Gideon Levy As Reports of Missing Israeli Children Emerge, the Story of My Lost Brother
When
I read the recent series of Ofer Aderet's reports about the
disappearance of children in Israel, I begin to ask myself: Where is
Dan? Are you alive?
haaretz.com
It was the summer of
1967, not long after the war, that my mother and I went to school for a
meeting with the school nurse. It was Ironi Aleph, a well regarded high
school at the time, and we were excited. The nurse, clad in a green
uniform and head scarf, pulled out the file from the pile on her desk
and started perusing it. She asked about childhood diseases and
tooth-brushing habits and then, without any warning, the blow landed: “I
understand that there was an older brother here,” she said. A deathly
silence descended on the room. My mother lowered her gaze and I didn’t
understand anything. It went on for an eternity. Finally my mother said:
“Yes, he had a brother and he died.”
Later
on we went home in silence. In the evening, after Father returned from
work, a window was opened — and just as quickly closed. My parents told
me that they were sorry that through all these years they hadn’t told me
that before I was born they had another child. They called him Dan. He
was six weeks old when he died, they told me. He died from an illness.
They didn’t even bring him home from the hospital, apparently the Dajani
Hospital in Jaffa, later called Tzahalon, the place where both my
younger brother and I were born.
They
told me which illness he died from, but now I don’t recall which one.
Maybe jaundice. What I do remember well was the explanation for the fact
that my brother has no grave. My parents told me that Dan was ill and
therefore he wasn’t circumcised, and because he wasn’t circumcised he
has no grave. That’s what the halakha (Jewish religious law) says, they
told my father, who never knew the difference between Passover and
Purim. From then on I knew that I had a brother and he has no grave.
An
uncircumcised infant has no grave? I asked Rabbi Benny Lau on Sunday.
“Absolute nonsense,” said the rabbi, “There’s no such thing.” And a
child who is less than a year old? “That’s even greater nonsense,” said
the rabbi. (I know someone whose parents were told that his dead brother
had no grave because he was less than a year old when he died).
We
never mentioned my dead brother again. I was disturbed by the thought
of what would have happened had he not died, and how and when would I
have come into the world, if at all, had he lived. But Dan was returned
to the family skeleton closet, from which he had been momentarily
removed against the family’s will, after which the door to that closet
was locked for good. They never mentioned him again in our house. As was
the case with many other subjects in our parents’ generation, they
didn’t tell and we didn’t ask.
Could
it be that Dan’s fate didn’t weigh on them until their dying day? Could
it be that they didn’t ask themselves why he had no grave? Did they
just accept the explanation/lie they were given, with such intolerable
ease, without asking any questions? And above all, did they even
entertain the thought that Dan is alive and well somewhere in the world?
My
parents locked the Dan file with iron chains. After what they,
survivors of Europe, had been through in their lives they apparently
couldn’t deal with those questions. And maybe they always suffered from
sleepless nights and were constantly preoccupied by thoughts of Dan, but
only didn’t tell us, as was usual at the time? Sadly, there’s nobody
left to ask.
When
I read the recent series of reports published in this newspaper by my
colleague Ofer Aderet, about the disappearance of other children, I
begin to ask myself: Where is Dan? Are you alive, Dan? Please get in
touch. You probably aren’t called Dan, or maybe you are. Born in the
early 1950s, maybe you live on the next street? And maybe in another
city? In another country?
Tom,
our son who died at the age of one in 1988, is buried in the children’s
section in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv. For years his grave
was surrounded by rusty iron poles on the tiny graves of anonymous
children. Then, about two years ago, an invisible hand covered this
children’s section with a concrete floor, and the iron poles were
replaced by marble slabs, which were hastily placed on the graves
without attaching them to the ground. Names were engraved on those
uniform stone slabs, sometimes only last names without any additional
information, not a date, not the parents’ names. Some are already
broken.
Sometimes
the thought has entered my mind that my big brother Dan is buried
there, next to my little son Tom. Now I’m beginning to doubt that too.
We named our son Dan. He’s already 30 years old
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