22/6/97

The Cleaning Ladyג€™s Story

    You can't find a woman more feminist than Sarah Tzuberi -- though she'd look at you crazy if you called her that.
    Sarah never waved placards, or joined demonstrations. As a younger woman, she was another sort of feminist: primitive, illiterate, socially retarded by the backward ways of her menfolk; abandoned on a mountaintop with eight young children to raise ... yet elevated by some force of nature to overcome the limitations foisted upon her.
    Her stricken family survived on one thing alone: Sarah's ferocious fortitude.
    She was born in 1917 to poor Yemenite parents who buried more children than they raised. Her father didn't work; didn't do anything much, in fact, but engage in religious study. Her mother sold coffee beans.
    "I was a girl. Girls counted for nothing. We weren't allowed to learn at all. I grew up confined, like in a box."
    Life in San'a was wretched, but there was consolation in the fact there was life at all: the king, Sarah recalls, was benevolent to the Jews. But when the king died, the pogroms began, and her parents knew it was time to get out.
    In 1944, they did: on foot to Aden. The port city was aswarm with fleeing Jewish refugees, all with one magical word on their lips: Jerusalem.
    Her family was lucky -- sort of. "With so many people and so few boats, there was a waiting list of a year. But they held a lottery to choose who would gain passage, and my family was allowed to go -- everyone but me."
    She was shanghaied there for a month. "I was very afraid. I had no education, I didn't know anything, I'd never been left alone. I cried bitterly. But there was no choice."
    That was to be her later fate.
    The year after she arrived in Jerusalem, a dashing young Yemenite named Shalom informed her that he planned to marry her. Sarah's eyes light up at the memory. "Don't be foolish, I told him. I can't marry you without permission from my parents. So a neighbor tried to get my father's permission. He said I was old enough to decide."
    They were a stunning couple: he, with big, soft eyes and matinee-idol looks; she, a delicate beauty with a hint of oriental exotica.
    "He was the first traffic policeman in Jerusalem, you know, in 1948. He stood on a platform in the intersection and wore white gloves."
    Shalom had been here since 1936, the same year Sarah's brother immigrated. "Back then, the boys ran from Yemen to Israel the way boys now run from Israel to America."
    Unknown to Sarah when they married, Shalom was already dying, slowly. While serving in the Hagana, he was severely wounded when a British soldier cracked his skull during a protest against the nefarious 1939 White Paper. As a result, for the rest of his life, Shalom was tormented by ever-worsening epilepsy.
    They struggled desperately: the stifling poverty, Shalom's disability; the city attrited by war, seige, guerrilla attacks, austerity; the shared home they were given was cramped and unsuitable; and their family was increasing every year.
    Shalom decided this was no way to raise children, and in 1951 they moved to Moshav Beit Zayit, five kilometers from Jerusalem. "This was paradise for the children; for me, it was hell."
      It was so remote, so desolate, so undesirable, the Jewish Agency set them up for free. "In the '40s there was nothing here, just olive trees. No houses, no road, it was filthy and fly-infested. Now? You say 'Beit Zayit,' and people say oh, how wonderful!
    "The Jewish Agency gave us a small house -- two rooms, really -- and two chickens. I bought two more chickens so we could start earning money from the eggs."
    They were stranded on a forest hilltop without electricity or running water, incommunicado -- no telephone, no car, and a distant bus stop that was her only link with the outside; the bus came only at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
    "Every little thing we needed -- schools, food, Kupat Holim -- we had to go all the way to Jerusalem, it took all day."
    Sarah's hardship was magnified when Shalom's health deteriorated. He had brain surgery, and a plate was implanted in his head, but two weeks later, he broke his back. Shalom died at the age of 40, in 1959.
    "I had eight children. Hadassah, the oldest, was only 13; Ami was a year old.
    "People offered to take the younger children off my hands. God forbid!"
    For the first time in her life, Sarah spoke up. She could not accept pity, or tolerate the indignity of charity, be it from welfare services or well-meaning relatives; they were her children, and she would provide for them.
    And by God, she did.
    Unable to read or write, she took the only work she could get: cleaning. Yet she would not compromise her pride. "I did not clean homes," she says hotly. "Only offices." So that she wouldn't be seen doing such humble labor, she went to work before dawn.
    She cleaned, she bought bread. She cleaned, the family stayed together. For 25 years she cleaned, and the Tzuberi children grew, thriving on the meager necessities, learning their mother's lofty values so humbly wrought.
    She cleaned and cleaned. And one by one, she put her children, every one of them, through school. Six of them are university graduates.
    "Hadassah is an interior decorator in Philadelphia and Herzliya Pituah. Azriel, an assessor. Emmanuel, a veterinarian [currently executive director of a Zionist institute in South Africa]. Nava was an El Al stewardess, now she's a travel agent. Eitan is a lawyer. Havatzelet and Nurit, secretaries. Ami, an emissary in Germany."
    Ami, 38, is the apple of her eye. Like all the Tzuberi children, he speaks perfect English (he's also fluent in German and Danish, and he's learning Swedish); like his siblings, he's an upstanding citizen, profoundly ingrained with such widely-lacking principles as civics, respect, conscientious morality, honesty, courtesy.
    Ami is a mensch, like all the Tzuberis, and that, Sarah stresses, is the most important thing.
    That, and education.
    "He who knows nothing, sees nothing," she says. "I was blind."
    She did not succumb to her intellectual darkness. "I was just an ignorant woman, but I would go to the schools and get involved with the teachers, asking how my children were progressing."
    When young Ami started school, he was both student and teacher. "I asked him to teach me what he learned.ג€
    And when he graduated, Sarah finally went to school herself.
     "It was only a Grade Six education," she says shyly, "but now I can read books and newspapers. When I get a bank statement, I know what it says."
    Sarah, now 80, sits on her veranda, her life's work done. A cooing baby, one of her 23 grandchildren, is crawling about in one of the two small rooms that comprised her original home. Irony of ironies, there is a cleaning woman in Sarah's kitchen. ("I don't have the strength to clean anymore," she sighs.)
    Now, instead of 10 souls squeezed into two rooms, there is one person, Sarah, living in what seems to be 10 rooms, spread out on two levels.
    She cleaned, she built.
    She cleaned more, she built more.  
    No charity, no pity, no excuses.