13/4/98

Yes, we have no bananas

    How many goyim does it take to make a Pessah seder?
    One, if he's Polish.
    Augustine "Duke" Labaczewski may still be chuckling about it, 51 years later. He was the cook aboard the good ship Hatikva, a creaky Aliya Bet vessel that became a legend for transporting either illegal Jews or legal bananas (guess which).
    Murray Greenfield, second officer in a crew of 20 Jews and two Gentiles, recalls that bizarre seder, conducted in secret from those nasty Brits so valiantly devoted to keeping Holocaust survivors behind barbed wire.
    Greenfield, of Ramat Aviv, documented the extraordinary American rescue effort of Aliya Bet in the book The Jews' Secret Fleet (co-authored by Joseph Hochstein, Gefen Publishers and MOD).
    "We gave some bullshit story about where we were from," he says with a hearty laugh. "We said the boat was being rebuilt from what it was into a banana ship. Of course, it was crazy: bananas you hang. And we were building platforms to lay people down. But, you know, the bigger the lie the better it goes."
    Docked in Lisbon, the vessel, formerly known as the Tradewinds, was destined to sneak 1,500 Jewish refugees from Italy into Palestine -- but they were intercepted. As Greenfield tells it, "We fought with the British, and they beat us up." The passengers got to see their Promised Land, tantalizingly, but were redirected to Cyprus for internment.
    A few weeks before setting off for its cargo, still in Lisbon, the crew realized that Pessah was upon them.
    Working towards their lofty goal, the crew's Jews may have been forgiven for passing up Passover, but Duke would have none of that.
    "Duke was a merchant marine cook during World War II. Short guy. He learned to cook in a Jewish bakery in Philadelphia. He knew all the Yiddish songs and Jewish holidays, and he knew all about Pessah. He was wonderful."
    Harold Katz, first officer of the Hatikva and now a landlubber in Ramat Hasharon, recalls Duke as "practically an illiterate Polish kid, a professional sailor with tattoos and long hair, a pre-hippy hippy."
    Greenfield chortles at the memory of this unlikely character.
    "When Duke heard it was Pessah, he said, it's Pessah! Ya gotta do something! He was adamant. He was so built into yiddishkeit, so much of a contrast to the Pollacks and how terrible they were.
    "So Duke prepared phoney food. Nobody was such a haredi that it mattered. He made it look like Pessah. He made a flat bread that looked like a matza. He made sponge cake. Maror was easy. I seem to remember he did something with fish, but I don't remember if it was gefilte. And there was lots of wine.
    "The wine went like mad. We didn't stop at four cups. Oh, no. I think it was more like 40."
    Keeping the seder a secret was vital -- the British must not suspect that the crew was predominantly Jewish -- so the proceedings were camouflaged as a birthday party for the captain.
    There was another sticky problem: every ship docked in Lisbon had a soldier or policeman stationed on board.
    The crew took care of that.
    "We had him placed up on the bridge, while we had the seder in the hold," says Katz. "We plied him with wine to share in the birthday celebration. He was a little bit under the influence. Heh, heh. He was very happy up there."
    Greenfield, struggling to recollect details, says he thinks he asked the Four Questions in Yiddish, but they were at a loss to perform much more of the seder. So they sang songs.
    "There was a record put out in the Spanish Revolution, under Franco, called Six Songs For Democracy. We sang some of them, in English." It was ludicrous, Greenfield laughs: they were singing anti-Fascist songs in fascist Portugal, during a pseudo-seder inspired by a Gentile Polish hippy sailor. 
    It gets even zanier when you factor in crewman Hugh McDonald, as ersatz a Jew as you'll ever meet, and Captain Diamond, a man of many aliases who wore a trenchcoat and "a hat with gold on it."
    McDonald, of Victoria, Canada, answered my phone call with a hearty "boker tov." An Irish Catholic former altar boy -- "I was a yeshiva boy in Latin" -- McDonald first heard about the Aliya Bet rescue at Harvard Law School.
    "I came out of World War II pissed off -- at Roosevelt and the Canadian leaders for what they didn't do. From Hitler, what do you expect -- but from us, I expected more. I didn't think about it much until after the war, but I had a harbored resentment." Then one day in 1946, over bagels and lox at Harvard's Hillel House, he heard a talk by a Palestinian; "as you know, Palestinians used to be Jews."
    He was reeled in.
    A 90-day adventure wound up being a two-year odyssey: he was interned in Cyprus along with his Jewish mates, and went to live on a Galilee kibbutz, where he ingrained his soul with all things Israeli. "I speak Hebrew fluently," he says, then adds with an audible wink, "but I'm not sure what the hell I'm saying." He's as Jewish as a church-going Catholic can get. "I'm very much of a Talmud student now. I've become very Jewish, married a Jewish girl, my kids are Jewish. David is a Jewish atheist -- there's a difference, you know; Dan is very religious, and Kinneret is a businesswoman."
    Kinneret McDonald?!
    "Yeah. I love that name."
    He retains profound memories of the rescue operation. "We picked up our people in Italy, which was one of the deepest moments in my life -- in the dusk, at twilight, to see these shadowy forms coming down, and everyone saying shalom, shalom, shalom. They knew they were home."
    He needs no prodding to conjure up that seder of 1947. "It was my first really great seder -- I'd been at one or two before, but they were run by people 200 years old who mumbled into their beards, you couldn't catch the gusto. This was a seder that would take the roof off." He laughs. "We broke all the rules.
    "We sang all kinds of war songs, and Hebrew songs, 'Shir Hapalmach'; they were very much 'in' in those days. Now, no one wants to hear them."
    If they broke all the rules for that seder, they went even further the next night, which should have been the second seder. "That was a year when Pessah and Easter coincided, and the following night I took Katz and Murray to a Catholic Church to observe Tenebrae. They didn't want to go."
    It took some doing, but I tracked down Duke himself.
    He must be one of the few sailors to have participated in both Aliya Bet and Operation Desert Storm.
    He was also the only one on Hatikva who assumed a Jewish identity -- while his mates were trying to hide theirs from the British.
    "I took the name Moishe Schneider. Anybody would talk to me, I was Moishe. Nobody called me Duke except the crew.
    "But you know, I was a real asset because I spoke Yiddish, better than most of the boys." That came in handy when they took on the refugees, none of whom suspected that this rough'n'ready sailor was not Jewish.
    He had become very Zionistic, he says, and when a friend urged him to join the effort to save refugees, he didn't think twice.
    Captured by the British, he was interned at Atlit, escaped, and lived for a spell on Kibbutz Beit Keshet.
    He recalls "singing songs of the halutzim" at the seder. "We were mostly young idealists."
    The seder food was a challenge. "I used powdered eggs to make the matza. I couldn't make a real gefilte fish, but I made nice little fish balls instead. Captain Diamond loved them."
    Diamond led the seder. He had more identities than Colonel Flagg. He was a kibbutznik, from Ginossar, with a Canadian passport and a false identity, hauling phantom bananas for something called the United Fruit Company. He was known as Shaike Rabinovitch, Yehoshua Baharav, Captain Diamond, Pinky, and heaven knows what else.
    And he was a modern-day Moses.
    "We had no haggadot, so Baharav told us about the rescue of Jews in modern times, in 1946, '47," Greenfield says. "He was rescuing Jews, working in Arab countries, in Europe. So we had an Exodus story on Pessah, through his eyes, the modern exodus of the Jews."
    Katz will never forget. "When we came to the end, and we all said 'Next Year in Jerusalem!' I must tell you, it had an emotional impact, a hard-edged meaning for all of us. Because we were on our way."