A Letter from Mama Camouna

Not long after Sammy’s visit, my father died after a long illness. My mother’s sorrow and mine were compounded by the fact that there were not ten men who had known him in his life to stand by his grave and recite kaddish for him. Seeing we were so few, some strangers at the Holon cemetery visiting their own dead did the mitzvah of coming to recite kaddish for this Jew they had never known. This was the time when we felt that Israel can be exile most bitterly and cruelly. But telegrams and letters poured in from so many places in the world where Father’s brothers, nephews, and grand-nephews lived. In New York and in Manchester there were enough of them to gather in his memory and do things the proper way, as he had done all his life for others. And when some of them now come to Israel, and ask to visit his grave, there is a more gentle sorrow, a kind of peace over the fact that he is remembered by them. Sometimes, I go alone, and this loneliness seems incredible when once we were so many.

Then I remember my grandmother telling me when I was a child how Mama Camouna and the other women would take the children to the Jewish cemetery in Tunis, so that the dear dead ones would not feel lonely. “At first we lamented and tore at our cheeks, and then we’d settle down for a collation, and the children would play hide-and-seek among the graves. And we’d remember what our dear ones had said and done and told stories about them. Oh, we’d laugh so much remembering your great-uncle Fragi, because he was so gay, always playing pranks and at weddings he’d compose songs, honoring the bride and groom and their families, with funny refrains about everybody.” Then Grandmother and her daughters would remember those weddings in Tunis and what everybody wore, some of the women still in their traditional dresses, wrapped up in big white silk shawls, and those who already dressed in the style that was “modern” before the First World War. Their infectious laughter sometimes seems to echo among the cold rectilinear alignment of the graves in Holon, and they all seem to be there, and I the surviving witness of something marvelously warm, vital, and alive, which I knew but which no longer is. Nowadays, even the dead seem regimented in these straight-lined cemeteries, so different from the old ones, where families kept together, in death as in life. And yet, somehow, life continues, reasserts itself, and some of the old ways still survive. After my father’s death, my mother stayed some time with my sister in Paris, where she saw many of her cousins, some who had left Egypt after the Sinai Campaign, and some who, in the meantime, had left Tunis and other North African cities. Then she stayed with my father’s relatives in England, and each of his nephews and nieces brought their children and grandchildren to see her, exactly as it was done in the old days. She wrote: “They still cook the same dishes, some of them, at least for the holidays.”

She returned to Israel having seen them all, appeased. In Paris, her cousins, the daughters of Uncle David, who are now old ladies, still meet every motsa’e shabbat and read the letters they have received. Anyone who passes through Paris joins the circle. The younger people sometimes come and sometimes don’t. Perhaps this will be the last generation to keep up the custom, but in the meantime it holds.

And so it was that Gerard, a great-grandson of Uncle David, called me up one day from his kibbutz. A little mockingly, he said, “Grandmother said that if I don’t see your mother while I’m in Israel, she’ll never forgive me. So when can I come?”

We make arrangements for his visit. He arrives, a handsome boy of eighteen, a student, who, trying to look serious, tells me that he, too, paraded with the black flag of anarchy during the student riots. We laugh. With his long blond hair he looks very much like a beatnik and his pink outfit is very dirty.

“Would you like to wash?” Mother suggests.

Gerard looks scandalized. Then his eyes begin to rove over the pictures hanging on her walls and he recognizes some of the old people he knows when they were still young, and of some he asks, “Who is he? Who is she?” For a brief moment they live again as part of our lives, mixed up with what we say about the Six-Day War, and what Gerard tells us of his kibbutz, and the family in Paris, and the student riots. And Gerard tells my mother, “Aunt Yvonne, you should have seen the crowd that came to hear your letters being read. Aunt Louise called us all up, and said ‘A letter from Yvonne!’ and we all went. We heard all about your visit to Jerusalem. It was very moving. But your letter about the visit to the Golan Heights drew crowds three Saturdays in a row! It was a masterpiece. You can’t imagine what it means now, to have family in Israel.”

Mother was very pleased. “I’m only an old woman. I just wrote about what I saw and what I felt about it, and wanted to share it with those I love.”

Gerard knits his eyebrows and asks, “But how did it happen that for the last three or four generations we’ve been constantly on the move? And it’s not finished yet. How did it all begin?”

So mother tells Gerard how in her family it might have begun. “You see, your great-great-grandfather had an oil press in Monastir, a small village in Tunisia. The oil was stored in big jars, like those in the tale about Ali Baba and the forty thieves. One jar was kept for ablutions. There was of course no running water in those days. Well, one day, after he had worked hard and sweated and felt very hot, he had the jar filled with cold water and stayed in it too long. He died of pneumonia as a consequence. Times were already changing, and your great-grandfather, my Uncle David, the eldest son, decided to try his luck in Tunis, the big city, and gradually he brought the whole family over to Tunis. That’s how it all began.”

“Well,” Gerard said, “it’s not given to everybody to have had an ancestor who died taking a cold bath in an oil jar. I’ll have to tell the cousins in Paris about it. I wonder why Grandmother never did.”

“Perhaps,” Mother said, at once gentle and reproaching, “because you never asked. How do you want us to tell, when you young people nowadays are really not interested in those old tales, when you can’t really be bothered with the past, because the world you live in is so different? So it’s wiser to wait until you ask.” She glances at me, a little slyly. “Isn’t it so, my daughter?”

I say yes and I think it’s always the same caravans crossing and recrossing. Perhaps memories are like water in a well, that well Rachel uncovered for Jacob when he came to his Uncle Laban. Perhaps that is when it all started, and since then it is only the means of transportation that have realty changed.