The archaeological excavations of Tel Shikmona (Hill of Sycamores) are located on Cape Carmel. Remains of buildings and structures have been found which date from the time of King Solomon until the Seleucid Period (second century BCE).
They can be reached by the Nos. 43, 44, and 47 municipal bus services.
For sightseeing in Haifa you can book a tour with experienced guides who are fluent in many languages.
8. 1996, Galilee, Moshav Nof a-Galil
F
ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN
AND
A
VIGDOR
S
TEIN
(Audio recording transcribed by Ewa after a visit to the family of Avigdor and Milka Stein.)
CASSETTE 1
AVIGDOR. By all means turn on your tape recorder, but I’m not going to be saying anything all that special.
EWA. I have a bad memory and I’m afraid of forgetting something important. When I talked to Daniel in Emsk I wrote everything down in a notebook when I got back to the hotel so as not to lose a single word.
AVIGDOR. Well, it was probably worth writing down what my brother said, but me? By the way, when he came here from Belorussia he told me about you, the little girl they put in the sleeve of a fur coat. So, what do you want me to tell you?
EWA. Everything. Where you were born, what your family was like, what life was like before the war … And why he was as he was.
AVIGDOR. Have you really come all the way from America to ask me about our family? Of course I will tell you. But why he was as he was, that I cannot tell you. I have wondered about it a lot myself. He was somehow different from other people even as a child. I used to think he was so special because he always said yes. If people asked him for something, or wanted something from him, he was always willing to say yes. Later, when we met again here, I saw that he was capable of saying no sometimes. So that was not it. I will tell you truthfully, to this day I don’t know. He was one of a kind in our family. As for our family, it was completely ordinary. We lived in South Poland, an area which passed from one set of hands to another and had belonged to Austria-Hungary, Poland, and been part of the Principality of Galicia. My brother and I were born in a poverty-stricken village with a Polish-Jewish population.
Our Father, Elias Stein, was a soldierly kind of Jew the like of which you could find only in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although he considered himself Jewish, attended the synagogue and associated with his co-religionists, he approved of secular education, which he had never received, spoke German fluently, and understood culture to mean German culture. He was a soldier and proud of it. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army for eight years and worked his way up from the ranks to finish as a junior officer, considering his period of military service the best years of his life. He kept his non-commissioned officer’s uniform like a relic in the wardrobe, and brought it with him on the second of September 1939, the day we all found ourselves among the crowd of refugees trying to escape the German invasion.
Our parents married in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, during a break in my father’s military service. They were distantly related. Such family marriages, arranged through a matchmaker, were commonplace in the Jewish community. My mother was an educated young woman who had managed to attend a school for future officials.
It was a late marriage. Now, looking back so far in time, it seems to me that they loved each other, but they had very different temperaments. My mother was two years older than my father, already an old maid of thirty. It was usual at that time and in that region for maidens to be given in marriage when they were no older than sixteen. My mother had a dowry. She had inherited an inn from an aunt, so even before marrying she had her own business. Admittedly it brought in a tiny income in return for a lot of hard work. My mother barely scraped a living from it, but for the whole of her life she clung to a comical belief that she was a woman of substance. Most of the people around were even poorer. When she married, my mother expected that her husband would run the inn. She had yet to discover what a highly impractical husband she had chosen.
My father did not enjoy being an innkeeper. He liked the company of clever, educated people, and here the only company was drunken Polish peasants. He did not have to sell vodka for long, though, because the First World War began and he went off to fight. My mother went back to trading and my father went off to the cannons. We have a photograph of him from that time, a gallant soldier with a moustache, in a smart uniform. He looks out proudly.
By 1918 everything had changed. The war had been lost and our village ceded to Poland. It was as if everybody had been deported from cultured, German-speaking Austria to backward, penniless Poland. Our father retained his German orientation right to the end of his life. He always preferred to switch from speaking Polish to speaking German, while at home, Yiddish, the main language of Polish Jews, was hardly spoken at all.
My elder brother was born in 1922. He was a late child but not the last, because two years later I was born. We were given traditional Jewish names, Daniel and Avigdor, but we have noble Aryan names, Dieter and Wilfried, in official documents. Those are the names we used as children, the names we were called at school. My brother reverted to his ancient name when he was ordained a monk, and I did when I came to Palestine.
Our family had a very hard life. My mother was in a constant rush to deal with the housekeeping and the inn. My father bought a shop because, as I have said, he did not care for the inn. This turned out to be the first of a succession of commercial disasters. All his enterprises failed, but for the first years at least my mother probably harbored illusions about her husband’s business skills. Later it became obvious that the only thing he was good at was running up debts.
In those years we worshipped our father and spent a lot of time with him. He had a romantic military past and was forever telling us tales about life in the army. Being a soldier was one of the best roles he got to play in his life. It was the Austrian army he fought in, but he considered the German military machine the acme of perfection. When we were little he would give us rapturous talks about Bismarck and Clausewitz. He did not live to see the ignominious collapse of German militarism, because that ideal mechanism ground him to dust along with six million of his co-religionists. I don’t think he was ever disabused of his faith that Germanic culture was the finest in the world. He read Goethe and adored Mozart.
Now, when I myself am long past the age at which my parents died in the concentration camps, I have a much better understanding of their edgy, touching relationship. My father was what Sholom Aleichem described as “a man of air.” His head was swarming with hundreds of ideas, not one of which was brought to fruition. He built castles in the air which collapsed one after the other, and every time this reduced him to a nervous wreck.
My mother had a strong personality and there were constant conflicts between my parents. My father would demand that she should bail him out by borrowing money from neighbors who were better off or from her sisters. They did sometimes help him to extricate himself from difficult situations. My parents often quarrelled, but for all that they were a devoted couple. Tempestuous disputes were followed by reconciliation. I think my mother felt sorry for my father.
We have never discovered how their lives ended. In the death camps, though. That much is certain.
EWA. When did you last see them?
AVIGDOR. On three September 1939. We parted on a road thronged with refugees, and all of us had a presentiment that we would never see each other again. Dieter was seventeen and I was fifteen. We were to be parted, too, for almost twenty years. I worshipped my elder brother. There was never a hint of rivalry between us, perhaps because he always treated me as his junior, playing with me, caring for me, looking out for me. Although there is a couple of years’ difference in our ages, we were sent to school at the same time. It wasn’t much of a school, Polish, for peasants’ children. There was a single classroom for children of all ages and the level was decidedly modest, but at least you were taught to read and write. We had no religious education. There was no longer a heder in the village. There were no more than a score of Jewish families in the entire district. There were not many children, but the Jewish cemetery and the synagogue had survived. I know even that has all gone now.