Once We Were Home by Jennifer Rosner

Author:Jennifer Rosner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

14

ANA

1948

There is a moment, liquid time, just before a photograph’s image appears on the developing paper, when Ana conjures the faces of her parents. Their actual features have blurred in her memory but she fills in with her imagination, Papa’s warm eyes peeking out from the soot and sparks of the smithy; the curve of Mama’s cheeks when she smiled.

Other moments, looking through her lens, she finds hidden truths that break into the light in momentary, unwitting flashes. There’s the recent picture of Eva, her left arm absentmindedly cradling her belly. Oskar, leaning against a sycamore tree at Neve Ora’s edge, his dark eyes searching. An outsider still.

Ana struggled at first, feeling an outsider herself. The girls in her room snubbed her, rolling their eyes when she snapped photos, teasing her for keeping hold of the dreidel, carried in her pocket all the way from the German children’s home. One of them even defaced a photograph of Eva that she stowed in her cubby, scribbling over it in ink. Ana snubbed them back, staying close to those she came with: Ida, whom she’s forgiven; Yehoshua and Dov, both now just friends.

In time the girls softened—it didn’t hurt that one of them developed a crush on Dov—and Ana found herself part of a large group, pulled along to meals, to farmwork, to the nightly fire, her ears buzzing with ideological talk: the kibbutz as a chance to build something new. Neve Ora, collaborative and communal, bent on equality. Avoiding the traditional traps of wealth and religion, the roles of men and women. And they, the youth, at its forefront, doing something never done before.

All the talk she’d heard before this—overheard, really—was the hushed and frantic whispers of her parents, or the strategizing of the Dąbrowskis. The focus was on safety and hiding, every utterance laced with fear. This talk is different, exciting. Israel has won its independence and at Neve Ora, the focus is on building a fair and worthy society where everyone works and shares equally in the bounty.

Only when words and voices are spent, in the wee hours, the guttering moments, does Ana perceive the loss undergirding everything: they, the survivors, are creating this future without their beloved parents, their brothers and sisters, their aunts, uncles, cousins, lovers, friends.

She’s called Chani here. She loves the name, so close to her mother’s. Her brother still calls her Stazja, which is all right with her; it’s hard for her to think of him as Yossi.

In the darkroom, she arranges her photographs into groupings—solitary children matched with adults, creating families, this one, then that—before quickly shuffling them into random piles. The mute-red safety light flickers. Her stomach rumbles. She looks at her watch, wondering if Boaz will come. He’s fourteen, a year older than she is, with shiny dark hair and beautiful brown eyes. He grew up with an uncle who was a photographer, and sometimes he offers her tips about composition and light.

For an entire year in the Naliboki forest, surviving in dug-out burrows and hollowed tree trunks, Boaz carried a roll of film in his sock.

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