“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 6 : Ramat Yishai
Our arrival in Northern Israel had been planned in advance and our wonderful friends, Palo and Aviva who lived in a small town called Tivon on the hills south-east of Haifa, had secured for us the rented property in the nearby village of Ramat Yishai. The square stone house had originally belonged to earlier settlers who had farmed the area.
The settlement of Ramat Yishai had been built on a finger of high land stretching out to overlook the wide and fertile Jezreel Valley. Across the valley at its northernmost sweep was a range of hills known as Mount Carmel. The Carmel fell steeply at its furthest reach into the sea, north-west at the Port of Haifa perched on its height and flanks down to the bay. Our home lay equidistant by road about twelve miles south of Haifa and east to Nazareth. The Jezreel Valley, known biblically as the Plain of Esdraelon, continues south-eastwards towards the famous site of Megiddo where so many battles have taken place in ancient and modern times and which gave its name to the word Armageddon, the last battle … if only.
The Carmel range blocked any view of the Mediterranean on its western slopes but provided a most beautiful, shadowy backdrop for occasional brilliant sunsets, appearing cool, dark green and alive in the summer when the valley between us had become scorched and yellow. I enjoyed looking across to this natural, hilly barrier, which tucked us into a geographical horseshoe and kept the busy world of Haifa, its noisy roads, traffic, smoke and pollution well at bay. In March there were places to visit on the nearside slopes of the hills, smothered in bold blue irises and jazzy scarlet poppies. Northern Israel was awash with flowers in the Spring.
You could smell Ramat Yishai from some little distance if the wind was in the right direction. This was because at the village entrance to the right off the main Nazareth road, and opposing a crumbling old Turkish fort, was a thriving chicken factory called Of Haemeq, Chicken of the Valley. Here kosher chickens and turkeys were processed, packed and sold both wholesale and retail. It was a fairly large concern adjacent to a small village and the smell of pre-and-post-disposal of chicken and turkey waste was not pleasant. The kibbutz owners had not wanted it on their territory! We rarely ate the birds ourselves, preferring mutton bought in the Arab quarter of Nazareth or beef from a non-kosher kibbutz. A garage also stood at the junction turn-off which marked a fork in two narrow roads, one leading into the village centre and one along the western edge of the promontory at the farthest end of which a few houses unusually built in stone, including our own, were located. Beyond that point the road ended in a dirt track leading down hill a couple of miles through grapefruit orchards towards Sede Ya’aqov, a farming community or moshav in the valley.
Off Ramat Yishai’s central road and cross roads, where small businesses including the post office were situated, barely metalled, rough lanes squarely criss-crossed over undulating land which housed the majority of the five or six hundred population in their little agency houses or shikunim. Many of these pre-fab type buildings had been extended and improved by their owners over the years. Most still stood in a quarter or half acre of land, now dotted with citrus and other fruit trees but which in 1925 it had been decided might provide a living and new way of life for Jewish immigrants trickling into Palestine at that time from across the world.
When we arrived in May 1973 the united nations were represented in numbers along our sparsely populated road alone. There were earlier generations of Israelis like the respected village elder and horseman of the ‘old guard’ Avigdor, from tall, blue-eyed Caucasian antecedents. There was a fair-haired and blue-eyed Russian, of medium height, the stocky Alexander Shoshani, also a member of the ‘old guard’ with his bow-legs to prove it, whose wife Yudit was from Yugoslavia. Their son Danny and daughter Ruti, of their four children, also lived along the street with their families. There was a rather aristocratic Hungarian widow called Etush, Hungarian-Rumanian Muscal, the Yanai family and Shaul’s family from Yemen and the family Maman, uniting Eli from a Jewish family amongst many from Algeria who had settled in the land from a previous century, to Canadian wife Ruthie.
These folk and their offspring were our immediate neighbours and good friends. I could add to this list other people across the village whom I personally came to know whose families or themselves had come from Persia, Algeria, Turkey, Iraq, America, Austria, Germany and Poland. I was one of three non-Jewish immigrants at that time, with the Canadian Raza married to Algerian Hagit and a Welshman married to an Anglo-Austrian, Adrienne. The largest single contingent in the village may have been the Ben Lulus who had come from Morocco, producing two, or was it three, sets of twins among their other children and who ran the local general store.
It was salutary and heart-warming to see how people from widely different backgrounds, cultures and nations could happily rub along together in a relatively small community; to see how background differences were automatically accepted despite the normal personal likes or dislikes, irritations or difficulties that might arise between people. It was good to live in a place where most were happy to help each other out, to laugh and sing together, to argue politics together because they were glad to be living in their own land, no longer long or short-term refugees, a land chosen for as many and various reasons as their were individuals. Well, this was the feeling you got.
