Zohara

In the evening, Motti dropped me and my backpack off at my mother’s house. I stood at the door and watched him drive away, the dust rising from the unpaved road turning golden from the glow of the streetlights.

Then, it was quiet.

After years of living in Manhattan, where the sound of taxis and traffic and trucks beeping in reverse became the soundtrack to my life, I forgot how quiet Sha’ariya got in the evenings. A sleepy Yemeni neighborhood, it stayed behind, while Petah Tikva grew up and around it, cranes littering its sky. In Sha’ariya, there were dirt roads and small houses, chicks and roosters calling at dawn and the kind of startling quietness that was only disturbed by crickets chirping in a steady two-beat song, the electrical hum of appliances and the hissing of cars on their way to the airport from highway 40 nearby.

I unlatched the gate, orange with rust, predicting its familiar creak, and walked the paved path, past the names Lizzie and I had engraved in the fresh concrete when it was repaved a few years in. The laundry lines in the front yard were empty, but for a single hardened cleaning cloth, a faded yellow stain against the whiteness of the house. To the right, my mother’s garden was wilting in the heat.

It was a relatively new thing, gardening. On my last visit, I was pleased to see petunias blooming in bright pink and deep purple, red geraniums, clumps of cilantro and mint, and my mother kneeling be­tween the flowerbeds, finding joy in something other than cleaning. A miracle. Her planting things, watching them grow, felt intrinsically op­timistic. Gardening added color to her cheeks, smoothed the wrinkles in her forehead. For the first time in years, she looked happy.

I glanced at the shed in the back, where Mr. Hason, my mother’s most recent tenant, lived. The door was closed, the shutters drawn. I could hear faint Arabic music playing from the inside. The rental unit was a modest source of income for my parents. A few people in the neighborhood had built them back in the day as an extra unit for their children or as a rental. My mom’s closest friend, Bruria, lived there first, and after she moved to a bigger place the next street down, Lizzie oc­cupied it for a few years. When she got married, Mrs. Matalon, my fa­vorite tenant, moved in. Mrs. Matalon spoke three languages, Hebrew, French and Egyptian Arabic, which was her mother tongue. She loved to knit, often sitting outside with her impressive updo, her eyes painted with kohl like a movie star. When she moved out to live with her daugh­ter in a moshav by Jerusalem, a spry, elderly Persian widower moved in, who fed the neighborhood’s cats and played cards with my mom. Then, I moved away and lost track.

I reached for the key over the doorframe, feeling the familiar grit of dirt before my fingers found it. I hesitated before opening the door.

Inside, it stank of unaired spices, of soup and detergent, the sharp­ness of bleach and citrus. Every time I came for a visit, I left with a suit­case drenched in that blend. The clean was a little faded, covered in a thin layer of dust. It would have driven her crazy.

I stopped to look at the framed pictures in the hallway that had haunted me my entire life, a modest shrine to my brother. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in the house; you couldn’t miss it. There weren’t many photos taken in those days; these two were all she had: one was from their immigration papers, reproduced and enlarged to a four-by-six, which made it blurry. In it, my mother appeared shell-shocked, stunned by the magic of photography and exhausted from the arduous journey. Baby Rafael was laughing in her lap, doughy-cheeked and fair against my mother’s dark complexion.

The other photo was a candid black and white taken in the immi­grant camp, outside their tent; I’m not sure who took it or how my fam­ily got hold of it. My mom was kneeling, dressed in an oversized coat, her headscarf tied at the chin, and smiling up at Rafael. My brother was dressed in a woolly vest, his one hand pointing at something far ahead. I turned the hallway light on, a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, and the photo revealed my own reflection, the ghost of me, hovering over my young mother’s face, smiling like I had never seen her smile.

My brother, Rafael, disappeared from the immigrant camp in Rosh HaAyin a few months after my family landed in Israel in 1949. They told me he was an easygoing, good-natured and healthy baby. When they arrived in the camp, they were instructed to house all infants at a nurs­ery. It was better for the babies, the nurses had said. The tents were un­hygienic. At first the Yemeni mothers rebelled, sneaking in to steal their own babies back, until the camp tightened security. My mother had gone to the nursery several times a day to nurse Rafael. In the evenings she would take him out, bathe him and play with him before bringing him back.

