Naomi had been loved and was deeply mourned. The family could not accept her death — we had touched the well of life itself. How could it be that instead of Aunt Ecka or Aunt Frieda, Naomi had suddenly been taken? Nor did Grandpa Hainek come to terms with her death. Perhaps he blamed himself. On the night when she gave birth to Oz, prematurely, he had run twelve miles in the snow after his horses had veered off the path, frightened by bright lights. But by the time he came back with the midwife, an old woman from one of the villages, it was too late to save Naomi. He went back to the kibbutz with his sons.
At the end of that year, the Yom Kippur War broke out. After the war, Grandpa Hainek’s oldest son with Tamar, Ze’ev (1953–1975), left the kibbutz. He went to Canada to work in the oil fields, where he was killed in a glacier accident. Grandpa Hainek mourned the loss of his eldest son heavily, but there were those who subtly claimed that his expression gave off a hint of satisfaction — after all, this was death by drowning in a freezing lake, just like in the old days, in the Wisła near Krakow.
A year later, Dov (1954–1976) was killed. Dov was the second son. Some say he was a Mossad agent, some say something even more secretive. In Europe, on a mission, two bullets. Three people, one dressed as a priest.
In 1978, a hay wagon ran over Sagi, Naomi’s second son.
Grandpa Hainek took his remaining sons and began an endless journey through the little Land of Israel, to get away from his Polish legacy and from the fate of the peasant coachman. He went from town to town, from vocation to vocation. He was an agricultural laborer in the Sharon region, a porter in Petach Tikva, a print worker in Haifa. He got as far south as Beersheba, far from the snow, and found work as a taxi driver. He changed his clothes, learned Hebrew, even voted in the elections. (Once. He stole an identity card and voted as Ernst Rabinowitz.) But all the roles he played, all the vocations, the attempts, the distance from the snow, none of these could rescue him from the claws of his true identity, the only possible one: a Polish coachman in the town of Kielce, wearing coachman’s boots and a black cap.
Still, despite long snowy years under scorching khamsin heat waves, despite sauerkraut and vodka that destroyed his teeth, despite his dead wives and tragically killed sons, at the age of fifty-two, thanks to an argument over change at the grocery store, Grandpa Hainek met his third wife, Atalia. She quickly gave him three children from her young body. To protect her and her children, he took them even further south, to Machtesh Ramon. He went north only when snow capped the high mountains, after which he would return to Beersheba, startled, to a heat that had no snow and no woods and no slowly descending darkness. He went back to making a living driving a taxi, with the windows rolled up even in the heaviest khamsin, ignoring his passengers’ pleas, sweating, his skin turning red. In Beersheba he had another child with Atalia.
Grandpa Hainek was the fertile opposite of our family: a Polish peasant, ignorant and uncomplicated. We never found any interest or use in him apart from his butterfly collection, which included an impossibly purple cabbage butterfly, and apart from his third son, Eitan, who was the first to show me pictures of naked ladies who were more developed than Effi was on the day she showed me her body.
Atalia was a different matter.
Aristocratic, tender and radiant, as were all of Grandpa Hainek’s known women, she was a tall, slender Yemenite. She was always barefoot and her fingers were adorned with rings of white copper. She was twenty-three when she married Grandpa Hainek, only a few years older than us, and boundlessly in love with her white-haired partner. Atalia’s sons (“the Lubliner Yemenites,” Effi called them), shared the appearance Grandpa Hainek gave all his sons regardless of the ethnicity of his partner. Each of his eleven sons had an identical hardened look. They could never be seen in one full group (Grandpa Hainek’s eldest were killed before Atalia’s children were born), but partial gatherings were sometimes convened for Grandpa Lolek’s ceremonious camera. These grandchildren of the headmaster of Kielce’s Hebrew Gymnasium, the pedagogue and man of letters Dr. Feuer, appear in pictures surrounding their father. Their calves wrapped in leg-warmers, they wear clothes that look heavy and sour. Spanning all ages, their countenances are identical. A dark, boorish crew of mute masculinity, a gang fifty years too late to join the ranks of Alexander Zaid’s nascent Shomer movement.
From a very young age, they paved their ways to living on moshavim or military academies. They were bulky and lonely. Their hair turned grey before they reached eighteen. In the army, they served in tight-lipped units. They had girlfriends, always moshav girls, always fair-haired. In time they each found an exciting line of work, but even their intriguing professions — hunters, spies, commandos, coal-miners — never gave them an aura of interest. They were ascetic, hardened types, who connected with the world only infrequently, to sleep with its girls or buy its spare tractor parts. Grandpa Lolek photographed them often. He enjoyed gathering them in front of his camera to immortalize his younger brother and nephews.
In the family, it was usually Grandpa Lolek who took pictures. He generously erected his Leica camera, a black metal monster with personality disorders, everywhere he went. It was no simple matter to produce a good picture with the Leica. Its internal mechanisms were controlled with one seemingly simple button that required no more than a click. But inside, the camera teemed with a religion of restrictions and mishaps. While the Leica produced attempts, failures and repeated adjustments, the audience opposite it grew increasingly impatient. Finally, the button. Pressing it produced an impressive sound and sometimes a picture.
(Effi: “If you press twice, you get an X-ray.”)
Grandpa Hainek and his sons usually agreed to pose. The pictures always captured them eyeing the lens suspiciously with a cautionary look, as if to say, “No tricks, I’m warning you.” They never asked for the pictures afterwards, uninterested in what had happened to the moment frozen by the Leica. Grandpa Lolek enjoyed photographing them and uncharacteristically overcame his sorrow at the lack of payment. He amassed the photos of his nephews, who had been imposed upon him as a calamity of potential heirs, and collected payment indirectly from other photography subjects.
The family members usually liked to be photographed, eternalized. The relatives, the friends, the acquaintances — all the survivors from there. After the Holocaust, eternity was as vital to them as oxygen, food, and good health. Even before they arrived in Israel, they photographed themselves with heavy black cameras at all sorts of events, proving that they existed, that they were real, a mathematical truth, a concept supported by science. They existed. They were photographed at resorts, on holidays, on afternoons of idle laziness, forgotten moments that they wished to immortalize so that future generations could not claim these people were never idle. The pictures were rarely gathered into albums. They generally bustled by the dozen, disorganized, in a chaos we spent evenings poring over, makings sudden discoveries of Mrs. Tsanz in a bathing suit, Uncle Antek embracing two young women. Smiling. Mrs. Tsanz too. There she was at the center of a merry group on a waterfront bench, a snowy background and a road-sign suggesting a season, a place. An unnamed park, perhaps in Krakow, chestnut trees overhead, and the people in the photograph are smiling. The awkward smile of a young girl, our Grandpa Yosef with his arm around her waist as if there were no prohibitions and no sins in this world. A snowman with a carrot nose, three anonymous people and Uncle Mendel kneeling at its feet, smiling. Springtime in a field divided by a walking path, a gang of people lingering briefly for the camera, smiling. Their clothes are heavy in summer too, their faces grave — here we are, living the good life. Recovering. Sated. Satisfied. Grumbling about this and that. And the park benches and the sidewalks and the doorways are full of them, gathered, smiling, the camera casting their images onto the negative. One click, and eternity.