Tirza ~ May 9

 

My father’s mother, Leah Maisel, was a force.  When she looked at you, her blue eyes seemed to pierce right through your skull into your innermost thoughts.  She said little, but when she spoke, the room fell silent.  Apparently, her signature is on Israel’s declaration of independence.

She came from a family of 12 siblings, how I wish I could have known them.  Her oldest sister went on a hunger strike until her father relented and let her go to the gymnasium (high school) as long as she hid her schoolbooks on the way back and from school, so the neighbors wouldn’t suspect that they permitted a girl to attend a school of higher learning. But that wasn’t enough. Then she campaigned to go to medical school in Switzerland, where they would admit a woman.  She succeeded, but once there, she fell in love with a fellow student. When he left her, she killed herself.

Her sister Hannah followed her to Switzerland, but her goals were to learn agronomy, to be used when Jews were allowed to own land and be able to farm.  At the same time, she wanted women to be equal in all ways to men, so once in Palestine, she set up an agricultural school for women.  My grandmother embarked on her own to join her there, traveling by train to Oddessa where she saw the sea for the first time, then taking a boat that made stops in Istanbul and Alexandria.  

The agricultural school was in the north, and the story goes that their two beaus, both intellectuals, one a writer, the other a mathematician, rode to visit them one Saturday in a donkey cart to marry them.  My grandfather Avram was a mathematician, and he had followed her from Russia, already in love.  They eventually settled in Tel-Aviv, in what became a street in the center city, with a lemon tree in the back I still remember.  Avram became a high school math teacher, and the parent who cooked and took care of the daily household after school.  Leah decided that agronomy might not be so practical for women who were the caretakers of the next generation, so she set up craft cooperatives, where they could learn a craft and have a place to sell what they could produce from home. She organized rescue efforts during the war, as Jews jumped off boats off the coast (see Exodus).

What I remember is a grandmother who was victim to Parkinson’s, and the time we spent together I was given the job of throwing a big blue ball for her to catch and throw back to me.  Her eyes never seemed to leave me but even so she managed to catch the ball.

My grandfather, as soon as I arrived, would quiz me to check my arithmetic skills.  He kept a ledger where every household expense, down to the grush (cent), was accounted for. But he would also write poetry, a book that was published before he died and that I cannot read, filled with poems to his beloved Leah.