One morning my mother went to the nursery and Rafael wasn’t there. The nurses informed her my brother had developed a cold, so they sent him to the hospital in Tel Aviv overnight. My father was away at the time, working up north. My mother took a bus to visit Rafael, but when she arrived, she was told by a receptionist that Rafael had died.

Every time I imagine that moment: my young mother, a teenager really, receiving the news that would alter her life forever, I feel like I can’t breathe from the magnitude of inherited grief. My mom collapsed on the floor of the hospital screaming and crying. Her boy had died. Except he was completely healthy and vital the day before. Except they wouldn’t give her a death certificate or show her a body or a grave. “You’re still young,” a nurse told her. “You’ll have other kids.”

Over the following weeks, stories of other babies, other deaths, other disappearances were circulated around the camp. Later, it became clear that many babies had gone missing the same way during those years, most of them Yemeni, the rest Mizrahi and Balkan, and even the odd Ashkenazi child. Some people, like Yosef Radai from the neighboring tent, didn’t believe the nurses; he searched through the hospital in a blinding rage and found his girl. Undead. Rumors spread of wealthy American Jews coming to choose children to adopt, children who had been dressed for the occasion in clothes that weren’t theirs, displayed like cattle. After all, Yemeni immigrants had many children, too many children, and no awareness of hygiene. They lacked parenting skills. And they were foreign-looking, so unlike the European Jews, so easily othered it seemed OK to take their children away from them, move them to a different location, or to not keep track of them. Years later, in New York, my friend Shoshi showed me some of the quotes she had found in her research into the affair: One head nurse who had been interviewed by the committee said, “Maybe we did them a favor.” Another referred to the children as packages. “I would have been happy to know my kids received better education,” she said.

When I was 5 or 6, my mother took me to kindergarten one morning and found the gate locked. I remember her looking over the fence, calling the teachers’ names, growing increasingly distressed. A woman who walked by told us the teachers were on strike. “Didn’t you hear?” she said, critique in her voice. “They’ve been threatening to shut down all week.” My mother didn’t take me home. We walked through the streets of Sha’ariya until we reached a bus stop. I didn’t notice she was wearing a backpack, didn’t think it was odd she had brought food and water. I was excited she decided to do something special with me. My mother wasn’t fun or spontaneous. She never—not once—took me to the movies or to a café. I didn’t know that I was a distraction, that the teachers’ strike was a dent in her plans.

On the bus, I sat by the window and talked, aware that I had my mom’s undivided attention. At home, she was always cleaning or cooking, always impatient, distracted. Now, she let me play with her bracelets and sang Hanukkah songs with me.

We got off at a busy bus station and followed throngs of people in army uniform to a fenced building with a guarded gate. We sat on a bench outside, under a ficus tree with dark green leaves. My mother closely watched the soldiers coming in and out. I didn’t wonder why my mother had taken me to this strange place to watch boys walking out of a building. I climbed the bench and followed the tangled bark with my fingertips. I lay down with my head on my mom’s thighs and looked up: The sunlight filtering through the leaves cast dappled shadows on my body. After a while, I grew impatient, tired, hungry. My mother kept saying, “Just a little longer, ayuni.” She promised to buy me candy afterward. She gave me her backpack to riffle through. When a group of boys came out, tapping each other on the shoulder, yelling, “Mazal tov” and “Good luck in civil life!” my mom straightened in her seat at once. I watched them too, fascinated. They were beautiful in their enthusiasm and vitality. When the group dispersed, she stood up quickly. “Wait here,” she ordered without looking at me. She called one of them, a gangly Yemeni boy, and he hesitantly turned to her. She asked him where he was born, who his parents were. I could tell he didn’t want to talk to her. When we walked away, she was crying. “Why are you crying, Ima?” I asked, and she said, “Nothing, hayati.” She wrapped her arm around me, and we walked like that until the bus station.

On the way home, she asked me not to tell my father about our trip. “It will be our little secret,” she said. But over dinner I got too excited and whispered to my sister that Ima had taken me to a place with soldiers today. Lizzie’s face changed to alarm. My father stopped eating. “Now you get Zohara involved? This is madness. You have to stop.”