Is Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel's Early Days Akin to Nazi Crimes?
The
Yemenite children affair is a central theme of Iris Eliya Cohen’s third
novel, but the way it’s handled gives pause for thought about the stuff
of which best sellers…
haaretz.com
“Galbi,” by Iris Eliya Cohen, Yedioth Books (Hebrew), 325 pages, 78 shekels
Zohara,
a lawyer of Yemenite descent in her early thirties, was born and raised
in Haifa. She’s a divorcée with one child. The novel opens at the
beginning of the 1980s, when Zohara visits a family living near
Jerusalem in an attempt to trace her twin sister, Batya, who disappeared
30 years earlier. Batya was taken away by a doctor and a nurse; they
promised to bring her back but did not do so. The mother, a young woman
who at the time didn’t know Hebrew, had tried to track down the girl
ever since, but in vain.
“Galbi,”
which means “my heart” in Yemeni Arabic, is based on the assumption
that a more or less organized kidnapping of Yemenite children was
perpetrated in Israel under Ashkenazi rule in the state's formative
years, out of a desire to give the children a better life than they
could have with their biological parents. The protagonist puts it like
this: “I have nothing against Ashkenazim in general. But in a very
specific way, some of them are responsible for the greatest, most
serious crime committed here since the state was established.” That
comment sums up the book's spirit rather well. The novel is a grave
indictment, replete with stereotypes and prejudices, of the Ashkenazim
and the crimes they allegedly committed against the Mizrahim (Jews of
Middle Eastern or North African origin).
In
an interview published in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth in February, the
Iris Eliya Cohen, the book’s author, drew a comparison between the
Nazis’ murder of European Jewry and the kidnapping of Yemenite children,
by invoking the phrase “the banality of evil,” drawn from Hannah
Arendt’s famous account of the 1961 Eichmann trial. In the words of the
author, a writer and artist, “It is what is known as the banality of
evil. Everything in this story, about the kidnappings of Yemenite
children, was supposedly done in good faith. … They just didn’t
understand that it was bad. They thought they were doing good.”
Asked
if the horrors of the Holocaust can be likened to the Yemenite children
affair, the author replied, “I think the comparison is valid. To
compare two things is not necessarily to say that they are the same.
When I started to write the book, I did actually pit the Mizrahi
narrative – at the base of which are the kidnappings of Yemenite
children – against the Ashkenazi narrative, at the base of which is the
Holocaust. After immersing myself in the shocking testimonies from the
Eichmann trial, my conclusion is that there is a vast difference. What
happened in the Holocaust is beyond comparison. But nevertheless, you
[can] say that a huge tragedy occurred here, too. Children were taken
here, living souls. As the mother of four children, I try to run that
thing through my head. What greater tragedy is there in the universe
than someone taking your child, heaven forbid? There is none. Nothing
can compare to it. It is incomprehensible that it was done, and
systematically, too.”
In
the novel, Zohara’s best friend, Adiva, is Ashkenazi. But apart from
her, almost all the Ashkenazi characters are totally wicked. There’s the
doctor who tells Zohara she doesn’t know how to behave because she is
Yemenite; a school nurse who humiliates the young Zohara in front of the
class when she’s found to have lice in her hair; and, worst of all, her
prospective father-in-law – a professor, kibbutz member and Ashkenazi –
who asks his son, on the eve of his hasty marriage to Zohara, what he
actually sees in her. Zohara carries these insults with her everywhere.
In addition, she also bears the pain of Batya’s unexplained
disappearance.
But
now things have come to a head. Zohara’s mother is on her deathbed, and
this is the spring of the tension: Will Zohara succeed in finding her
twin sister before their mother dies? Zohara enlists the aid of a
private investigator, Yigal, a tall, corpulent, silent type who runs
through his notes time and again, and it’s not completely clear whether
he knows where he’s going.
The
story plays out on two time levels. One is the book’s present, the
early 1980s, in which the protagonist searches for her long-lost sister.
The other is the period of Zohara’s childhood, in 1950s’ Haifa, with
her sailor father who is far from home; her mother, who has a hard time
raising the children on her own; the atmosphere of mourning that hangs
over the family because of Batya’s disappearance; and the humiliations
the family undergoes at the hands of the Ashkenazi establishment.
The
author, apparently realizing the categorical nature of the text, tries
to soften the tone occasionally – or at least to justify those who
supposedly kidnapped children and put them up for adoption, while
telling the original parents that their children had died. The primary
justification for these deeds, according to the author, was to provide
children to people who lost their own children in the Holocaust. The
Yemenites did not perpetrate the Shoah, but the authorities gave their
children to Holocaust survivors, argues Cohen, so that they, too, would
finally have someone or something in this world.
Manifestly,
this presentation of events is outrageous and untenable. The third and
final state commission of inquiry that was established to investigate
the subject, chaired by Yehuda Cohen and Yaacov Kedmi, published its
findings in 2001. The commission was severely critical of the
establishment’s attitude toward the immigrants, but after examining more
than 800 cases, found that uncertainty existed regarding the fate of
some 100 children, who were possibly handed over for adoption, without
their parents being informed. With regard to 733 children, the
commission concluded definitively that they died shortly after being
taken from the parents. I certainly do not make light of the kidnapping
of some 100 children, but I don’t think it is appropriate to describe
this as “the greatest, most serious crime committed here since the state
was established.”
Writing
on Megafon, a news website for independent journalists, Tal Goldstein
termed Cohen’s book important. Neta Halperin, from the freebie newspaper
Israel Hayom, praised the author for her honest, authentic writing,
which made it easy to believe her. But like me, however, Halperin had
reservations: “At a quite early stage, it becomes clear that the place
from which the novel’s power derives is the same place from which its
weaknesses derive. ‘Galbi’ is a novel of grand gestures. Nothing is left
implicit. Restraint is not a marker of quality, of course … but in the
case of ‘Galbi,’ which gushes with emotions, impressions and emphases to
bursting point, the reader is frequently left with no room to feel, to
sense and to form an impression.”
She
goes on to address the offensive characters of the establishment: “If
they possessed a degree of depth, the reader would also be able to
object and be angry at the infuriating injustice. Here, the emotional
overload often leaves the reader with no other course than to observe
the events as a bystander.”
Obviously,
juxtaposing a highly charged affair such as that of the Yemenite
children with the Holocaust and its horrors are certain to generate much
interest. In our polarized society, this theme – the Holocaust as
justification for everything (both domestically and externally) on the
one side, and the discriminatory behavior of the Ashkenazi establishment
on the other – is a surefire recipe for a hot best seller, simply
because this theme seems to be fed by an eternal flame.
Is
this literature? There’s undoubtedly an attempt here to create
literature. The characters are well crafted, the tangle is presented and
the plot tries to unravel it, and there is also symbolism: Adiva,
Zohara’s Ashkenazi friend, not only suffers from a mole on her back that
torments her, she is also obsessed with cleanliness; in short, she is
not without blemish. But hovering above all this is an agenda, not to
say ideology – both of which are bitter enemies of literature, which is
first and foremost meant to tell a story.
Haaretz Contributor
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