Week 7: Structure; Profile; Lecture

Carved in stone/ a pioneer profile

The small cemetery on top of the hill is where all the members of this agriculture community are buried. Standing there the whole valley can be seen, green and dotted with small settlements. In the background the Gliboa mountain range, cursed by King David for being the dying grounds of King Saul and his sons. A curse removed with sweat and blood by the people who settle the valley against all odds.

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 The grave is a simple plaque of white marble with a short inscription. Leah Brakin, born 1920 died 2002, place of birth, Vienna Austria, place of death Kfar Yehezkeal, Israel. The ample space at the bottom should have included two more words to do her justice, a pioneer…

***

In the small outdated living room less than a mile away, he pulls out some of his picture albums. He leafs through them and looks at the many pictures of her shaking hands with prime ministers, social activists and other dignitaries. “Funny” he says “since I was always too busy to travel with her, she brought the world to me”. And then as an afterthought he adds “From the first moment I saw her; with her strange European clothes, I knew she will change my life forever, I knew I chose a special women to live by her side for the rest of my life”.

***

In the black and white pictures the road leading to the *moshav entrance looks long and steep. It must have shrunk or the new houses built along it over the years, to accommodate the new generation, make it look different.  But then when she came home at the end of the week she had to wait at the bottom for someone to give her a ride. In a horse drawn wagon and later on in a tractor, with her suitcase, she would descent in front of the house every Friday, walk straight into the kitchen and immediately resumes her older role.

 In those years she could be seen almost every weekend walking with at least one guest but often a whole group presenting the unique agriculture endeavor with great detail and knowledge.  Explaining the inner make up of a cooperative agriculture community constitute of individual farms with an emphasis on community labor, the pride in her voice pronounced and obvious. The tour always ended with her walking her guests around the family farm telling them her own personal story.

***

At age sixteen she decided to leave her family, in Vienna and go by herself to Israel. The year was 1938 and the winds of war were already blowing over Europe. She joined a group called “youth immigration” that brought young adults to Israel and arranged for them to stay with families in agriculture settlements. That is how she made it to the moshav and met her future husband. He, being a third generation, Israeli born, *Sabra, belonged to the new aristocracy; someone who grew up on the land, not a new immigrant like her.  And so the pure blood Sabra and the new girl from Vienna fell in love and got married. By then Europe was at war and she lost all contact with the family she left behind.

***

Was it really a love at first sight like in a fairy tale?  Or maybe the truth lies in the slightly different version where she married him so she can get “a certificate” a document the British officials who had the mandate over, then Palestine, agreed to give family members in Europe to allow them to reunite.

This forever will remain a mystery.

***

What is apparent to everyone who ever met her is that she was a pioneer all her life. Always few steps ahead she curved her own path. When she thought her role as a mother and a farm hand was fulfilled, she turned to public service and for the next forty years spent every week in her office in Tel-Aviv, promoting public relations and communication, mainly between Germany and the growing agriculture community in Israel.  With that she went against the stream on so many levels. She left her husband at the farm with two kids returning home only on the weekends from her rented apartment in Tel –Aviv. Equally remarkable was her choice to promote relationships with the country that in those days was viewed as just one short step away from the devil itself. Years later many German youth came to Israel to work and in a way make amends but when she started she was definitely ahead of her time.

***

Every Sunday morning she took the bus going to her office in Tel-Aviv, on the second floor of the headquarters of the “Moshav movement” and on the same bus she returned on Friday. She did not have a car, or a driver. She did it for almost forty years even when she was diagnosed with cancer and had to go through long and painful treatments. Her apartment in Tel-Aviv was a tiny, ground floor, two bedrooms in a quiet side street. She belonged to a dying breed of pioneers, those who led the way by doing what they thought was needed and in their personal life remained modest.

***

She was my aunt,

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*Moshav, A type of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms with an emphasis on community labor.

* Sabra, a Jewish person born in Israeli territory; the term is also usually inclusive of Jews born during the period of the establishment of the state of Israel. "tzabar", related to the Arabic word sabr which means "aloe" or "cactus" or "patience". The allusion is to a tenacious, thorny desert plant with a thick hide that conceals a sweet, softer interior, suggesting that even though the Israeli Sabra are rough and masculine on the outside, they are delicate and sensitive on the inside.