“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 12 : A Personal Exodus - Inlaws Outlined
My parents-in-law were virtually founder members of a kibbutz established near the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa in 1935. My mother-in-law came from a Polish family, from a village much like that of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. It was on the borderlands in the south so often fought over by the Poles and Russians. She was called Klara Klieger and the wry joke about her relatively fair skin and green eyes made reference to the number of Russian invasions across the Polish border.
My father-in-law, Israel or Yis Roth, who was also fair skinned with blue eyes, was an educated man from a prosperous merchant family living on the Danube in Györ, Hungary. His family owned a granary and shipped the grain from the country’s vast wheat production up or down the Danube as far as the Black Sea and beyond as business required.
The name Goren, a Hebrew translation of ‘granary’, was adopted by my father-in-law after independence in 1948 in order to shed the adopted European name of Rot or Roth, meaning red, which was a popular accommodation with a common word for a name that sounded harmless enough in the country in which his family had become assimilated and had lived for many generations. Little did the Jews realize that red, green, blue and so on - Roth, Grün and Blau - often with berg or stein as a suffix, would soon identify them as swiftly with their Jewish origins as any modern Hebrew name might. As the Yiddish comic said “OK, so what was your family name before it was Green?” I suppose the final reply to that might be “So, I come from the House of David”!.. which you have to admit sounds far grander than any colour or landmark.
Klara was born in the middle of the Great War in 1916 as the ferment in Russia was building up to wholesale Revolution in 1917. These were turbulent times in Eastern Europe as in the West; times of war, famine and the historical collapse forever of the power of aristocracy and the landed elite. As a young woman of seventeen in the early 1930s, Klara had left her peasant family village, joined a Jewish Youth Group and was working on the land in various farm camps learning agricultural skills that she hoped might be useful in the country in which she dreamed of living, Palestine.
The young Klara worked on the farm camps for two years. As Nazism and anti-Jewish propaganda was stepped up and Hitler’s Germany sought to extend its territorial grip eastwards to Russia, Klara’s Youth Group started to organize a regular exodus of young people to Palestine on a quota basis. Priority was given to married couples on a single registration so many boys and girls obtained false marriage papers from local rabbis to give themselves a better chance of getting on the emigration lists. Klara was one of those who teamed up with a lad and the pair of them set sail for Palestine as a supposed married couple in 1936. She left behind her parents and siblings, one sister managing to get a passage to the United States along with a cousin.
Klara’s parents, who had never left their village, and most other members of her family subsequently perished in the Holocaust. When Klara arrived in Palestine she was sent to a Jewish settlement at Kfar Saba where she was able to study horticulture, commercial flower growing in particular. Of medium build with light brown hair and lively, flirtatious green eyes, Klara was an attractive woman who learned fast and worked hard.
Israel Roth studied law in Hungary but also dreamed of a land called Palestine, its heart the ancient city of Jerusalem so dear to so many. He was born in 1911 and since everyone needs bread, the business of distributing grain flowed on with his childhood alongside the Danube. Despite the upheavals of the Great War his life was cushioned by the commercial success of the family business. When on his student holidays to Palestine in 1933, following a Grand Tour which included Italy from which he had sailed, Yis set his mind to returning in the near future to this biblical homeland and building a new life on a kibbutz away from the insidious march of Europe’s anti-semitism.
Two years later, aged twenty-four, Yis had abandoned his law studies and became one of hundreds of Jews packed on an illegal immigrant vessel, the Vallos, which set sail from Constanza, the chief port of Rumania on the Black Sea, towards the coast of British-ruled Palestine in the late Spring of 1935. Despite a traveling distance of no more than a few days the passengers on this crowded boat were at sea for two months in the growing heat of summer as the vessel prowled the Mediterranean waiting for a window of opportunity to safely land its illegal human cargo.
The British navy and police boats regularly patrolled the shores between the Lebanese border in the north and the Egyptian border in the south. Patterns of patrol were monitored and finally, after a suffocating eight weeks at sea with rations and water dwindling, the boat discharged its load one dark July night. Men and women with children and babes in arms waded waist deep in water up the beach of Kfar Vitkin near Caesarea, below the northern port of Haifa, while the patrol boats were in the south. Jewish settlers were there to quietly receive this weary and wet but triumphant, straggling host of humanity and smuggle them away to various kibbutzes and other communities. Today at Kfar Vitkin you can find a plaque commemorating this landing and the boat and crew who got their cargo safely ashore.
Yis found himself in the new Kibbutz Maabarot, on arid marshland two miles from the landing strip of beach at Kfar Vitkin, and stayed there for the rest of an eventful life in the shaping history of that kibbutz and a Jewish homeland. His elder brother had also spent time in Palestine in the early 1930s in theological studies at the University of Jerusalem and returned to Hungary. There he later became a rabbi and felt duty-bound to stay with his Jewish community despite the onslaught of Nazism. He too perished in the Holocaust although another brother remained in Hungary and escaped detection to finally emigrate to Israel with his family in 1956.
Soon after his arrival, Yis, a quiet and studious fellow, tall, slim and aesthetic looking but with a puckish sense of humour, was given a few rudimentary lessons in being a guard. You could not meet a more gentle and pacific man than Yis but he had to learn to use a rifle and play his part in ‘guarding’ the Jewish settlements. And so he was sent to guard the Jewish settlement of Kfar Saba where he met a pretty Polish girl called Klara Klieger. Klara finished her studies and went to live and work on Kibbutz Maabarot alongside her partner Yis in 1937. They had three sons, Arnon, Yigal and Itzhak and when Israel was declared a State in 1948 and registration of the population began in earnest, Yis and Klara decided to marry and give themselves the Hebrew name of Goren. Their eldest child, Arnon, my husband, then ten years old, was asked if he would like to attend the marriage ceremony or stay in the kibbutz and have a special treat, an ice cream. He naturally opted for the ice-cream and can therefore truthfully say that he was not around at the time his parents married.