coming up with his donkey, and she ran up to him. Yehuda stopped by every week or so on his way home from his rounds in the villages and had routinely passed along messages from Hamame to Rumia, usually telling her, “I want to come home. I don’t want to stay here. Shmuel is not nice to me. He beats me.” This time, she saw an escape route. “Take me back to my mother. I want to go to my mother,” she begged him. Yehuda stretched his arms to express the impossibility of the plan: “My donkey has a wound on his back and is filled with merchandise, and there was no room for you.”

She shrugged off the problem. “I don’t care,” she said. “I can walk beside the donkey.” Yehuda reminded her how long and difficult a journey it was. “I know the way,” she insisted. Yehuda went to Shmuel’s mother to ask what to do. Hamame heard her grandmother say: “Take the girl back to her mother. She’s giving me a hole in my head. Take her.”

So Hamame walked by the donkey’s side for eight or so hours. Wearing thin sandals, she navigated the steep, rough slopes. The voyage was not new, but this time was different: She was absconding to her freedom.

When Rumia saw Hamame coming up the road in the early evening, she could not believe her eyes. Even before they embraced, she burst into tears, and so did Hamame. Rumia kept hugging and kissing her daughter in disbelief. As Hamame elaborated on Shmuel’s mistreatment, her mother shifted from joy to anger, her initial discomfort about Shmuel and the whole marriage confirmed. Rumia had never liked Shmuel and assured her daughter that she would not make her go back and, in fact, would demand that he grant her a divorce certificate. Rumia would not speak to her brother-in-law again as long as she lived.

Rumia warmed up water to wash her dusty body, not a daily occasion, and prepared wheat and ghee with honey, Hamame’s favorite food. She then dressed her daughter up with her best velvet gargush and clothes. Hamame looked forward to spending the night beside her mother, under the cover with its familiar smell—a scent she’d taken for granted for so many years but over the months longed for. It was the first time in many months that Hamame felt safe.

That same night, as the family prepared for bed, there was a loud knock on the door. “Don’t worry,” Hamame said to her mother, “I will go and see who that is.” She took the kerosene lamp and went downstairs. What she saw gave her a fright. It was Shmuel, and another young man she did not recognize. For a moment, she was sure that Shmuel had followed her to take her back, but she quickly understood, by the expression of his utter surprise, that he had no idea that she had been there.

Quickly recomposed, in the same tyrannical and possessive tone that she had come to know all too well, he demanded to know what Hamame was doing and how she got there.

Hamame did not respond. She felt safe under her mother’s roof, where he could not hurt her. She turned around and went back upstairs to tell her parents.

Her father came down and learned why Shmuel had come: He was going to marry another girl older (this one was older than his daughter, about 13), and he had brought his future brother-in-law to invite Yihye to his second wedding.

Hamame’s father was angry. The resentment and humiliation of having to give or sell his daughter for a debt that he could not pay never left him, especially since he knew that Shmuel had treated his daughter badly—and now he was marrying another girl. While it was permitted to take more than one wife, it was not encouraged and was looked down upon (unless the wife was infertile). Yihye deserted his brother at the door. “Go away,” he told him. “You are not welcome in my house.”

It took some convincing to make Shmuel give up Hamame and grant her a get, the Jewish divorce certificate. But he did, and Hamame, at age 10 or 11, was free. However, this was not the last she heard from him. Years later, he would return in another land and lay claim to her.