Of course there was the usual family strife, and indeed a war to come in October 1973 and its aftermath, and the continual, subterranean movement that marks change that nobody recognizes at the time. But shortly after we arrived in May we felt Ramat Yishai was alive then with a sense of purpose, community and well-being that satisfied its mixed population. In this respect it differed considerably from the co-operative farming communities, moshavs, where families were commercially linked, or the kibbutzes whose memberships were culturally and politically linked and who shared a communal way of life without personal ownership of finance or goods.
There were very few settlements like Ramat Yishai set up in Israel and, as small as it was, it had its own Council and Mayor, elected to represent one of two major national parties, Mapaam and Mapai, and later Likud, as well as providing a clinic, sports area, kindergartens and junior school. It had the joy of being largely self-contained, a mish-mash of individuals who nevertheless shared a common identity in living in one particular place. It was private enough not to promote too much envy, greed or feuding amongst fellow villagers at that stage, for no-one was rich, though some families naturally amassed more than others by fair or foul means. Criticism was usually good humored, open or sardonic, with the usual wit and noisy exchanges of people of different views and political persuasions. Racial jokes about cultural origins were shared without rancour in a land where being Jewish and Israeli ranked higher than any previous nationality.
There were three discreet synagogues in simple buildings catering for the mainstream Jewish denominations and culturally diverse population. Beyond that a secular Ramat Yishai engendered enterprise, sometimes dubious but vigorous with imagination, flair, confidence and a largely unexpressed hope. I am so glad that we were there to be part of such a unique experience, for however short a period. Time, after all, is relative.
In Ramat Yishai we could find a blacksmith, plumber, electrician, mechanical and civil engineer, policeman, sea captain, doctor, nurses, scrap merchant, builders, grocer, fish-woman, toymaker, secretary, clerk, teacher and no doubt a dozen more professions and occupations, not forgetting the Mayor and the Rabbi. Many of us kept hens, goats, horses, harvested fruits from our land and we all cooked for our families. Readymade meals did not exist. And what a variety of international dishes you could enjoy from Sephardic baked Mediterranean fish with garlic, chilli pepper and tomatoes to stuffed baked aubergine, a vegetable you can cook in a hundred different ways; from cous-cous to Georgian stuffed chicken; from Suliman’s pilaf with mutton and pine nuts to barbecued beef with hot Yemenite relish and so on and on, all served with wonderful dips and salads and followed by delicious sweets and pastries, often made from or filled with the abundant fruits of the land.
On one occasion, I added a little English colour by providing roast lamb and mint sauce for guests, having asked a friend to bring a leg of lamb from England as it was difficult to find really tender cuts of non-koshered sheep, which in Christian Nazareth was usually sold, as butchered, as a whole or half animal of uncertain age. The only problem with the importation was the fact that the joint contained a skewer which set off the security check at the airport and when discovered occasioned a remark from the security officer to the effect that he didn’t know people were starving in Israel. My friend was also importing in her luggage Cheddar cheese and Typhoo tea, which I sorely missed despite the cornucopia of national produce and international cooking.
This village might have been a copy of the settlements founded by the immigrants who had gone West in America in a previous century and indeed it had a certain wildness and idiosyncracy about it which was not to be found in the suburban life of the nearest town, Tivon, or surrounding agricultural communities. It bred a degree of toughness and individuality that may be found amongst pioneering peoples who have not been required to conform for too long to an established cultural routine and settled way of life.
It was then early days in the transforming ethos born of the sudden wealth Israel was to gain from the financial protection of the United States of America. Israel was the one strategic Western democracy in the Middle East with established links to an American Jewry. As the geographical and political fulcrum of the area, not only was the country to become the mightiest military power in the Middle East, its technology in armaments and fighter planes unmatched alongside its permanently trained armed forces, but the economy generally after the Six Day War benefited from a buoyancy unknown to earlier waves of immigration before and after Independence in 1948. From 1968, the money flowed in and the Jewish State changed.
Change sparked by wealth rather than need has an insidious side to its nature, for while offering an easier way of life none would reject, it simultaneously engenders negative qualities which go largely unnoticed. When the going is good, too often need becomes greed, fear becomes arrogance, care becomes nonchalance and privilege becomes ‘rights’. After all people are just people, not philosophers or gods, and common to all elements of the natural world we human beings simply react and respond to our environment and, as the Christian morning prayer says, ‘there is no health in us’. I often wondered what that meant!
So we met in Ramat Yishai in the early nineteen-seventies the final fling, perhaps, in gritty post independence Israel; the fun of doing your own thing your own way, of not having to care what the neighbours thought because they didn’t give a hang about what you thought; of doing and daring and laughing and caring and shouting and singing and sometimes being wicked and getting away with it. Imagine nevertheless a certain cohesion, camaraderie, a sense of belonging, a lightness and brightness, despite personal traumas or tragedies of the daily round, and that was life in Ramat Yishai at a point in time, 1973, celebrating the State of Israel’s first quarter century.