Sleeping on a Wire by David Grossman

Author:David Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466804180
Publisher: Macmillan

“Last year I took an organized tour of Eastern Europe,” Dr. Nazir Yunes of Kafr Ara told me. “The group included the children of Holocaust survivors, people whose families had been murdered there, people who themselves had been there, and partisan fighters. Obviously, the tour was centered around the extermination camps. I heard their stories, and they’d talk on the bus rides. They made everything I’d read in books very concrete. I went with some of them to look for their old houses. I took a cab with one member of the group and we went to his hometown, in Czechoslovakia. He remembered every street and every house. We reached his house, and his nurse was there, old and blind. In the extermination camps we visited I stood in front of the gas chambers. We lit candles, and all of a sudden everything you knew about the suffering and the history of the Jews runs through your head, and you tremble, almost enough, I’d say, to make you cry. At the gas chambers I asked a friend of mine, an Arab who was there with me, ‘What does it mean to you that entire villages, whole towns were erased there in a single day?’ And he answered me, ‘What do you want, look what they’re doing to us now.’

“Now, I’m not willing to make that comparison,” Yunes said, “but the link between the two things certainly exists. The principal impetus that led to the establishment of Israel was Jewish experience in the Exile and in the Holocaust. That traumatic experience affects all of life here. When you see those things you understand it in such a concrete way, and you realize how much the element of fear in Jewish society was deepened by the Holocaust. Fear of the foreigner. Fear of everything.”

When Nazir Yunes was fourteen, his father sent him to study at the agricultural boarding school at Pardes Hannah, together with Jewish children. “Father knew that we had to have strong ties with the Jews. To learn about them and learn to live with them. If we don’t know each other we won’t be able to live together.” Nazir entered the school not knowing Hebrew, and found himself studying about the early Zionists and the ‘redemption of the land,’ and singing ‘Hatikva’ devotedly. When his father found numerous mistakes in the Arabic of his letters home, he said, ‘I’ve lost my son.’ Today Yunes, forty-four years old, is a surgeon in the general and plastic surgery department of the Hillel Yafeh Hospital in Hadera. He speaks with a perfect Hebrew accent, reads for the most part in Hebrew, dreams in both languages, and counts in Hebrew.

“If I remember that 26,000 out of the 36,000 dunams of my village’s land were confiscated; if I remember that until the end of 1966 I needed a special permit to go from my village to the neighboring one, because of the military government; if my village received electricity twenty years after the Jewish

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